PG&E Electricity Rates: What Homes Really Pay per kWh

Two facts make PG&E’s average easy to misread. It is the price for the 1.7 million homes that still buy their power from PG&E. Another 3.3 million, 66% of the homes on its wires, get their power from a community choice programme or other supplier and pay PG&E only for delivery. And no home pays the average: the price depends on the plan, the season, the baseline allowance and income-based discounts. Check your own bill below, then see how the average got here.

Every month since 1990

In 1990 PG&E homes paid 10.4¢. Today’s price is up 233.7% on that; prices in general are up 153.1%. Most of the gap opened recently: the average stood at 19.9¢ in 2016 and 23.7¢ in 2020. It has now fallen back, to 34.7¢ from 38.5¢ a year earlier, but it is still 92.6% above the US average.

Against inflation

In today’s dollars, the 10.4¢ of 1990 is 26.4¢. The line below starts all three series at 100, so you can see when PG&E pulled away from prices in general.

Year by year

Through the year

The bill peaks in July, at $250 on average, and bottoms in April, at $119. So a summer bill far above a spring one is normal here. The price per kWh moves as well, as the small figures show.

Average for each calendar month over the last 36 months EIA has published: bill per home, with the price per kWh that month beneath it.

Price or use?

Homes on PG&E’s supply use less power than in 2010, so price accounts for more than the whole rise in the bill.

Who supplies PG&E’s homes

PG&E’s wires-only charge averages 24.6¢ per kWh. A home on a community choice programme pays that, plus the programme’s own generation charge, so it cannot be compared with 34.7¢ without adding the second part.

Share of the utility’s homes buying power from the utility itself, each year. EIA-861, Parts A and C, 2025 latest.

Other utilities nearby

If you are moving within California, this table matters more than any other here. City-owned utilities such as Sacramento’s and Anaheim’s charge far less than the three big investor-owned ones.

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.

Where it serves

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

Outages

The average PG&E customer was without power for 273 minutes in 2025, against 269 minutes across the US. The worst since EIA’s figures begin in 2013 was 1,355 minutes in 2019, the year of PG&E’s mass wildfire-prevention shutoffs; its report to the CPUC counts 728,980 customers in 35 counties cut off in one event, on 9 to 12 October 2019.

Rooftop solar

924,854 PG&E homes had net-metered solar at the end of 2025, 18.3% of all the homes it serves.

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

The official tariff

These are the filed prices for two of PG&E’s main home plans. The 34.7¢ average is not a rate anyone is charged: it blends tiers, seasons, discounts, credits and the fixed charge.

Fixed monthly charge: Base Services Charge, billed by the day: 79.343¢ a day for most homes (about $24 a month), 39.688¢ for income tier 2, 19.713¢ for income tier 1.

The filed schedules also list a California Climate Credit of $36.18 per household, which the current sheets place in the August and September bill cycles.

Checked by hand against the utility’s own documents on 9 November 2026. All PG&E rate schedules.

Rate changes in front of the regulator

• Filed 15 May 2025, decision expected May 2027: PG&E’s 2027 general rate case (A.25-05-009) asks for $16.637 billion of revenue in 2027, an increase of $1.237 billion or 8%, and 6.1% more in each of 2028 to 2030. The CPUC’s fact sheet puts a typical combined gas and electric residential bill up 3.6% in 2027 against 2025. CPUC fact sheet.

Related

• All 40 of the biggest US utilities compared
• California electricity rates: every utility and the state trend
• Average electric bill by state
• Solar panel calculator

How these figures are made

The price is what homes paid the utility in a period, divided by the kWh they bought. It includes every charge the utility bills: energy, delivery, fixed charges, riders and credits. It does not match any one rate on a tariff, and it leaves out homes that buy their power from someone else. The 12-month figures sum revenue and kWh over the months EIA has published. The bill and kWh use the middle month’s customer count, so a one-month slip in EIA’s customer figure cannot move them. We never edit a month EIA published, and the latest months are preliminary until EIA finalises them.

Frequently asked questions

Download the data

• PG&E, 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{say2026pgeelectricityr,
  author    = {Say, Jeremiah},
  title     = {PG&E 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

• 1.1 (9 November 2026): the dataset is archived with a DOI (Zenodo) and on GitHub under CC BY 4.0; added BibTeX.
• 1.0 (November 2026): first published.