A rate increase moving through a single state regulator’s docket rarely makes national news on its own. Tallied together, though, hundreds of those filings show how widespread higher electric and gas bills have become since early 2025. The Center for American Progress, working with the Natural Resources Defense Council, has spent more than a year logging those filings state by state, and its latest count puts a number on a pattern most households have only felt one bill at a time.
A Tracker Built From State Filings, Not a Federal Count
The two groups’ Electric and Natural Gas Utility Rate Hikes Tracker counts at least 275 electric and natural gas utilities that have already implemented a rate increase, won regulatory approval for one, or filed a request still pending before a state public utilities commission, covering increases starting in 2025 or later. Center for American Progress and NRDC built the list from utility press releases, company filings and public utilities commission dockets rather than from any single federal database, and the organizations say directly that the figure blends three different stages of the same process: a rate already showing up on a bill, one a commission has approved but not yet billed, and one a utility has only asked for.
That mix is exactly why the count describes utilities as having “raised or proposed” increases rather than simply raised them. Some of the 275 have not billed a higher rate yet, and regulators could still reject or trim a pending request before it takes effect. In practice, the tracker treats a rate a commission approved months ago the same way it treats one a utility filed only weeks ago and is still defending in hearings, which is also why the organizations describe the list as a running estimate rather than a finished tally.
Relief that waits to be asked for: Property-tax freezes, exemptions and utility help are rarely applied automatically, and each has its own filing window. See the five kinds of relief in The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
116 Million Electric Customers, Nearly 60 Million Gas Customers
Center for American Progress and NRDC attribute the increases to utilities serving more than 116.4 million electricity customers and more than 59.7 million natural gas customers across 49 states and Washington, D.C. The organizations calculate that footprint covers 71 percent of the nation’s electricity customers and 75 percent of its natural gas customers. The analysis is footnoted as accurate as of July 31, 2026, with the tracker itself last updated August 5, 2026. Collectively, the newly enacted and proposed increases are projected to add $78.9 billion to electricity bills and $22.5 billion to natural gas bills nationwide by 2028. In Arkansas, New York and Massachusetts, among other states, the tracker notes some residents could see monthly bills climb by $40 or more. The customer totals are not limited to households: they combine residential, commercial and industrial accounts drawn largely from federal Energy Information Administration and S&P Global data, with utilities’ own investor filings filling gaps where that data was incomplete.
Data Centers, an Aging Grid and a Federal Policy Shift
Center for American Progress researchers point to several forces pushing rates up at the same time: rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers, delayed maintenance and modernization costs on an aging grid, and extreme weather events that have grown more frequent and costlier to recover from. The organization lays out those drivers in more detail in its companion analysis of the 49 affected states, published in October 2025. Spikes in natural gas prices are adding pressure in some regions, and CAP has separately catalogued a series of federal policy actions it says work against the cheaper, cleaner generation that could otherwise ease the strain on electricity prices. Extreme heat adds a second layer of strain: as more households run air conditioning at once, demand on the grid climbs at the exact moments outages are most dangerous, a dynamic CAP has separately warned raises the risk of blackouts during the hottest and coldest stretches of the year.
Cooling Costs Are Landing on Top of the Rate Increases
The timing compounds the problem for lower-income households. A National Energy Assistance Directors Association analysis cited in the tracker’s August update found that summer cooling costs have risen 40 percent since 2020, and nearly 40 percent of households earning less than $50,000 a year report difficulty paying their electricity bills. June 2026 was the second-warmest month on record globally, meaning many households facing a rate increase are also running air conditioners longer, stacking higher usage on top of a higher per-unit price. The two pressures land hardest on the same households: NEADA’s data points to lower-income customers already carrying utility debt heading into summer, so a rate increase approved months earlier can turn a stretched cooling bill into a shutoff notice.
Why the Same Company Can Show Up Twice in the Count
The 275 figure is not a count of parent companies. Center for American Progress and NRDC treat each state-level subsidiary that files its own rate case as a separate utility, so one company operating in more than one state can appear more than once in the tracker’s underlying dataset. CenterPoint Energy, for example, filed increases through two distinct subsidiaries — CenterPoint Energy Minnesota Gas and CenterPoint Energy Entex — and both are counted individually rather than as one company. Jamie Friedman, a senior policy analyst on CAP’s domestic climate policy team, and Amanda Levin of NRDC are among the tracker’s authors, and both organizations describe the list as incomplete; they say they intend to keep adding filings as new rate cases surface across the country. Since March 2026, the two groups have also stopped counting interim rate changes that have not been finalized through a settlement or stipulation agreement, a methodology change that can make the topline count move down between updates even as new filings continue to arrive.
Two Hundred Seventy-Five Utilities
None of the 275 filings in the tracker distinguish between a household that absorbs another rate increase without much trouble and one that is already choosing between the electric bill and the property tax bill. Older homeowners on fixed incomes often carry both costs at once, and relief for either rarely arrives automatically. It typically requires filing a specific form, by a specific date, that neither the utility nor the county tends to advertise.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit lays out the 5 kinds of property-tax relief older homeowners can apply for, the circuit-breaker credit that includes renters, and heating, cooling and home-repair help for the months when utility bills spike.
See the five relief programs and the renewal calendar in The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
