How to Lower Your Electric Bill — April 2026

Before any tip: find out which lever is your problem

Most advice fails because it treats every high bill as a usage problem. Your bill prints both sides, so spend five minutes separating them before you change a single setting. Divide the bill total by the kilowatt-hours to get your effective all-in price, then compare two things against the same month a year ago: that price, and the kWh. If the kWh barely moved and the price did, no thermostat schedule will fix it — you have a price problem, and section one is your section. If the kWh jumped, go straight to section two. Both can move at once, which is the common case; our full diagnosis guide walks the checks in order.

One thing worth confirming while you have the bill open: whether the meter read was actual or estimated. An estimated read that later corrects itself can stack two months of usage onto one bill, and no amount of saving will show up until the correction clears.

Run your own numbers first

Enter your state and your monthly bill: the calculator places you against your state's average, and shows the increases already locked in for you — every line sourced and dated. That tells you how much of your bill is yours to cut and how much is the market's. Nothing you type is stored.

Lever 1 — the price per kWh (the strongest, if you have it)

A residential rate is a stack: supply (the energy itself, plus a capacity charge that pays generators to stay available at peak), delivery (poles, wires, transformers) and a set of riders. In a deregulated or “retail choice” market you can buy the supply half from a competing supplier while your utility keeps delivering it; the delivery half and the riders stay with the utility either way. That is why switching moves supply only — it is a real lever, not a whole-bill lever.

Residential supplier choice is open in these 14 jurisdictions (13 of them without a live restriction today) — each state page carries its current average price, the 12-month history and whatever restrictions apply locally:

• Connecticut
• Delaware
• District of Columbia
• Illinois*
• Maine
• Maryland*
• Massachusetts*
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New York*
• Ohio
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Texas*

• * Illinois: ComEd in PJM; Ameren territory in MISO.
• * Maryland: Maryland's SB1 (2025) caps retail supplier prices below the standard offer and limits contracts to 12 months, so supplier offers are limited.
• * Massachusetts: A ban on individual residential supplier sales is under debate in the state legislature.
• * New York: NYISO, not PJM; ESCO retail choice.
• * Texas: ERCOT - the largest retail-choice market. Choice covers the competitive ERCOT zones only; Austin, San Antonio and El Paso are served by their own utilities.

If you are shopping, the honest checklist is short. Compare the offered rate against your utility's default supply price rather than against a headline number, because the default is what you actually pay if you do nothing. Read the term and what happens after it — a fixed rate that rolls onto a variable month-to-month rate at expiry is the single most common reason a bill jumps without anyone touching the thermostat. Check for monthly fees and early-termination fees, since either can swallow a small per-kWh saving. And set a calendar reminder for the month before your term ends; the lever only stays pulled if you pull it again.

If you are in one of the 37 regulated jurisdictions, this lever does not exist for you. There is no supplier to switch to; your utility's rates are set by your state commission, and any site telling you to “shop for a better rate” is selling you something that is not for sale where you live. What is worth your time instead: ask your utility which rate schedules you qualify for, since many regulated utilities offer time-of-use or off-peak pricing that rewards shifting the loads in section two into cheaper hours; check whether you qualify for an income-based rate or bill-assistance program, which is a genuine price reduction rather than a deferral; and look at the utility's own rebate list before buying any efficiency equipment, since the rebate is usually the difference between a payback measured in years and one measured in a decade. Budget or level billing is worth knowing about but is not a saving — it smooths the same annual cost across twelve months, and the reconciliation still arrives.

Lever 2 — the kilowatt-hours (available to everyone)

Usage is not spread evenly across your house. It concentrates in whatever turns electricity into heat or motion for hours at a time — heating, cooling, hot water, and a handful of large intermittent loads. Ranking the seeded appliances by what each one actually costs per month at its typical hours and the U.S. median state price of 16.54¢/kWh puts the order of attack beyond argument:

Assumes a 30-day month at the daily hours shown — a household that never runs a pool pump pays nothing for one. Appliances with no sourced wattage are excluded, never estimated. Price: 16.54¢/kWh, the median of the 51 jurisdiction average residential prices EIA reported for April 2026 (jurisdictions not reported are skipped, never counted as zero). Your state's price is very likely different — look it up and rerun the ranking against it. Wattages are typical DOE Energy Saver figures for the category, not your model's spec plate.

