Electricity cost tools

What is a normal electricity bill?

A bill is two things multiplied together: how much electricity you used, and what it cost you per kWh. This page diagnoses them separately, instead of answering with one dollar figure.

Is there such a thing as a normal electricity bill?

No — not as a dollar amount. Consumption can be described statistically: in EIA RECS 2020 public-use microdata, the median US household used 9,045 kWh a year while the mean was 10,566 kWh, and the 10th to 90th percentile span runs from 3,472 to 19,504 kWh — a factor of 5.6× between ordinary households. The mean sitting well above the median is the first warning: a single “average household” figure already describes a home that uses more than most. Price cannot be pinned down the same way; the only distribution we hold is from 2020, and prices have moved since. So the useful question is not “is my bill normal?” but which half of it is unusual — the kWh or the rate? That is what the diagnosis below separates, and when your inputs cannot support the split, it says so rather than inventing a normal range.

Your bill

Total amount billed

The amount you pay for the period, including taxes and fixed charges.

Billing period

1 for a monthly bill, 2 for bi-monthly, 3 for quarterly.

What does the bill tell you?

Without one of the first two, the bill cannot be split into consumption and price, and this page will say so.

Metered consumption for the period

Use a meter-read bill rather than an estimated one where you can.

Fixed charges on the bill

Standing, service, connection or meter charges only — the lines that do not change with consumption.

Comparison group

Compare against

One dimension at a time. The microdata does not support combining them, so this page does not offer combinations.

13,800

kWh per year — About the 75th percentile of all us households.

Not enough separation to name one cause. Effective bill rate 18.26 ¢/kWh, of which 1.57 ¢ is fixed charges spread over 1,150 kWh.

Calculated from your inputs

kWh this period: 1,150
Group median: 9,045 kWh/yr
Effective rate: 18.26 ¢/kWh
Variable rate: 16.70 ¢/kWh

Not enough separation to name one cause

Consumption is not above the 75th percentile of all us households and not below the 25th, and the effective rate is above a dated national average by less than 28% — inside the spread that already existed between households paying ordinary tariffs. Nothing here is unusual enough to attribute the bill to one side rather than the other.

Your annualised consumption against All US households — SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata (n = 18,496 sampled households, NWEIGHT-weighted).
Point in the distribution	kWh per year	Your position
10th percentile	3,472	at or above
25th percentile	5,621	at or above
Median	9,045	at or above
Mean	10,566	at or above
75th percentile	13,811	below
90th percentile	19,504	below
You	13,800	About the 75th percentile of all us households.

What the price side can and cannot be compared with

Your effective rate is 18.26 ¢/kWh. The only external reference used here is the 2024 US average residential price of 16.48 ¢/kWh (U.S. Energy Information Administration) — a national average for a past year, not a normal range and not your market. Being above or below it is a flag to check your tariff, not a verdict on it. At this rate, 100 kWh more this month adds $16.70 at the variable rate.

What this diagnosis still cannot see

• A current local tariff comparison
• A second billing period, to separate season from level

Method

Consumption = 1150 kWh, read from the bill
Annualised = 1150 kWh ÷ 1 months × 12 = 13800 kWh/year
Effective bill rate = 210 ÷ 1150 = 0.182609 per kWh
Variable rate = (210 − 18) ÷ 1150 = 0.166957 per kWh
Placement: 13800 kWh/year against All US households (P25 5621, median 9045, P75 13811)

Engine billNormality-1.0.0. Percentiles are a SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata, not EIA-published table values.

Assumptions

The bill total and the consumption figure cover the same period, and the period length you entered is correct.
Annualising one period assumes the rest of the year resembles it. A winter or summer bill annualised on its own overstates or understates the year.
Consumption is compared with all us households in RECS 2020 — site electricity, 2020 reference year, US households. It is a distribution of other homes, not a prediction of yours.
Only the lines you entered as fixed are treated as fixed; per-kWh delivery and tax components belong in the variable part.
The rate is compared only with a dated national average, because no defensible present-day distribution of household rates is available to us. Price is named as a cause only when the effective rate exceeds that average by more than the P50→P75 step of the RECS 2020 implied-rate distribution (28%); smaller gaps sit inside ordinary household-to-household spread and are treated as no evidence.

What can change the result?

Season: heating or cooling months move consumption far more than habits do
Whether the meter was read or estimated
Time-of-use or tiered pricing, where the marginal rate is not the average rate
Solar export credits, which lower metered kWh without lowering consumption
Which comparison group you select — the same kWh can be high in one group and ordinary in another

The distribution behind the word “normal”

Every percentile on this page is a SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata — computed from recs2020_public_v7.csv (18,496 sampled households, final weight NWEIGHT, representing about 123.5 million occupied primary homes). They are not EIA-published table values: EIA publishes means by category, not distributions. The variable is KWH, annual site electricity use for the 2020 reference year. Replicate weights were not used, so no standard error is attached and none is implied.

