ComEd Electric Rates: Every Line on the Bill, Month by Month and Town by Town

Your bill, line by line

A ComEd bill has more than a dozen lines, and several of them depend on things the kWh total does not show: whether the home has electric heat, whether it is a house or a flat in a building of three or more, and which town it is in. The calculator takes all of that. Pick the billing month from the top of your bill, then the home, the town and who supplies your power. If you buy from a supplier, or your town buys for you, enter the price per kWh from the contract; ComEd’s three supply lines then drop off and everything else stays.

Where the money goes

For the example home, supply comes to $79.98 this month and ComEd’s delivery to $54.45. Delivery is mostly the distribution facilities charge, 6.081¢ per kWh, plus a monthly customer charge of $14.92 and $3.72 for the meter. Everything else nets to −$2.84: the state programme riders, the carbon-free resource adjustment, and tax. The customer charge hides $0.91 of state assessments, mostly for the low-income energy assistance fund, which ComEd does not list separately.

The last column is the one to read before switching supplier. A supplier replaces the electricity supply charge, the transmission charge and the purchased electricity adjustment, and nothing else. The carbon-free resource adjustment, the renewable and zero-emission charges and the taxes stay on the bill whoever supplies the power.

Delivery charges include ComEd’s adjustment factors for this month, which together add 5.63% to the base charges filed for 2026. Sheet numbers refer to ComEd’s 2026 Schedule of Rates.

Why the bill changes every month

ComEd sets its supply charge for a year at a time, from June to May, with a higher price for June to September. For 2026 to 2027 it was revised from the October bills, after the autumn procurement the Commerce Commission approved on 17 September 2026. Two other lines are filed fresh each month, and between them they move the bill more than the seasons do.

The purchased electricity adjustment squares what ComEd collected for supply against what that supply actually cost. A month in which ComEd under-collected adds a charge; one in which it over-collected gives a credit. It applies only to homes on ComEd’s supply. For November 2026 bills it is a charge of 3.758¢, which comes to $21.68 on the example bill. ComEd posts each value only shortly before the month it applies to, and the current sheet shows just two months, so the table below marks later months as estimates.

The carbon-free resource adjustment pays for the carbon mitigation credits that ComEd buys from nuclear plants on the PJM grid under the Illinois Power Agency Act. The rider covers money going to the plants and money coming back, and every home pays or receives it, supplier customers included. ComEd sets a base for the year from June and adds a reconciliation one month at a time. It was a credit in every month from June to November 2026; for November 2026 it is a credit of 2.503¢, or −$14.44 on the example bill. The sheet runs to May 2027.

Price to Compare: Info Sheets 1 and 2. Adjustment: Info Sheet 3, which ComEd revises each month and which only ever shows two months. Carbon-free resource adjustment: Info Sheet 36.1, where ComEd sets the base for a year and adds a reconciliation one month at a time. A minus sign is a credit.

Time of day: delivery, supply, or both

Since the January 2026 bills a ComEd home can ask for time-of-day delivery, which replaces the single distribution charge with four. From the June 2026 bills it can add Rate BEST, ComEd’s time-of-day supply, which is only open to homes that also take the time-of-day delivery. Both use the same clock every day of the week, weekends included. The expensive stretch is 1 to 7 p.m.: 11.377¢ per kWh for delivery and 14.700¢ for supply, against 3.214¢ and 3.394¢ overnight.

The two can be judged separately. Time-of-day delivery on its own is close to neutral for a home that uses power evenly through the day, and costs a little more for one that runs heavily in the afternoon. Rate BEST is harder to call, because it brings its own monthly adjustment in place of the standard one. In a month when the standard adjustment is a large charge, BEST looks cheap; in a month when it is a credit, BEST can cost more. For November 2026 bills, an evenly spread home on both saves $28.84 against ComEd’s fixed price, and the same home charging a car for 300 kWh overnight saves $61.35. Treat one month as an example, not a promise.

