Absolute Best Numbers on Electric Bills

On April 28, the federal government released the absolute best numbers on residential electric bills sliced and diced by where customers live, and in what type of home, what they earn, and how old they are. The Consumer Expenditure Survey literally checks the bills of many thousands of households and now we have the results for the twelve months ending June 2019.

The monthly bills for households in the west averaged $107.42. In the northeast, the average bill was $113.83, and in the midwest it was $115.75.

As usual, the outlier was electric bills for households in the south. Their monthly bills averaged $143.35. That’s a lot of air conditioning.

It sure matters what customers earn. Nationally, the average monthly electric bill for the bottom twenty percent of income earners was $86.50. On the other hand, the average monthly bill for the top twenty percent of income earners was $164.83.

This is just a tasting of the insights that come from the semiannual Consumer Expenditure Survey. Public Utilities Fortnightly is crunching all the numbers in this massive trove down to the microdata details exclusively for PUF member organizations.