Original research

Average electricity bill by state, and why it is not the same question as the rate

Residential revenue divided by residential accounts, for every US jurisdiction, from the mandatory annual census of American electric utilities.

Updated September 2026 · Data as of EIA-861 2024 final release

Written by HyreSolar Research team Research and analysis

Audited by HyreSolar Research team Data audit and fact check

$142.26 average monthly bill $1,707 a year, 2024

$212.12 highest, Hawaii Lowest: New Mexico, $92.88

-0.74 price against consumption The two terms pull opposite ways

The headline

The average American household electricity bill is $142.26 a month, $1,707 a year. It runs from $212.12 in Hawaii to $92.88 in New Mexico. But a bill is a product of two numbers, price and quantity, and across the states those two move in opposite directions: the correlation between a state's residential price and its household consumption is r = -0.74. Hawaii has the dearest electricity in the country and one of the smallest appetites for it. Louisiana has nearly the cheapest and by far the largest. Neither state's bill can be predicted from its rate, and that is the single most useful thing to know about this table.

What "average electricity bill" means on this page

The phrase average electricity bill is used to mean at least four different things in published sources, and the differences between them are larger than the differences between many states. Here is exactly what ours is.

Average monthly bill: Total residential electricity revenue ÷ total residential customer accounts ÷ 12, computed within each state from Form EIA-861 for the 2024 data year. The national figure is $142.26.
An arithmetic mean, not a typical household: Every account carries equal weight in the denominator: a studio flat and a five-bedroom house with a pool count once each. The mean sits above the median in a right-skewed distribution, so more than half of households pay less than this figure. EIA-861 reports no distribution, so we cannot tell you how much less.
Includes fixed charges: Revenue is everything the utility billed for residential service: energy charges, the monthly customer or service charge, demand and delivery components, riders and surcharges. A household that used nothing all year still contributes its standing charge to the numerator, which is why no per-kWh rate multiplied by any consumption figure will reproduce an individual bill.
Residential class only: Commercial, industrial and transport sales are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator. A state with heavy industry does not get a higher household bill for it.
One account is not one home: A master-metered apartment building is a single residential account serving many households. Where that stock is large the average bill is overstated relative to what a family actually pays, and the effect is not uniform between states.

A bill is two numbers multiplied together, and they disagree

Price against consumption for all 51 jurisdictions. Every point on the same downward-sloping hyperbola would have an identical bill; the cloud is tighter than that, which is the compression. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Highlighted points are the states named in the text.

Every electricity bill in this dataset satisfies the same identity: bill = price × consumption ÷ 12. Take a state's residential price in cents per kilowatt-hour, multiply by the kilowatt-hours its average household buys in a year, convert to dollars, divide by twelve. That is not a model of the bill. It is the bill, rearranged, and it reproduces every published figure in the table below to within 5.3 cents a month, which is the rounding carried in the price and consumption columns and nothing else.

The identity is trivial. What is not trivial is that its two terms are strongly negatively correlated across the states: r = -0.74. Expensive electricity and large consumption almost never occur in the same place. States with dear power are cool, coastal, dense and often gas-heated; states with cheap power are hot, humid, sprawling and electrically heated and cooled.

The consequence is compression. The price of electricity varies across the states by a factor of 3.72, from 11.51¢ in North Dakota to 42.86¢ in Hawaii. Household consumption varies by a factor of 2.43. But the bill, their product, varies by only 2.28, less than either of the numbers that make it. Multiplying two widely dispersed quantities normally produces something more dispersed still. Here it produces something less.

The formal version: because the identity is exact, the variance of the log bill decomposes without residual into the variance of the log price, the variance of log consumption, and twice their covariance. Those three terms are 0.0928, 0.0653 and -0.1264, and they sum to 0.0317: the observed variance of the log bill. The negative covariance cancels 80% of the dispersion the two inputs would otherwise produce.

That is why a rate comparison is such a poor guide to a bill. Across the 51 jurisdictions, price explains a moderate amount of bill variation (r = 0.60) and consumption explains almost none on its own (r = 0.06), not because consumption does not matter, but because the states that use the most are systematically the ones paying the least per unit.

Four ways to arrive at an electricity bill, and only two of them are common

Split the 51 jurisdictions at the median price (14.91¢/kWh) and the median household consumption (10,582 kWh a year) and you get four groups. 38 of 51 land on the diagonal (dear and thrifty, or cheap and hungry) and only 13 land off it. That imbalance is the negative correlation made concrete, and it is why most states' bills cluster.