Delivery: Info Sheet 67, with this month’s adjustment factors and DG rebate adjustment. Supply: Info Sheets 70 to 72; BEST customers pay a PJM services charge of 2.039¢ instead of the 1.690¢ transmission charge, and their own monthly adjustment instead of the standard one. Rate BEST requires time-of-day delivery and a smart meter, and is not open to net-metered homes. The three homes are our own examples; savings include the change in franchise cost, which follows delivery. Each supply rate has its own monthly adjustment, and the gap between them moves a lot: October, standard −1.551¢ against BEST 0.110¢, costing a BEST home $9.58; November, standard 3.758¢ against BEST 0.460¢, worth $19.03 to a BEST home at 577 kWh. One month’s saving is not a forecast for the next.

What your town adds

Two lines depend on where the meter is. The franchise cost recovers the value of the electricity and other services ComEd gives a town free of charge in return for use of its streets and rights of way. It is charged only to customers in that town, as a percentage of their delivery charges, and the percentage is reset each June from the year before. ComEd lists 389 towns; the median is 1.55% and the highest is Maple Park (19.85%). Chicago has no franchise percentage on ComEd’s list.

The municipal tax is a town’s own tax on electricity use, which ComEd collects with the bill. Chicago’s comes to 0.628¢ per kWh on the first 2,000 kWh a month, nearly twice the state tax of 0.330¢, which is the same everywhere. Choose your town in the calculator above, or open the list.

389 towns carry a franchise cost percentage for June 2026 to May 2027 (Info Sheets 10 to 17) and 299 have a municipal electricity tax that ComEd collects (Rider TAX, Sheets 259 onward, which include a 3% collection fee the law allows). A town missing from both lists, or an unincorporated area, adds neither; the same bill there is $127.97. The franchise sheets abbreviate a few names, which we have spelled out.

Delivery charges set to 2027

ComEd’s delivery charges for 2024 to 2027 were set in advance, in Illinois’ first multi-year rate plan for ComEd. The Illinois Commerce Commission ruled on it in December 2023, then revised it in December 2024 after ComEd refiled its grid plan. Every year’s charge is already in the tariff. For a single-family home without electric heat, the monthly customer charge goes from $12.45 in mid-2024 to $13.48 in 2027, and the distribution charge from 4.883¢ to 5.906¢ per kWh. The steps are larger in 2025 and 2026 than in 2027.

The base charges are not what the bill shows. Each month ComEd multiplies them by a set of adjustment factors that settle earlier years and keep revenue in line with the plan, and these move every few months. For November 2026 they add 5.63% to the base delivery charges of the example home. Homes with electric heat pay much less per kWh for distribution, as the table shows, but a higher customer charge.

1. 14 Dec 2023The ICC rules on ComEd’s first multi-year rate plan, setting delivery charges for 2024 to 2027 (Dockets 22-0486 and 23-0055, consolidated).
2. 19 Dec 2024Order on ComEd’s refiled plan (adding Docket 24-0181). The tariff carries a separate 2024 column “per final order”, and new charges for 2025 to 2027.
3. 16 Jan 2025Order in Docket 24-0378. ComEd files time-of-day delivery charges for 2026 and 2027 under it, in force from 6 February 2025.
4. 17 Jul 2025Order on rehearing in the same docket. Rate BEST, ComEd’s time-of-day supply, cites it and opens with the June 2026 bills.
5. Jan 2026Time-of-day delivery becomes available to homes that elect it.
6. Jan 2027Last year of the plan: the 2027 column applies, and the revenue balancing factor for single-family homes without electric heat turns into a credit.

Base charges from Info Sheets 64 and 64.1, before the “& ADJ” factors, which add or take away a few percent each month. Dates and dockets as printed in the tariff sheets’ order references.

Suppliers and town programmes

Any ComEd home can buy its supply elsewhere: from a retail supplier, or through its town if the town runs an aggregation programme, which buys for every resident who does not opt out. In 2025, 20% of ComEd homes did. The share was far higher a decade earlier. Between 2011 and 2013 it went from about 3% to two homes in three, and it has fallen back since, as the chart shows.

To compare an offer, set it against ComEd’s Price to Compare over the same months. The state publishes current offers at Plug In Illinois. Check a contract’s length, any monthly fee and what the price becomes when it ends.

