PECO Electric Rates: The Price to Compare, Every Charge on Rate R and Prices Since 2001

Your own bill depends on how many kWh you used and on who supplies the power. Enter the kWh printed on your bill. Leave the plan on PECO’s default price, switch it to time of use and say how much of your use falls in each period, or type in the price per kWh from a supplier contract. The table shows each line today and under the next Price to Compare.

Two prices on one bill

Read a PECO bill as two bills stapled together. The supply half is the Price to Compare. PECO buys this power in competitive procurements for the homes that have not chosen a supplier and passes the cost through without profit, so the price moves only with the wholesale market. PECO resets it twice a year, each June and December, on the first of the month. Before June 2025 it changed every three months. It also carries the state’s 5.9% gross receipts tax, which is why it never appears as a separate line.

The delivery half pays for PECO’s poles, wires and substations. The Public Utility Commission sets it in rate cases, and no supplier can change it. Several small riders sit inside the distribution price per kWh. Two of them: universal service, 0.287¢, which funds help for low-income customers, and a 0.06¢ credit for decommissioning old nuclear plants. At 700 kWh, delivery comes to $83.71, 50% of the bill. Pennsylvania charges no sales tax on home electricity.

The price per kWh you see quoted elsewhere is usually something else. The federal figure for PECO, 19.5¢ over the twelve months to August 2026, divides what PECO billed its own-supply homes by the kWh they used, summer and winter together. It is a fair average and a poor guide to next month.

Two rate cases in two years

PECO asked in March 2024 for $464 million a year more for electric delivery. The PUC approved a settlement at $354 million in December, with the customer charge rising $0.75 rather than the $3.78 PECO wanted. Part of the deal was a pause: no new electric base-rate case before 16 March 2026.

PECO filed again on 30 March 2026, two weeks after the pause ran out, for $429 million a year. At 700 kWh that meant $20.08 more a month, from $160.37 to $180.45, starting in 2027. PECO told the PUC it planned about $2.8 billion of work on its system in 2026 and 2027. Seventeen days later it petitioned to withdraw both that case and a gas case filed the same day. The Governor’s office, which had pressed for the withdrawal, put the two together at $510 million a year and called the electric one PECO’s third rate increase since 2022. We have not found a PUC order closing the docket as of 10 November 2026.

So base rates are where the 2024 settlement left them. The bill has gone up anyway, for two reasons the case never touched. The Price to Compare rose each June and December, and the DSIC came back. The DSIC is a surcharge that lets PECO recover pole and wire replacement between rate cases. It was reset to zero in January 2025 and has been 1.05% since 1 October. The chart follows one 700 kWh home through each step.

2025 and 2026: PUC, 12 December 2024. March 2026 and the withdrawn request: PECO’s figures as reported by Utility Dive, 1 April 2026; our sum of the March 2026 tariff gives the same $160.37. From June 2026: our sum of the filed tariff.

1. 28 Mar 2024PECO asks for $464 million a year more for its electric wires, and a customer charge $3.78 higher (Docket R-2024-3046931).
2. 12 Dec 2024The PUC approves a settlement at $354 million. The customer charge goes up $0.75, not $3.78. PECO agrees not to file another electric base-rate case before 16 March 2026.
3. 1 Jan 2025New rates in force. The DSIC, PECO’s surcharge for pipe-and-pole replacement between rate cases, resets to zero as that work moves into base rates.
4. 1 Jan 2026Second step of the settlement: distribution per kWh rises again.
5. 30 Mar 2026Two weeks after the stay-out ends, PECO files again: $429 million more a year for electric delivery, $20.08 a month on a 700 kWh bill (Docket R-2026-3060859).
6. 1 Apr 2026The DSIC returns at 0.11%.
7. 16 Apr 2026PECO petitions to withdraw the electric and gas cases. The Governor’s office puts the two together at $510 million a year.
8. 1 Oct 2026DSIC 1.05%.

Each row read from the PECO tariff in force on that date (five tariffs, filed copies kept). Delivery is customer charge plus 700 kWh of distribution, with the DSIC and state tax adjustment applied; it leaves out two riders worth under 0.01¢ a kWh. Rate cases: PUC, 12 December 2024; Utility Dive, 1 April 2026; Governor’s office, 16 April 2026; Exelon’s report to the SEC, April 2026.

The Price to Compare since 2001

PECO publishes its Price to Compare tables back to 2023. For earlier years we went to the Office of Consumer Advocate, which has printed every Pennsylvania utility’s default price in a monthly shopping guide since 1999. We read PECO’s regular residential price from 109 archived guides and joined it to PECO’s own tables.

The line shows what deregulation did here. Until the end of 2010 PECO’s generation rates were capped, and the price crept from 5.67¢ to 7.29¢ over a decade. From January 2011 PECO had to buy supply in a competitive process, and the first guide we hold after that, for September 2011, shows 10.42¢. Prices then drifted down for a decade with cheap natural gas, to 6.267¢ in March 2021. Since 2022 they have climbed in almost every reset, and the price for the winter of 2026 to 2027 is the highest in the record.

Time of use: four hours that cost the most

Since September 2021, homes on PECO’s default supply can choose time-of-use prices instead of one flat Price to Compare. The day splits into three. On-peak is 2 to 6 p.m. on weekdays, and each kWh then costs 32.404¢, 4.8 times the super off-peak price of 6.741¢, which runs from midnight to 6 a.m. every day. All other hours are off-peak at 9.336¢.