Dear power, small appetite, 19 jurisdictions

The largest group, and the one the rate tables are built around: Hawaii, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, Pennsylvania and 13 others. Hawaii is the extreme case, 42.86¢/kWh, the dearest electricity in the country, bought at 5,938 kWh a year, the smallest household appetite in the country. It still returns the highest bill in America at $212.12, because a price that far above the field cannot be offset by any plausible thrift.

California is the more representative member: 2nd dearest at 31.97¢/kWh, but 2nd lowest on consumption at 6,039 kWh. Its bill of $160.86 ranks only 8th. Mild coastal climate, gas space heating, and four decades of appliance and building standards.

Maine makes the point most sharply of all: 8th of 51 on price (first being the dearest, a convention every rank on this page follows) and 27th on bill. A household there buys 6,601 kWh a year, about 36% below the national figure.

Cheap power, large appetite, 19 jurisdictions

The mirror image, and overwhelmingly the South: Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina and 13 others. Louisiana is the extreme, 11.73¢/kWh, 48th of 51 on price and among the cheapest in the country, on 14,422 kWh a year, the highest household consumption of any US jurisdiction.

Its bill is $140.96, only $1.30 below the national average, despite electricity costing 29% less per unit than the national price. Mississippi does the same trick and lands above the national bill at $154.83. Florida, Georgia and South Carolina all clear $150 a month on below-median rates.

Long cooling seasons, electric resistance and heat-pump heating rather than gas, larger detached housing, and a great deal of poorly insulated older stock. These states are where a rate comparison misleads worst, and the divergence table further down quantifies exactly how far.

Cheap power, small appetite, 6 jurisdictions

Where bills are genuinely low, because both terms are low: Kansas, Iowa, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico. Just 6 of 51 jurisdictions manage it.

New Mexico has the lowest average bill in America at $92.88, 14.20¢/kWh on 7,849 kWh a year. Utah is next at $94.57. These are the interior-west and northern-plains states: mild summers by southern standards, gas heating, cheap hydro, coal or wind generation, and no month in which air conditioning runs around the clock.

It is worth noticing that this group contains two of the states with the most rooftop solar per household, Utah at 6.4% and New Mexico at 6.5%. Solar adoption is not driven by the size of the bill, and this quadrant is the clearest evidence of it. Adoption by state →

Dear power, large appetite, 7 jurisdictions

The quadrant that produces the punishing bills, and it is nearly as thin as the cheap-and-thrifty one: Alabama ($173.50), Maryland ($165.87), Texas ($163.72), Arizona ($160.24), West Virginia ($154.76), Delaware ($150.87), Nevada ($139.39).

Alabama is the state most often reported the wrong way round. Its electricity costs 15.18¢/kWh (barely above the median and below the national 16.48¢) yet it carries the 3rd highest bill in America at $173.50, on 13,718 kWh a year. Texas does the same at $163.72, 6th in the country on 24th price.

Between them, the two off-diagonal quadrants hold 13 of 51 jurisdictions. The remaining 38 sit on the diagonal, where one term offsets the other, and it is that offsetting, not any regulatory harmonisation, that keeps American electricity bills as similar as they are.

Average electricity bill by state, all 51 jurisdictions, 2024

Ranked by monthly bill, highest first. The price and consumption columns are the two terms behind each bill; multiply them and divide by twelve and you get the first column back.

Average monthly residential electricity bill, 2024. Every jurisdiction on one square, because bills are a per-household quantity and land area is irrelevant to them. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. A linear colour scale is used here, unlike the adoption maps elsewhere in this library: the bill range is a factor of 2.28, narrow enough that a linear ramp keeps every tile distinguishable.

