Findings · tariff snapshot 2026-08-27
Why a small apartment pays more for each kilowatt-hour than a family house
Electricity is sold by the kilowatt-hour, so it is easy to assume everyone at the same utility pays the same price for one. They do not. We ran two households through the default residential plan at 125 US utilities — a small apartment and a family house with central air — and divided each bill by the energy used. At 120 of the 125, the apartment paid more per kilowatt-hour.
Apartment pays more per kWh
120 of 125
At 64 of them the gap is 10% or more. The median apartment pays 10% more per kWh than the house next door.
Median fixed charge
$16
A month, before any electricity is used. One utility in ten charges $33 or more.
Where it is half the bill
8
Utilities where the fixed charge alone is at least half of what the small apartment pays in a year.
How a flat fee turns into a higher price
A residential tariff usually has two parts. One is the energy charge, a price per kilowatt-hour that may change with the season, the hour, or how much has been used that month. The other is a fixed monthly charge — called a customer charge, a basic service charge or a facilities charge depending on the utility — that pays for the meter, the billing, and the wire to the house. It does not move with usage.
Take the median fixed charge of $16 a month. Our apartment uses 400 kilowatt-hours in a typical month, so that fee alone adds 3.9¢ to every kilowatt-hour it buys. The family house uses about 640 kilowatt-hours before the air conditioning starts and much more in summer, so the same fee adds 2.4¢ or less. Nothing about the price of energy differs between the two homes. The difference is arithmetic.
The effect is largest where the fixed charge is largest. At Lincoln Electric System, the apartment’s effective price is 17.5¢ per kilowatt-hour and the house’s is 12.1¢ — the smaller home pays 45% more for the same unit of electricity, from the same tariff.
The highest fixed charges
The 15 utilities, among the 125 we priced, whose default residential plan carries the largest fixed charge, and what share of a small apartment’s annual bill that charge makes up.
| Utility | State | Fixed charge a month | Share of apartment bill | Apartment ¢/kWh | House ¢/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entergy Mississippi | Mississippi | $48.51 | 55% | 21.9¢ | 15.8¢ |
| Lorain-Medina R E C | Ohio | $48.00 | 46% | 25.6¢ | 19.9¢ |
| Lincoln Electric System | Nebraska | $47.00 | 66% | 17.5¢ | 12.1¢ |
| Berkeley Electric Coop | South Carolina | $45.63 | 59% | 19.1¢ | 13.7¢ |
| Roanoke Electric Member | North Carolina | $45.00 | 43% | 26.0¢ | 20.6¢ |
| High West Energy | Wyoming | $44.00 | 53% | 20.5¢ | 15.5¢ |
| Aiken Electric Coop | South Carolina | $41.06 | 46% | 22.0¢ | 16.6¢ |
| Tri-County Elec Member Corp (GA) | Georgia | $40.00 | 48% | 20.4¢ | 15.6¢ |
| Ozark Border Electric | Missouri | $39.09 | 50% | 19.1¢ | 14.4¢ |
| Randolph Electric Member | North Carolina | $37.50 | 42% | 21.9¢ | 17.5¢ |
| Peninsula Light | Washington | $37.00 | 54% | 16.8¢ | 12.6¢ |
| Brunswick Electric Member | North Carolina | $35.00 | 46% | 18.9¢ | 15.2¢ |
| Valley Electric Assn | Nevada | $35.00 | 37% | 23.1¢ | 18.9¢ |
| San Miguel Power Assn | Colorado | $33.00 | 34% | 23.7¢ | 19.8¢ |
| Jackson Electric Member Corp | Georgia | $31.00 | 46% | 16.5¢ | 13.1¢ |
Many of the names near the top are rural electric cooperatives. That is not an accident of the sample. A cooperative serving a few customers per mile of line has to recover the cost of that line from fewer meters, and most choose to recover a large part of it through the fixed charge rather than the energy price. The same cost structure that makes rural service expensive to provide shows up as a fee that does not shrink when a member uses less.
At the other end, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power ($0.00), San Diego Gas & Electric ($0.79), Southern California Edison ($0.94), Jersey Central Power & Lt ($4.27), Northern States Power Co - Minnesota ($6.00) charge the least. A low fixed charge is not the same as a cheap utility — some of these recover their costs through some of the highest energy prices in the country — but it does mean that using less electricity shows up almost one-for-one on the bill.
Where the big house pays more instead
At 5 utilities the pattern runs the other way and the house pays more per kilowatt-hour than the apartment: Public Service Co of NM, Jersey Central Power & Lt, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. What they share is a tiered energy price — the first block of each month’s usage is billed at a lower rate and everything above it at a higher one. A household that stays inside the first block buys all of its energy cheaply. A house running central air through July pushes well into the upper block, and at these utilities that outweighs whatever the fixed charge adds — even where the fixed charge itself is not small.
This is a deliberate policy choice, mostly in California, where regulators have long used rising tiers to discourage heavy use. It is worth knowing about because it flips the usual advice. Where tiers dominate, cutting usage in the heaviest months is worth more than the average price suggests, because every kilowatt-hour saved comes off the most expensive block. Our guide to tiered rates explains how to find where the threshold sits on a bill.
What a small household can do about it
- Know which part of the bill is movable. Subtract the fixed charge from a recent bill. What remains is the part that responds to using less. At a utility where the fixed charge is half the bill, turning things off can only ever move the other half.
- Check whether a plan with a lower fixed charge exists. Some utilities file more than one residential plan with different splits between the fixed and the energy charge. For a low-use home, the plan with the smaller fixed charge and the higher energy price is often the cheaper one. Each utility page prices every open plan for a small apartment, so the comparison is already done.
- Read the bill for the charge’s name. It is usually printed as a separate line: customer charge, basic charge, service availability charge. Our guide to fixed charges shows where it sits and what it pays for.
Method
- Source: the NREL Utility Rate Database, public domain, snapshot 2026-08-27. One plan per utility: the plan a household is most likely to be on, inferred the same way as on each utility’s page. Plans that cover only part of the bill, plans with demand charges, and plans that are not for ordinary homes are left out, which is why 125 utilities appear here.
- The apartment: one or two people, no central air, no electric heat, about 400 kilowatt-hours a month. The house: three or four people with central air conditioning. Both are modelled hour by hour for a full year, so tiers, seasons and time-of-use windows are priced as the tariff writes them.
- Effective price per kilowatt-hour is the full annual bill, fixed charge included, divided by the energy used. Fixed charges billed per day are converted at 365 days a year.
- Taxes, riders and fuel adjustments that the tariff database does not carry are not included. They change the level of every figure here more than the comparison between the two households.
Use this
The data is public domain and so is our derivation. Download every plan as CSV, or read how we price a tariff before relying on a figure.