The Price to Compare leaves out ComEd’s purchased electricity adjustment, and the adjustment is the part that has changed. From January 2017 to July 2023 it stayed within half a cent of zero in every month. Since August 2023 it has not: it reached a charge of 8.166¢ in May 2026 and a credit of −1.785¢ in October 2024. A home on a supplier’s plan pays neither side of it. In 2024 that meant missing ten monthly credits; in May 2026, a fixed offer a cent above the Price to Compare came out ahead of ComEd’s own supply.

What ComEd homes paid since 1990

In 1990 a ComEd home paid 10.8¢ per kWh. It stayed near 11¢ until 1997, then fell: the 1997 law that opened Illinois to competition cut residential rates and froze them, and the price sat at 8.6¢ to 8.7¢ from 2002 to 2006. It jumped by more than two cents in 2007, when the freeze ended, and has risen in most years since. For homes on ComEd’s supply, the latest year of data, ending August 2026, averages 19.3¢, up 79.3% on 1990.

Against other Illinois utilities

ComEd serves the north of the state and Ameren Illinois most of the centre and south, with municipal utilities and co-operatives in between. The table sets ComEd against every Illinois utility with 10,000 or more homes.

EIA-861, 2025, homes buying their power from the utility itself. A year’s average, so the figure for this utility can differ a little from the 12 months above.

Outages

Leaving out major-event days, the average ComEd customer lost 62 minutes of power in 2013 and 38 in 2025. Counting every day, the worst year in the record was 2020, at 341 minutes, the year a derecho crossed northern Illinois in August; 2025 came to 77.

Rooftop solar

ComEd counted 73,159 homes with panels and net metering in 2025, or 1.9% of its residential customers, against 1,651 in 2018. Part of every bill pays for the rebates ComEd gives for solar and storage: the distributed generation rebate adjustment is built into the distribution charge, at 0.062¢ per kWh in 2026.

EIA-861 Net Metering: homes with solar panels on a net-metering arrangement at the end of each year.

Where ComEd serves

Commonwealth Edison, an Exelon company, had 3.8 million residential customers across Chicago and northern Illinois in 2025; the counties below come from its own return to the EIA. A few towns within those counties, such as Naperville and St. Charles, own their electric systems, and their residents are not ComEd customers.

EIA-861 Service Territory, 2025. A county on the list may be served only in part, and other utilities may serve the same county.

How we worked this out

Every charge comes from ComEd’s 2026 Schedule of Rates, the full tariff book ComEd links from its rates page, read on 10 November 2026. A script reads each value from the informational sheets and checks it against the figures we read by hand; if a sheet changes shape or a value goes missing, the build stops. It also records the last month each value covers, which is how the page knows what to call an estimate.

The bill follows the tariff’s own formulas. Delivery charges are multiplied by the adjustment factors as Informational Sheet 64.17 sets out, the franchise cost is applied to the customer, metering, distribution and distribution-tax charges as Rider FCA defines them, and state and municipal tax use the per-kWh bands in Rider TAX. The customer charge includes the state assessments in Rider RCA. The three add-ons inside it sum to $0.59 at 2024 rates, the figure ComEd printed for that year.

As a check on scale: without this month’s purchased electricity adjustment, the example bill works out to 19.0¢ per kWh, against 19.3¢, the EIA average for ComEd-supply homes in the year ending August 2026. ComEd’s own sample bill for June 2024 lists the same lines we do and its state tax matches the tariff exactly, but its franchise line does not multiply out, so we have not used it as a test. The carbon figure is the RFC West subregion rate from EPA eGRID 2023: a regional mix, not the mix of any one supplier.

Download the data

• ComEd, every month (CSV)
• All 40 utilities, latest figures (CSV)
• Citable archive on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.24071582): all 40 utilities, with field descriptions
• Dataset, code and history on GitHub

How to cite this page

@dataset{say2026comedelectricity,
  author    = {Say, Jeremiah},
  title     = {ComEd electricity rates: monthly residential price since 1990},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {GreenCalculus},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.24071582},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24071582}
}

Version history

• 1.0 (10 November 2026): first version. Charges from ComEd’s 2026 Schedule of Rates as read on 10 November 2026; monthly adjustments through November 2026, supply prices through May 2027.