#	State	Monthly bill	Annual bill	Price	Consumption	Price rank	Use rank
1	Hawaii	$212.12	$2,545	42.86¢	5,938 kWh	1	51
2	Connecticut	$199.66	$2,396	28.75¢	8,335 kWh	4	35
3	Alabama	$173.50	$2,082	15.18¢	13,718 kWh	21	4
4	Massachusetts	$167.20	$2,006	29.35¢	6,836 kWh	3	47
5	Maryland	$165.87	$1,990	17.86¢	11,146 kWh	13	23
6	Texas	$163.72	$1,965	14.94¢	13,154 kWh	24	6
7	Rhode Island	$162.40	$1,949	28.65¢	6,802 kWh	5	48
8	California	$160.86	$1,930	31.97¢	6,039 kWh	2	50
9	Arizona	$160.24	$1,923	14.91¢	12,899 kWh	26	8
10	Florida	$156.09	$1,873	14.14¢	13,250 kWh	33	5
11	Mississippi	$154.83	$1,858	13.39¢	13,871 kWh	37	2
12	West Virginia	$154.76	$1,857	15.07¢	12,320 kWh	22	15
13	Georgia	$151.25	$1,815	14.08¢	12,888 kWh	35	9
14	Delaware	$150.87	$1,810	16.57¢	10,928 kWh	17	24
15	South Carolina	$149.51	$1,794	14.23¢	12,605 kWh	30	10
16	Virginia	$148.77	$1,785	14.41¢	12,388 kWh	29	13
17	Pennsylvania	$145.17	$1,742	17.77¢	9,806 kWh	14	32
18	New Hampshire	$144.87	$1,738	23.40¢	7,428 kWh	9	42
19	Alaska	$143.54	$1,722	24.82¢	6,939 kWh	6	44
20	North Carolina	$143.50	$1,722	14.13¢	12,184 kWh	34	16
21	Tennessee	$143.32	$1,720	12.42¢	13,843 kWh	43	3
22	Louisiana	$140.96	$1,692	11.73¢	14,422 kWh	48	1
23	New York	$139.53	$1,674	24.43¢	6,854 kWh	7	46
24	Nevada	$139.39	$1,673	15.00¢	11,154 kWh	23	22
25	Ohio	$135.16	$1,622	15.99¢	10,146 kWh	18	30
26	Kentucky	$133.81	$1,606	12.79¢	12,558 kWh	40	12
27	Maine	$133.60	$1,603	24.29¢	6,601 kWh	8	49
28	Indiana	$133.06	$1,597	14.77¢	10,814 kWh	27	25
29	Oklahoma	$132.05	$1,585	12.24¢	12,949 kWh	45	7
30	Oregon	$129.62	$1,555	14.70¢	10,582 kWh	28	26
31	Missouri	$129.18	$1,550	12.91¢	12,007 kWh	38	17
32	Arkansas	$129.13	$1,550	12.32¢	12,580 kWh	44	11
33	New Jersey	$128.13	$1,538	19.34¢	7,949 kWh	11	38
34	South Dakota	$127.81	$1,534	12.86¢	11,925 kWh	39	18
35	Vermont	$125.66	$1,508	21.90¢	6,884 kWh	10	45
36	Kansas	$123.90	$1,487	14.15¢	10,508 kWh	32	27
37	Michigan	$119.31	$1,432	19.30¢	7,419 kWh	12	43
38	North Dakota	$118.38	$1,421	11.51¢	12,344 kWh	51	14
39	Washington	$113.68	$1,364	11.90¢	11,465 kWh	47	20
40	District of Columbia	$113.23	$1,359	17.71¢	7,672 kWh	15	41
41	Iowa	$111.54	$1,338	13.40¢	9,987 kWh	36	31
42	Wisconsin	$110.87	$1,330	17.18¢	7,742 kWh	16	40
43	Nebraska	$110.28	$1,323	11.53¢	11,477 kWh	49	19
44	Minnesota	$110.06	$1,321	15.45¢	8,548 kWh	20	34
45	Illinois	$109.99	$1,320	15.87¢	8,317 kWh	19	36
46	Idaho	$108.73	$1,305	11.52¢	11,326 kWh	50	21
47	Montana	$107.91	$1,295	12.66¢	10,226 kWh	41	29
48	Wyoming	$107.65	$1,292	12.47¢	10,361 kWh	42	28
49	Colorado	$100.57	$1,207	14.92¢	8,091 kWh	25	37
50	Utah	$94.57	$1,135	12.22¢	9,290 kWh	46	33
51	New Mexico	$92.88	$1,115	14.20¢	7,849 kWh	31	39

HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. National average $142.26 a month, $1,707 a year, on 16.48¢/kWh and 10,359 kWh a year. Price rank and use rank both run 1 = highest.

Figures labelled HyreSolar analysis are computed by us from the EIA source files named below. EIA publishes the inputs; it does not publish these ratios or rankings.

How the bills are spread

Every jurisdiction's average monthly bill as a distance from the national $142.26. Gold above, grey below. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Labels show each state's own bill, not the gap.

21 of 51 jurisdictions sit above the national average of $142.26 and 30 below it. The national figure is a customer-weighted mean, not a mean of the states, so it sits where the population is, which is why fewer states are above it than a simple midpoint would suggest.