Annual household electricity use, all US households. SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata.
Point in the distribution	kWh per year	Roughly per month
10th percentile	3,472	289
25th percentile	5,621	468
Median	9,045	754
Mean	10,566	881
75th percentile	13,811	1,151
90th percentile	19,504	1,625

Comparison lenses, one dimension at a time

“Normal” depends entirely on which households you compare with. The medians below are the same microdata split one dimension at a time. They are deliberately not combined: the sample does not support a “3-person, gas-heated, cold-climate, detached” cell, so no such figure exists here. Crossing thin categories produces numbers that look more specific and are less true.

Housing type (TYPEHUQ). Housing type alone, not crossed with size, climate or fuel. SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata.
Group	P25	Median	P75	Sampled households
Mobile home	7,246	11,676	16,821	974
Single-family detached	7,342	10,912	15,759	12,319
Single-family attached	4,999	7,349	10,869	1,751
Apartment, 2–4 units	3,598	5,696	9,038	1,013
Apartment, 5 or more units	3,326	5,295	7,911	2,439

Climate zone (BA_climate). Building-America climate zone. Subarctic (n = 54) is excluded as too thin to publish. SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata.
Group	P25	Median	P75	Sampled households
Very-Cold	5,766	8,300	13,203	572
Cold	4,948	7,568	11,372	7,116
Mixed-Humid	6,461	10,286	15,143	5,579
Mixed-Dry	5,505	8,147	11,103	142
Hot-Dry	4,309	7,193	11,441	1,577
Hot-Humid	8,559	12,576	17,540	2,545
Marine	4,091	7,104	10,749	911

Main heating fuel (FUELHEAT). The fuel used by the main space-heating equipment, whatever else the home runs. SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata.
Group	P25	Median	P75	Sampled households
Electricity	7,044	11,742	17,509	5,699
Natural gas	5,029	7,878	11,649	9,595
Propane	6,922	10,039	13,764	928
Fuel oil	4,719	7,890	11,514	1,097
Wood	6,872	10,090	13,796	418
No heating equipment	4,023	7,743	12,823	751

Household size (NHSLDMEM). People living in the home, regardless of dwelling size. SnapEnergyLab analysis of EIA RECS 2020 public microdata.
Group	P25	Median	P75	Sampled households
1 person	3,765	6,000	9,173	4,752
2 people	6,197	9,308	13,687	7,026
3 people	7,189	10,652	15,594	2,718
4 people	7,850	11,719	16,868	2,376
5 or more people	8,571	13,033	18,471	1,624

Why the price half has no percentile

The same survey records electricity expenditure, and dividing it by consumption gives an implied household rate: 9.98 ¢ at the 10th percentile, 12.82 ¢ at the median and 21.28 ¢ at the 90th. P90 ÷ P10 = 2.1× — two homes with identical kWh could already differ that much on price alone in 2020. That is worth knowing as evidence that price variation between households is large — it is the reason two homes with identical kWh can receive very different bills.

It is not, however, a benchmark for a rate paid today. Those are 2020 expenditures in 2020 prices, partly modelled from utility price data rather than collected as bills, and the US average residential price has risen materially since. This page therefore never tells you that your current rate is at some percentile. The only external price reference used is the 2024 US average of 16.48 ¢/kWh from U.S. Energy Information Administration, and it is a dated national average — a prompt to check your tariff, not a boundary of normality.

The rule this page follows

If your inputs cannot carry a defensible kWh figure, the diagnosis returns “not enough information to separate rate from usage”. It does not fall back to a national average rate to manufacture a consumption estimate, because that would smuggle the answer into the question.

Where could the usage be coming from?

If the diagnosis above put the consumption side high, the next question is which loads could account for it. The model below is an explanatory sketch built from typical appliance figures — it is not a reconstruction of your home, and it is not evidence about what your home actually runs. Use it to test whether a candidate explanation is even the right order of magnitude: an electric water heater or a heat pump can account for thousands of kWh a year, while standby loads cannot.

Order-of-magnitude annual energy for typical household loads: watts × duty cycle × 24 h × 365.24 days. Catalogue values, not measurements of your home.
Load	Typical watts	Share of the day running	kWh per year
Electric storage water heater	4,500 W	10%	3,945
Heat pump (small ducted)	1,800 W	40%	6,311
Central air conditioner (3 ton)	3,500 W	35%	10,738
Electric clothes dryer	3,000 W	6%	1,578
EV charger (7.4 kW)	7,400 W	15%	9,730
Refrigerator	150 W	35%	460
Standby and always-on electronics	40 W	100%	351