How to Read Your Electric Bill — April 2026

The two halves of every bill: supply and delivery

Supply (also printed as “generation,” “energy” or “basic service”) is the commodity: the electrons produced somewhere on the grid and sold to you by the kilowatt-hour. Delivery (also “distribution,” “transmission” or simply “utility”) is the physical network — poles, wires, substations, transformers, the meter on your wall, and the crews who fix them at 3 a.m. Both are charged per kilowatt-hour on most bills, which is why a single “rate” you half-remember rarely matches anything printed.

The split matters because the two halves work differently. Delivery is a monopoly: exactly one company owns the wires to your house, its prices are set by your state's utility regulator, and no amount of shopping changes them. Supply can be competitive. In states that restructured their electricity markets, a household can leave the utility's default supply rate and buy the commodity half from a retail supplier instead — the wires, the meter reading and the bill itself usually stay with the same utility. By our classification of the 51 jurisdictions we track, 14 allow residential customers to choose a supplier; everywhere else, supply and delivery both come from the regulated utility. Whether choice reaches your particular address depends on your utility's territory, which is why each state page carries the caveats for its market.

One consequence worth internalizing before you read a line item: if you shopped for a supply plan, only the supply half of the bill responds to that contract. A fixed supply rate does not freeze your bill — delivery charges and riders keep moving underneath it, and when the fixed term ends the supply half can roll onto a variable rate on its own. That expiry is one of the classic causes of a bill that suddenly jumps, covered in why did my electric bill double.

The line items, in the order they appear

Bill layouts differ by utility, but the reading order is remarkably consistent. Work down the page in this sequence and each number explains the next.

1. Billing period and days served

Usually the first thing printed, often in small type: a service period with a start and end date, and a count of days. Read it before anything else. Billing cycles are not all the same length, so two consecutive bills can cover a different number of days — which means comparing totals compares apples to oranges. The honest comparison between two bills is dollars per day, or kilowatt-hours per day.

2. The meter read — actual or estimated

Somewhere near the usage summary the bill states the previous and current meter readings and, crucially, whether each was actual or estimated. Utilities estimate when nobody could reach the meter — access, weather, an equipment change. An estimate is a guess at your consumption, and when the next actual read arrives the difference is trued up on that single bill. The pattern to recognize: one or two suspiciously cheap months, then one that looks doubled. Nothing about your usage changed; the accounting caught up. If you see it, compare the reading printed on the bill against the number physically on your meter. The full checklist for a 2× month is in why did my electric bill double.

3. Kilowatt-hours used

The current read minus the previous read, in kilowatt-hours — the single most useful number on the bill and the one the calculator below asks for. A kilowatt-hour is one thousand watts drawn for one hour, so a 1,500 W space heater running 8 hours a day uses about 12 of them daily. Most bills also print a bar chart of the last twelve or twenty-four months beside it; that chart, not last month's total, is how you tell a seasonal swing from a real change. What each appliance contributes is priced on the cost-to-run guides.

4. Supply charges and your supply rate

The supply section shows a rate per kilowatt-hour multiplied by the kilowatt-hours above. If you buy from a retail supplier, this section names the supplier, the contract rate, and often the contract end date — the three things to note if you ever want to shop. If you are on the utility's default service, the rate here is the regulated default, which is typically reset on a fixed schedule rather than moving month to month.

5. Delivery and distribution charges

The delivery section is usually the longest and the least legible: a distribution charge per kilowatt-hour, a transmission charge, and a stack of riders with names like reliability, storm recovery, energy-efficiency programs, low-income assistance, or decommissioning. Each rider is a separately approved cost being recovered from customers. They are small individually and meaningful in aggregate, and they are the reason a bill can rise in a month when the supply rate did not move at all.

6. Capacity or generation-related charges

On some bills, a capacity charge appears as its own line; on others it is folded silently into the supply rate. It pays generators to stay available for the hours of peak demand, whether or not they end up running. In the PJM region it is set years ahead at auction, which is the one part of a future bill that is knowable today rather than forecast — the mechanism, the cleared prices and the arithmetic that turns dollars per megawatt-day into cents per kilowatt-hour are in the capacity charge explainer.

