November 1 is the date the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, opens to the general eligible public in Iowa and Illinois, and Pennsylvania follows a day later on November 2. In Iowa and Illinois that is the second stage of a two-step rollout, because older adults and other priority groups were…

Minnesota’s Cold Weather Rule runs from October 1, 2026 through April 30, 2027, and for those seven months a utility may not disconnect a residential customer when the shutoff would cut the home’s primary heating source. Xcel Energy announced the rule’s start on September 29, and the protection comes with conditions: a customer who receives…

Iowa’s winter ban on utility disconnections runs from November 1 to April 1, and it protects qualifying customers rather than every account. A household that tells its electric or natural gas provider it is applying for federal heating aid receives a separate 30-day stay of disconnection while the application is processed, according to the Iowa…

Iowa began taking heating-aid applications on October 1 from households with a resident age 60 or older, a disabled resident or a housing crisis, and every other eligible household has to wait until November 1. The split puts a month between two groups of applicants for the same federal program, which runs through April 30,…

New Jersey will take federal heating-aid applications through June 30, 2027, two months past Iowa’s April 30 cutoff, and the fiscal 2027 windows in both states opened October 1, along with Rhode Island’s. Iowa’s October opening covers only households with a resident age 60 or older, a disabled resident or a housing crisis, while every…

A typical residential gas bill from UGI Utilities in Pennsylvania moved from $113.76 to $117.69 a month on October 1, 2026, the first of two steps in a rate increase the state’s utility regulator approved that day. The monthly figures are the commission’s own, built on a stated level of household gas use. A second…

Rhode Island Energy has told state regulators exactly how it will return roughly $175 million to its customers, and the mechanics are simpler than most utility refunds: a flat line on the bill, no form, no application. Electric accounts are scheduled to start seeing $14.51 a month with the October billing cycle, while gas accounts…

About one in six U.S. households is already behind on its utility bills as winter nears, and the unpaid balances add up to nearly $23 billion. Shutoffs have followed missed payments on a vast scale: in 2024, utilities cut off residential electric service about 13.4 million times and natural gas service about 1.7 million times.…

The National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA) projects that the average U.S. household will spend $1,030 to heat its home this winter, an increase of $82, or 8.7 percent, over last year. The figure is a forecast for a season that has not yet played out, and it comes from the group that speaks for…

Two lines on the household utility statement moved in the August 2026 Consumer Price Index, and both outpaced the overall inflation rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that electricity prices rose 3.8 percent over the 12 months ending August, while its natural gas index, which tracks piped utility gas, rose 4.4 percent over the…