Findings · tariff snapshot 2026-08-27

Is the electricity plan you were put on the cheapest one your utility offers?

We took every residential rate plan that 85 US utilities have on file with their regulators and ran one identical household through all of them, hour by hour, for a year. Then we asked the only question that matters to the person opening the bill: would moving to a different plan at the same utility change what they pay?

Already on the cheapest

35%

30 of the 85 utilities we can rank in full. For these households the honest advice is to change nothing.

Median left on the table

$43

A year, for a household on the default plan. Real, but smaller than the headlines usually suggest.

Utilities with $200+ a year in it

20% of the sample. At 6 of them it is more than $500 a year.

At 35% of the utilities we can rank, the plan a household is most likely to be on is already the cheapest one available to it. At the rest, moving to the cheapest plan is worth a median of $43 a year — rising to $360 at the 90th percentile and $776 at the worst case. Nobody sends a letter either way.

What we measured, and what we did not

There are two different numbers people confuse, and the difference is the whole point of this report.

The spread — the distance between a utility’s cheapest and priciest residential plan. Median $178, and $3,122 at Southern California Edison. This is the number that makes a good headline and it is not money anyone can go and get. It includes plans no household is on by accident.
The gap from the default — what a household on the plan it was most likely put on would save by moving to the cheapest one it could take. Median $43. This is the number that describes a real decision, and it is the one this report leads with.

We publish both, in the table below, so anyone can check that we are not quoting the larger one as if it were the smaller one.

How often is switching worth the phone call?

Across the 85 utilities we can rank in full:

What a household on the default plan could save	Utilities	Share
Nothing — already on the cheapest	30	35%
Something, but under $100 a year	25	29%
$100 or more	30	35%
$200 or more	17	20%
$500 or more	6	7%

Utilities by how much a household on the default plan could save by moving to the cheapest one

Read that first row as the finding, not the leftovers. Most rate-comparison tools have no way to tell you that you are already fine, because they are paid when you switch. At 30 of these 85 utilities, switching plans is not your lever — and knowing that is worth as much as a number with a dollar sign on it.

Where it is worth the most

The 20 utilities where a household on the default plan has the most to gain by moving. Every figure is the same household, priced from the filed tariff. All 137 utilities we cover have their own page with the full plan-by-plan working.

Utility	State	Plans priced	Default → cheapest	Cheapest–priciest
San Diego Gas & Electric	California	8	$776	$3,951–$4,920
Central Hudson Gas & Elec	New York	2	$760	$3,584–$4,344
DTE Electric	Michigan	7	$724	$1,548–$2,272
Green Mountain Power	Vermont	3	$550	$1,812–$2,362
El Paso Electric	New Mexico	3	$515	$790–$1,325
Public Service Elec & Gas	New Jersey	4	$510	$2,159–$2,895
Virginia Electric & Power	Virginia	9	$466	$1,167–$2,497
Pacific Gas & Electric	California	8	$376	$3,409–$3,786
PacifiCorp	Wyoming	14	$360	$1,150–$1,657
Duke Energy Carolinas	North Carolina	22	$349	$1,225–$1,715
ALLETE	Minnesota	6	$349	$836–$1,305
Dominion Energy South Carolina	South Carolina	4	$239	$1,556–$1,794
Duquesne Light	Pennsylvania	3	$232	$2,044–$2,276
Nevada Power	Nevada	4	$206	$1,157–$1,411
Wisconsin Electric Power	Wisconsin	10	$205	$1,827–$2,032
Wisconsin Public Service	Wisconsin	4	$201	$1,366–$1,692
Entergy Mississippi	Mississippi	2	$200	$1,296–$1,496
Public Service Co of NM	New Mexico	3	$194	$1,458–$2,044
Northern States Power Co - Minnesota	South Dakota	8	$187	$1,433–$1,737
Jersey Central Power & Lt	New Jersey	5	$176	$1,762–$1,987

Utilities ranked by what a household on the default plan could save by switching

Where a utility prices different parts of its territory differently, the comparison is made inside a single rate zone — comparing a plan in one zone with a plan in another would describe a switch nobody can make.

Method

Source: the NREL Utility Rate Database, public domain, snapshot 2026-08-27. We publish only plans that are currently effective, open to new enrollment, and complete enough to price a whole bill — which is why 85 utilities appear here and not all 137 we cover.
The household: a three-bedroom house with central air conditioning, modelled hour by hour across a full year so that air conditioning loads the afternoon the way it actually does. The same household is run through every plan, which is what makes the comparison between plans hold up even where the absolute figure is an estimate.
The default plan is inferred from the structure of the tariff, not from a flag in the data — the database’s own default flag is set on only 3% of records and cannot be relied on. Each utility page says which plan we inferred.
Excluded from ranking: plans with demand charges (we do not price those yet), plans that are not for ordinary households, and tariffs that cover only part of a bill.
Every number on this page is recomputed from the tariff data at build time. Nothing is typed in by hand.

What this does not say

It is not a savings promise. Eligibility rules decide whether a household can actually take the cheapest plan, and those rules are written into the tariff — we quote them on each plan’s page. A heating rate that requires a heat pump is not available to a house without one.
Your usage is not our household. The absolute annual figures are estimates. What holds up is the comparison between plans, because every plan is priced against the same house.
Time-of-use plans reward behaviour we did not assume. A household that can move its car charging overnight will do better on those plans than this model shows.
Coverage is partial. 137 utilities across 45 states, roughly two thirds of US ZIP codes. Where the tariff on file is too old or too partial, we decline to answer rather than guess.

Use this

The underlying data is public domain and so is our derivation of it. Take the numbers, check them, republish them.

Download the full dataset — every plan, every price, as CSV.
How we audit the source data — what the raw database gets wrong, measured, with reproduction steps. Worth reading before you cite any tariff dataset, including ours.

Citation. plainrates, “Is the electricity plan you were put on the cheapest one your utility offers?”, 2026-08-27. https://plainrates.com/report/plan-gap/. Derived from the NREL Utility Rate Database (public domain).

If you are writing about this

We will run the numbers for any utility in the dataset and send you the plan-by-plan working, including the ones that make us look wrong. If a figure here does not survive contact with the tariff you are holding, tell us and we will correct it on the page. Get in touch.