The dispersion is modest by the standards of anything else in this data library. The coefficient of variation across the states is 18% for the bill, against 37% for price and 24% for consumption. Household solar penetration, by comparison, varies by four orders of magnitude between first and last. Electricity bills are one of the most geographically uniform household costs in America.

That uniformity is worth holding onto when reading claims about a state being an expensive or a cheap place to run a home. The distance from the highest bill in the country to the lowest is $119.24 a month. It is a real difference and it compounds over a year to $1,430, but it is not the order-of-magnitude gap the rate tables imply.

The states where the rate table and the bill table disagree

Each state holds two ranks in this dataset: one for what it charges per kilowatt-hour and one for what its households actually pay a month. For most states the two are close. For the twelve below they are not, and every one of them is a state whose electricity costs are routinely described the wrong way round.

Price rank against bill rank, twelve states. The longer the bar, the worse a rate comparison serves that state's households. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Rank 1 is the highest value in each series.

State	Price rank	Bill rank	Movement	Price	Consumption	Monthly bill
Louisiana	48	22	+26 places	11.73¢	14,422 kWh	$140.96
Mississippi	37	11	+26 places	13.39¢	13,871 kWh	$154.83
Florida	33	10	+23 places	14.14¢	13,250 kWh	$156.09
Georgia	35	13	+22 places	14.08¢	12,888 kWh	$151.25
Tennessee	43	21	+22 places	12.42¢	13,843 kWh	$143.32
Alabama	21	3	+18 places	15.18¢	13,718 kWh	$173.50
Wisconsin	16	42	-26 places	17.18¢	7,742 kWh	$110.87
Illinois	19	45	-26 places	15.87¢	8,317 kWh	$109.99
Vermont	10	35	-25 places	21.90¢	6,884 kWh	$125.66
Michigan	12	37	-25 places	19.30¢	7,419 kWh	$119.31
District of Columbia	15	40	-25 places	17.71¢	7,672 kWh	$113.23
Minnesota	20	44	-24 places	15.45¢	8,548 kWh	$110.06

HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Both ranks run 1 = highest. A positive movement means the state pays more per month than its position on the rate table implies.

Louisiana and Mississippi move 26 places each: the largest divergence in the country in both cases, and in the same direction. Wisconsin moves the other way by 26.

The compression, as a table

Sort every jurisdiction by price and split into quarters. If the bill followed the rate, the last column would spread as widely as the second. It does not.

Price group	Jurisdictions	Mean price	Mean consumption	Mean monthly bill
Cheapest quarter	13	12.17¢	11,905 kWh	$120.64
Second quarter	13	14.11¢	11,679 kWh	$137.26
Third quarter	13	16.12¢	10,211 kWh	$136.40
Dearest quarter	12	26.59¢	7,002 kWh	$153.07

HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Unweighted means within each quartile of jurisdictions sorted by residential price.

The dearest quarter of jurisdictions pays 2.19× the price of the cheapest quarter, but only 1.27× the bill, because it buys 41% less electricity to begin with.

What has moved over eleven years

Residential electricity price, 2014–2024, for eight states named on this page. Each panel is scaled to its own range. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861. Nominal cents per kilowatt-hour; no inflation adjustment. Panels are not comparable in height, only in shape.

The national residential price rose from 12.52¢/kWh in 2014 to 16.48¢ in 2024, a nominal increase of 32% over eleven years. These are nominal cents: no deflator is applied anywhere on this page, and over eleven years that matters a great deal to how the increase should be read.

The state paths are not parallel, and the sparklines below show why an aggregate is misleading. California's residential price went from 16.25¢ to 31.97¢: it very nearly doubled. Utah's moved from 10.65¢ to 12.22¢. Two states in the same interconnection, eleven years, entirely different experiences of what electricity costs.

We deliberately do not publish a bill series to match. EIA-861 lets us compute a per-account bill for each year, but a bill is a price times a quantity, and the quantity moves with weather. A single hot summer moves a state's average bill more than a tariff case does, and presenting an eleven-point bill series without weather normalisation would invite readers to see rate policy in what is mostly cooling degree days. The price series has no such problem, so that is the series we show.

What this figure will and will not do for you

Reasonable uses

Benchmarking a state against the country. The definition is identical in every jurisdiction and the source is a census, so cross-state comparison is exactly what this figure is for.

Sizing an aggregate. Multiply by residential accounts and you recover total residential revenue, which is where the number came from.

Sanity-checking a quote. If a sales estimate assumes your household spends far more than your state's average, ask which of the two terms it has inflated: the rate or the consumption. It is nearly always the second.