7. Taxes, surcharges and the fixed customer charge

Near the total sit the charges that do not scale with usage: state and local taxes, franchise fees, and a fixed customer or basic service charge billed for being connected at all. The fixed charge is why a nearly empty house still gets a bill, and why cutting usage in half does not halve the total. It also means your effective price per kilowatt-hour is highest in your lowest-usage months — the same fixed dollars spread over fewer units.

How to check your own rate

No single rate printed on the bill tells you what you pay, because the total is a stack of them. The number that does is the all-in price, and it takes one division:

Use the whole total — supply, delivery, riders, fixed charge, taxes. That is what left your account, so that is your real price. It will be higher than the supply rate printed in the supply section, often considerably, and that gap is the point of the exercise: people shop against a supply rate and budget against an all-in one.

The same division on a real, dated row — Colorado's average residential household in April 2026, which sits closest to the median of the reporting jurisdictions:

EIA publishes Colorado's average residential price for April 2026 as 16.54¢/kWh; the division above lands beside it rather than exactly on it because the published bill and usage figures are each rounded before being divided. That round-trip is the useful part — the published average price comes out of the same all-in arithmetic you just did on your own bill, dollars over kilowatt-hours, which is what makes your number and the averages below comparable at all.

Now the comparison point. Here is how the 51 jurisdictions EIA priced for April 2026 are distributed — find where your own cents-per-kilowatt-hour lands:

Method: the 51 of 51 jurisdictions with a reported average residential price in EIA data for April 2026, ordered, with quartiles taken by linear interpolation between adjacent values. Jurisdictions EIA has not reported are excluded, never counted as zero. Your own state's average, its twelve-month history and the increases already locked in are on its state page.

Put your numbers in

With the total and the kilowatt-hours from your bill, the calculator does the rest: where you sit against your state's average, and which price increases are already locked in for you — every line sourced and dated. Nothing you type is stored.

What “average” means, and what it does not

A state average is one number standing in for every residential customer in the state. It blends investor-owned utilities with municipal systems and rural cooperatives, default service with retail supply contracts, flat rates with time-of-use plans, and apartments with all-electric houses. Two neighbors on different plans can both be far from it while being billed exactly correctly.

So treat the distinction carefully. Landing above your state average is not proof of an error or of a bad plan — an all-electric home in a cold month lands above it as a matter of arithmetic, and so does anyone whose fixed customer charge is spread over low usage. What the average is genuinely good for is direction and magnitude: a few cents apart is normal variation between plans and utilities; a gap of a different order of magnitude is worth explaining. And month-to-month, your own history is a sharper instrument than any average — the same month last year, on the same number of days, tells you more than any state figure can.

One more limit: an average describes the past. Some of what is coming is already contracted rather than forecast — the ranked state-by-state view of that is in our 2027 study.

Red flags worth a call to your utility

Most surprising bills are explained by season, usage or cycle length. These are the patterns that are worth picking up the phone about — and in each case the bill itself gives you the specific thing to ask.

• A long run of estimated reads. One estimate is routine; several in a row means your bills are a guess and a correction is building. Ask for an actual read, or submit your own meter reading.
• The meter reading on the bill does not match the meter. Read the display yourself and compare. A mismatch is a billing question with a concrete answer, not a matter of opinion.
• High usage that survives the obvious explanations. If the kilowatt-hours are up but the weather, the occupancy and the appliances did not change, something is drawing power continuously — a heating element stuck on, a heat pump running on auxiliary heat, a well pump cycling on a leak. Utilities can often pull interval data showing whether the load is constant or peaky, which separates a broken appliance from a behavior change.
• A supplier name you do not recognize in the supply section. Ask when the contract started, at what rate, and when it ends. Enrolments do happen without a clear memory of agreeing to them, and your state's regulator has a complaint process for that.
• A charge you cannot map to either half. Every line on a regulated bill traces to an approved tariff. “What is this line and which approval is it under?” is a normal question with a normal answer, and asking it costs nothing.
• A balance you genuinely cannot pay. Call before the due date rather than after. Payment plans, budget or levelized billing, and assistance programs exist, and they are far easier to arrange before an account is in arrears than after.

Keep going

• Why is my electric bill so high? — the usage-versus-price diagnosis, with the national numbers.
• Why did my electric bill double? — the realistic causes of a true 2× jump, in checking order.
• The PJM capacity charge, explained — the auction that fixes part of your future bill years ahead.