The average U.S. household paid 18.34 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity it used in June, according to the federal government’s own tally of what utilities actually billed customers. That figure is 5 percent higher than the same month a year earlier, and residential customers absorbed a bigger increase than either businesses or factories did. For a bill that arrives every month no matter what a family does to cut back, a nationwide increase like that is real money, and this time it reached almost the entire country at once.
The June Price Tag: 18.34 Cents a Kilowatt-Hour, Up 5 Percent
The number comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electricity Monthly Update, released August 26 with billing data through June 2026. Residential customers paid an average of 18.34 cents per kilowatt-hour that month, up 5.0 percent from June 2025. Commercial customers, mostly small and mid-size businesses, saw a smaller 4.8 percent increase, to 14.19 cents, and industrial customers, which buy power in bulk for factories and large plants, rose just 3.0 percent, to 9.17 cents. Of the three customer classes EIA tracks, households absorbed the steepest year-over-year increase.
EIA does not collect retail electricity rates directly. Instead, it divides the sales revenue utilities report by the volume of electricity sold, producing an average revenue per kilowatt-hour that stands in for the retail price. That also means the June figure reflects bills tied to billing cycles ending in June, which typically include some usage from late May rather than a strict calendar-month total — a lag EIA discloses in its own explanation of the report.
The same data set shows residential electricity purchases actually fell 0.2 percent from June 2025, even as commercial sales rose 3.4 percent and industrial sales rose 1.3 percent. Nationwide retail sales volume across all customer classes rose 1.5 percent. Put plainly, the typical household did not buy more electricity this June than last June; it paid more for essentially the same amount.
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43 States and the District of Columbia Paid More Than a Year Ago
The increase wasn’t confined to a handful of regions. EIA’s state-by-state breakdown shows 43 states plus the District of Columbia paid more per kilowatt-hour in June 2026 than they did in June 2025; only seven states paid less. Hawaii posted the largest percentage increase, up 35.5 percent, followed by Delaware and the District of Columbia, both up 13.5 percent.
Three states moved the other way by more than a rounding error. Connecticut’s average revenue per kilowatt-hour fell 9.7 percent from a year earlier, New Mexico dropped 8.9 percent, and West Virginia declined 3.9 percent. Everywhere else, the change was small enough that EIA’s own map shows only mild shading, but for the 43 states and Washington, D.C. that paid more, the direction matches most months so far this year: up.
The Price Rose in a Comparatively Mild Month for Air Conditioning
The increase also arrived in a month when cooling demand, if anything, eased in most of the country. EIA’s cooling-degree-day count, a rough proxy for how hard homes and businesses ran their air conditioners, fell in 38 states compared with last June; Montana’s count dropped 74 percent and Alaska’s fell 67 percent. Only nine states and the District of Columbia logged more cooling degree days than a year earlier, led by New Mexico, up 13 percent. A milder summer across most of the country makes it harder to explain the national price increase as simply higher air-conditioning demand pushing up bills — the average price per kilowatt-hour rose regardless of how much cooling actually ran.
What a 5 Percent Jump Costs on an Average Household’s Bill
EIA’s most recent full-year usage data, covering 2022, put average U.S. residential electricity purchases at about 899 kilowatt-hours a month per customer. Applying that usage figure to June’s rate is a rough illustration, not a published EIA statistic, but it shows the scale involved: a household using 899 kilowatt-hours at the June 2026 rate of 18.34 cents would owe about $164.87 for the month. The same usage at the rate implied a year earlier — 18.34 cents divided by the reported 5.0 percent increase, or roughly 17.47 cents — would have cost about $157.03.
That’s a difference of roughly $7.84 a month, or about $94 over a full year, for a household whose usage doesn’t change at all. Actual bills vary enormously by region and by how much electricity a home uses in a given month; a household drawing far more power during a hot June will feel a 5 percent rate increase more in dollar terms than one using less power at a much higher per-kilowatt-hour rate. But the direction is consistent: on a bill nobody can simply decline to pay, a rate increase compounds every month it stays in place.
Residential Bills Climbed Faster Than Business and Factory Rates
EIA’s report doesn’t explain why residential rates rose faster than commercial or industrial rates in June, but the gap fits a familiar pattern in how electricity gets priced. Total average revenue across all customer classes combined rose 4.5 percent, to 14.48 cents per kilowatt-hour — a blended figure pulled down by industrial customers, who typically negotiate high-volume contracts and can shift some usage to off-peak hours, and pulled up by the residential increase. Households, by contrast, pay fixed, state-regulated tariff rates with little ability to negotiate or shift consumption, which is one reason residential customers tend to see the sharpest swings when generation, fuel or grid-maintenance costs change.
Where Electricity Costs the Most and Least Right Now
Where a household lives still matters more than the national trend. In the contiguous United States, California, Massachusetts and Rhode Island carried the highest average revenues per kilowatt-hour in June, at 28.50, 25.72 and 25.30 cents. New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming were the cheapest, at 8.96, 9.01 and 10.10 cents — meaning a California household paid roughly three times what a New Mexico household paid for an identical kilowatt-hour of power. EIA’s Electricity Monthly Update is scheduled to publish its next round of state-by-state figures on September 24, when July’s billing data will show whether the 43-state trend held or started to ease.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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