Understanding why solar payback differs by state. A solar array offsets kilowatt-hours at the marginal rate, not at the average bill. Two states with the same bill can have very different solar economics. Run your own numbers →

Uses it will not survive

"My bill should be this." It is a mean across every account in the state including flats, holiday homes and vacant properties. Most households pay less; some pay several times more.

Deriving a rate from it. Dividing this bill by an assumed consumption gives a number that is not the tariff, because the bill contains fixed charges that no per-kWh rate includes.

Estimating solar savings. Removing a state's average bill from a household's outgoings is the standard overstatement in solar sales copy. Fixed charges survive the array, exports are usually credited below retail, and the offset applies to the marginal rate. What exports are actually worth →

Reading a change over time as a policy outcome. Bills move with weather at least as much as with tariffs, and nothing here is weather-normalised.

Methodology

Source

US Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, Sales to Ultimate Customers schedule, 2024 final release, with the 2014–2024 annual files behind the price series. Downloaded as the published ZIP archives on 2 September 2026. EIA-861 is a legally mandated annual census of US electric utilities, not a sample survey, so these figures carry no sampling error.

The 2024 file is the final release. EIA's 2025 early release is excluded from everything here: it covers a partial set of filers and would depress every state's revenue and customer count unevenly.

The arithmetic, in full

Monthly bill = residential revenue (thousand dollars) × 1,000 ÷ residential customers ÷ 12. Annual bill is the same without the final division. Price = residential revenue ÷ residential sales, expressed in cents per kilowatt-hour. Consumption = residential sales (MWh) × 1,000 ÷ residential customers.

All four are computed within each state from the same filers in the same year, never by apportioning a national total or by joining across vintages.

The identity check: price × consumption ÷ 12 reproduces the published monthly bill for every one of the 51 jurisdictions to within 5.3 cents, and the national figure to within 0.4 cents. That is not a validation of the data: it is a validation that the three published columns are internally consistent, which is what licenses the variance decomposition earlier on the page.

The double-counting trap, and the validation that catches it

EIA files service in restructured retail markets in two halves: Part B is a competitive supplier's energy sale, Part C is the incumbent utility's delivery of the same electricity to the same household. The two carry identical megawatthours. Summing sales and customers across every Part double-counts them and understates the 2024 national residential price by 1.12¢/kWh: an error large enough to reorder several states.

We sum revenue across all Parts, and sales and customers across Parts A, B and D only. That handling reproduces EIA's own published residential price series across all 357 overlapping state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh. EIA rounds its published series to two decimals, so the residual is rounding and nothing else. This is the strongest external check available on any figure in this library, and every bill and consumption figure on this page is built on the same extraction that passes it.

Definitions that change the answer

Customer, not household. The denominator is residential accounts. A master-metered building is one account for many homes. Where such stock is large (dense urban jurisdictions especially) the average bill is pulled upwards relative to what a family pays.

Mean, not median. Residential electricity consumption is right-skewed, so the mean exceeds the median and more than half of households pay less than the figures here. EIA-861 publishes no distribution, so we cannot say by how much, and we will not guess.

Nominal dollars. No inflation adjustment is applied anywhere on this page, including in the eleven-year price series.

Bundled and unbundled service are combined. In restructured states a household's total cost is split across a supplier bill and a delivery bill. Our revenue figure sums both, which is the correct total but means the "price" for those states is a blended all-in figure rather than any single tariff a customer would recognise.

Limitations

No distribution, only a mean. This is the limitation that matters most to an individual reader, and no amount of analysis of this dataset will fix it. For the spread within a state you need utility rate-case data or the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, neither of which is what this page uses.

No weather normalisation. Consumption, and therefore the bill, reflects the actual weather of 2024. A hot summer raises a southern state's average bill without any tariff having changed.

No fuel split. A state where most homes heat with gas will show lower electricity consumption and a lower electricity bill while its households spend more on energy overall. Nothing here is a total household energy cost.

Annual resolution only. There are no monthly figures in this filing. A "monthly bill" here is one twelfth of an annual total, not what arrives in January, and in most states the seasonal swing around that twelfth is very large.

Reproducing this

Every figure above, including the correlations and the variance decomposition, is computed by script from the source workbooks into a single dataset file that the page reads. No number is typed into the prose. The inputs are a public federal download and the arithmetic is stated in this section; if you find an error, tell us and we will correct it here with a dated note.

Questions

What is the average electricity bill in the US?

