Average electric bill per month

Electricity bills: how these averages are worked out

Electric utilities, and the companies that sell electricity to homes, report their revenue, sales and customers to the US Energy Information Administration each year on Form EIA-861. The average bill is residential revenue divided by residential customers and by 12 months; usage is residential sales in kWh divided the same way, and the price is revenue divided by kWh.

• State and US figurescount each residential customer once, including those who buy their electricity from a company other than their utility: their bill is what they paid both, the supplier for energy and the utility for delivery. This is the same calculation as EIA's own average monthly bill table.
• Utility figures cover only the customers who buy both energy and delivery from that utility.
• Some small utilities file EIA's short form, which reports only their total sales, with no separate figure for homes. Unless EIA lists them in its residential sales data, they are not in these averages.
• The figures are a year's total divided by 12, so any single month's bill can be higher or lower than the average.

What goes into a bill is on what is a utility bill; how rates are set, and where you can choose who sells you electricity, on electricity rates by state.