The useful thing about that ranking is what it implies about tactics. For the top group, the lever is hours and setpoint, not the appliance: a heating or cooling system costs what it costs per hour, so the saving comes from asking it to run fewer of them — a wider dead band between heating and cooling setpoints, a schedule that stops conditioning an empty house, and sealing the leaks that make it run longer to reach the same temperature. For water heating, it is temperature and volume. For the big intermittent loads — pool pumps, hot tubs, EV charging — the run time is often directly under your control, and if your utility offers off-peak pricing they are the easiest loads in the house to move into cheaper hours, because nobody has to be awake for them. Each guide in the cost-to-run set recomputes its own figure at your state's price and shows the full range behind the representative wattage.

What barely moves the needle

The advice that circulates most is mostly aimed at the bottom of that same ranking. The cheapest loads in the table above — hair dryer at ≈$1.49/month, led tv at ≈$2.23/month, coffee maker at ≈$2.23/month and ceiling fan at ≈$2.38/month — are where unplugging, switching off and remembering live. None of that is wrong; it is simply small, and it competes for attention with the loads that are ten times larger. Three specific pieces of folklore are worth retiring.

• Standby “vampire” draw. Modern devices in standby draw a trickle by design, and regulation has pushed that trickle down over the years. Hunting for chargers to unplug is real but marginal work next to anything with a heating element or a compressor in it.
• Swapping lighting you already swapped. The move from incandescent to LED was a genuine step change, which is exactly why repeating it has little left to give: once the lights are LED, lighting is no longer near the top of the ranking, and the next fixture upgrade is a comfort decision rather than a bill decision.
• Turning the heat fully off while you are out. Setbacks work, but a house allowed to drift far from setpoint has to be pulled all the way back, and in a system with electric resistance backup that recovery can be run at the least efficient mode the equipment has. Moderate, scheduled setbacks beat dramatic ones.

The test to apply to any tip you read: does it change a load near the top of the ranking, or does it change one near the bottom? If a bill has genuinely doubled, the cause is almost never a bottom-of-table item — the realistic causes of a 2x jump are a short and checkable list.

The part you cannot cut

One slice of the price side is neither a forecast nor negotiable: capacity prices in the PJM Interconnection footprint are already fixed at auction through 2028/2029. Measured against the price already inside April 2026 bills, the cleared delivery years still ahead work out as follows — a change applied to every kilowatt-hour, whatever you do with your thermostat:

PJM Base Residual Auction clearing prices (RTO-wide), measured against the 2025/2026 price already in April 2026 bills — a delivery year that has already begun is never counted again. Several utility zones cleared higher than the RTO-wide price, so treat each line as a floor. Dollar column: the change applied to 688 kWh, the median of the 51 jurisdiction average monthly household usages EIA reported for April 2026. Applies to households served by PJM only.

This is why efficiency offsets rather than cancels. If you are in the PJM footprint and you do nothing, the largest locked step above (+0.44¢/kWh) is added on top of whatever your usage turns out to be. Cutting kilowatt-hours shrinks the bill the step is applied to, which is real money — but the higher price per unit is not something a household lever reaches. Plan around it rather than against it. The full mechanism, and the documented arithmetic from $/MW-day to cents per kWh, is in the capacity charge explainer; the same calculation ranked across all 51 jurisdictions is in our 2027 study.

Keep going

• Why is my electric bill so high? — the full usage-vs-price diagnosis, with the national numbers.
• Why did my electric bill double? — the realistic causes of a true 2x jump, in checking order.
• The PJM capacity charge, explained — the auction that fixes part of your future bill years ahead.
• Your state's average price and history — all 51 jurisdictions, refreshed monthly.