PECO sets these prices from its own estimate of when a typical home uses power: 12.73% on-peak, 19.76% super off-peak, the rest off-peak. A home that matches that split pays the same either way. The plan pays only for a home that shifts use out of the afternoon. Each kWh moved from on-peak to super off-peak saves 25.66¢ today. A car charged overnight is the clearest case. Adding 300 kWh of midnight charging to a 700 kWh home saves about $16.70 a month under the 1 December prices. Customers in the Customer Assistance Program cannot sign up.

Prices from PECO’s Price to Compare table; hours and the typical-home split (on-peak 12.73%, super off-peak 19.76%, off-peak 67.51%) from the tariff. At that split the time-of-use prices average out to the standard price, which is how PECO sets them. Delivery charges are the same on both. Customer Assistance Program customers cannot take time of use. The other three homes are our own examples.

Why supply keeps rising

Much of the rise traces to one market. PJM, the grid operator for Pennsylvania, twelve other states and Washington, D.C., runs a yearly auction for capacity: power plants paid to be available in the hours of highest demand. In the eastern zone PECO sits in, that price went from $54.95 a megawatt-day for June 2024 to May 2025 to $329.17 for the year now running, 6.0 times as much. The suppliers that win PECO’s auctions build that cost into their bids, and PJM has already held the auctions for 2027/28 and 2028/29, which cleared at much the same price.

PJM Base Residual Auction reports for each delivery year (PJM capacity market). June prices from the series above.

Buying from a supplier

About 20% of PECO homes buy their power from another company. PECO then bills only delivery, which came to 10.5¢ per kWh across those homes in 2025. A supplier saves money only when its price per kWh beats the Price to Compare, and only for as long as it does. Many fixed offers end in a variable rate that follows the market. Put the contract price into the calculator above to compare. GreenCalculus takes no commission from suppliers.

PECO’s share has swung widely. In the first years of choice, about one PECO home in five had switched. By 2006 nearly all of them had come back to PECO’s capped price. When the caps ended, suppliers returned, and in 2016 more than a third of PECO homes were with one.

What PECO homes paid since 1990

The federal record of PECO’s own-supply homes starts at 12.6¢ per kWh in 1990. Thirty-one years later, in 2021, the figure was almost the same, about 12.6¢, while consumer prices more than doubled. Everything since has come quickly: 19.5¢ for the last 12 months, up 55.2% on 1990.

Against other Pennsylvania utilities

Homes on Pennsylvania’s investor-owned utilities can shop for supply, but the wires company is fixed by address. The table sets PECO against every utility in the state with 10,000 or more homes, co-operatives included.

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

On ordinary days PECO’s reliability has improved: excluding major events, the average customer lost about 59 minutes of power in 2025, against 88 in 2018. Storms are a different story. Counting every day, the worst years were 2014, at 880 minutes, then 2018 at 642 and 2020 at 629; 2025 came to 328. Storm resilience was one of the reasons PECO gave for its 2026 rate case.

Rooftop solar

24,549 PECO homes had panels on the roof and net metering at the end of 2025, 1.6% of the homes it serves. In 2013 there were 2,241.

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

Where PECO serves

PECO, called Philadelphia Electric until 1994 and part of Exelon since 2000, delivered electricity to 1.5 million homes in 2025, in Philadelphia and the counties around it. Counties are as PECO reports them to the EIA. Co-operatives and borough-owned utilities serve some towns inside these counties, so check the name on the bill.

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

Today’s charges are read from PECO’s electric tariff in force from 1 October 2026 and its Price to Compare tables. Nothing is typed in by hand: a script pulls every charge out of the PDFs, and the build halts on any absent value or failed test. Generation plus transmission must equal the Price to Compare in every period. The time-of-use prices must rebuild from PECO’s split of use and its multipliers. The step in the customer charge between the 2024 and 2025 tariffs must equal the $0.75 the PUC approved.

One check ties our method to PECO’s own arithmetic. Pricing 700 kWh on the tariff in force in March 2026, with that winter’s Price to Compare, gives $160.37. That is PECO’s own figure for the same home in its 2026 filing: the $180.45 it proposed, less the $20.08 increase. The DSIC and the state tax adjustment are applied to the customer charge and distribution only, as the tariff says.

The history comes from the Office of Consumer Advocate’s shopping guides, read from archived copies. We take PECO’s regular residential rate only, never the heating rate or a neighbouring utility’s line, and drop any guide whose price had already expired when it was printed. If two guides for one month disagree, the script stops. In the 7 months where a guide and PECO’s own table both exist, they agree. Where no guide survives for more than seven months, the chart shows a dashed line rather than inventing a price. Every source file is kept with a checksum.

The December price is labelled pending until PECO confirms its transmission part, which it expects to do mid November 2026. We will update the page when it does. Carbon uses the EPA’s eGRID 2023 average for the RFC East region.

Download the data

• PECO, 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{say2026pecoelectricityr,
  author    = {Say, Jeremiah},
  title     = {PECO 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): published, using PECO’s tariff in force from 1 October 2026, its Price to Compare tables to May 2027 and 109 Office of Consumer Advocate guides from June 2001.