$142.26 a month, or $1,707 a year, for the 2024 data year, total residential electricity revenue divided by residential customer accounts, from Form EIA-861. That average sits on a residential price of 16.48¢/kWh and household consumption of 10,359 kWh a year. It is an arithmetic mean across all accounts and includes fixed charges, so most households pay somewhat less.

Which state has the highest electricity bill?

Hawaii, at $212.12 a month ($2,545 a year), followed by Connecticut at $199.66 and Alabama at $173.50. The lowest is New Mexico at $92.88. Alabama at $173.50 is the surprise in the top three: its electricity costs 15.18¢/kWh, below the national 16.48¢ and 21st of 51 on price, but its households buy 13,718 kWh a year, 4th highest in the country.

Why is my bill higher than my state average?

Because the average is a mean across every residential account in the state, including small flats, second homes and properties that sat empty for part of the year, and the distribution is right-skewed: a minority of large, all-electric, air-conditioned houses pull the mean up while the majority of accounts sit below it. A detached, electrically heated home with a family in it will normally exceed its state's mean by a wide margin. EIA-861 reports no distribution, so this page cannot tell you what percentile you are in.

Does a low electricity rate mean a low bill?

No, and the relationship is weaker than almost anyone expects. Across the 51 jurisdictions, price and household consumption are correlated at r = -0.74 (strongly negative) so cheap-power states are also high-consumption states. Louisiana has among the cheapest electricity in America at 11.73¢/kWh and a bill of $140.96, within $1.30 of the national average. Louisiana and Mississippi each sit 26 places higher on the bill table than on the rate table.

How is the average bill calculated here, exactly?

Residential electricity revenue ÷ residential customer accounts ÷ 12, computed state by state from Form EIA-861 for the 2024 data year, for the residential customer class only. Revenue includes fixed monthly charges, riders and delivery components as well as energy charges. In restructured states, supplier and delivery revenue are summed so the figure is the household's total electricity cost. The same extraction reproduces EIA's published residential price series across 357 state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh.

Is this the same as the average electricity rate by state?

No. The rate is cents per kilowatt-hour; the bill is dollars per month, and the bill also contains fixed charges the rate does not. Both are on this page, in adjacent columns, and they rank the states differently, twelve jurisdictions move by at least 18 places between the two rankings, and two of them by 26. If you want to compare tariffs, use the price column. If you want to compare what households actually pay, use the bill.

Will solar eliminate my electricity bill?

Not the whole of it, and this page shows why. The bill in these figures includes fixed monthly charges that survive any amount of generation, and exported kilowatt-hours are increasingly credited below the retail rate rather than at it. A solar array offsets consumption at the marginal rate; it does not delete an average bill. Our payback calculator asks for both terms separately for that reason.

Written and audited by

HyreSolar Research

Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking

We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the statute, the tariff, the code section, the federal filing or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it. Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. That rule has cost us whole sections, and it is the reason the rest can be trusted.

160: primary sources read and cited
220: figures with a retrieval date
115: federal and state government sources
66: researched pages published

How this desk works

Primary sources only. Statutes from the legislature’s own publishing system, federal data from the agency that collects it, code text from the adopted edition, manufacturer claims from the data sheet. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we go and read the source.
Every figure carries its provenance. A named document and the date we retrieved it, so you can check it and so you know how old it is. Retrieval dates are not decoration: an EIA rate from May is a different fact from an EIA rate from August.
We publish what we could not verify. Every research page carries a section naming the things we tried to establish and could not, and why. A paywalled standard, a state website that refused the request, a manufacturer that publishes no figure at all.
We separate measurement from modelling from our own reasoning, and label which is which on the page. A laboratory measurement, an assumption inside a modelling tool and our own inference are three different kinds of claim and they are never presented as one.
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Data as of EIA-861 2024 final release. Authorship on this site is organisational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.

Sources & retrieval dates

US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Net Metering (annual files, 2014–2024) — Utility-level net-metered installations, capacity and PV-paired batteries by state and customer sector. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Sales to Ultimate Customers (annual files, 2014–2024) — Residential revenue, sales and customer counts by utility and state. The basis for price, bill and consumption figures. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector — EIA’s published price series, used to validate our derivation. Agreement across all 357 overlapping state-years is within 0.005¢/kWh. Retrieved 2 September 2026.

What would solar do to your bill, specifically?

A state average is $142.26 of context. The calculator takes your own consumption, your own tariff and your own roof, and separates the part an array can offset from the part it cannot.

Estimate your savings Payback calculator

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