Bill Ninja exists because of a gap that is easy to describe and apparently hard to fill: there is no high-authority, financially neutral place on the web to work out what a household utility bill should be.
The large general-purpose calculator sites publish hundreds of tools and almost none for household utilities. The sites that do rank for these questions fall into two groups. Some are automatically generated pages with no sourcing and arithmetic that does not survive checking. The rest are owned by, or paid by, the companies selling you energy. A comparison site earning a commission on every enrolment is not a neutral place to learn what a delivery charge is.
What we do
We publish 16 calculators, average electricity data for all fifty states and the District of Columbia, running costs for 32 household appliances, and a small set of guides explaining the parts of a bill that utilities explain badly. Everything is free and nothing is gated.
Who this is for
Four kinds of visitor account for most of what gets used here, and the site is built around them.
- Households looking at a bill that seems wrong. The bill went up and the weather did not obviously explain it. The first step is to check what the usage on the bill should have cost at your rate; the second is to work out why the usage moved.
- Renters and buyers pricing a place before they commit to it. Rent is advertised; running costs are not. The state average, the heating fuel and the appliance mix turn a vague worry into a budget line.
- People deciding whether a supply offer is real. In a deregulated market the pitch is almost always a rate per kilowatt-hour compared against something. Working out your own effective rate first is the only way to know what you are being compared to.
- Roommates and housemates dividing costs. Splitting a bill fairly when people moved in mid-cycle, or when one room ran an air conditioner all summer, is a small arithmetic problem that causes a disproportionate number of arguments.
Three commitments
Nothing you type leaves your browser. Every calculator on this site is JavaScript running on your own machine. There is no account, no email capture, no bank connection, and no server that receives your usage figures — because there is no server-side calculation at all. You can confirm this by opening your browser's network tab while you use any tool on the site.
We take no money from energy suppliers. Not for placement, not for referrals, not for enrolments. This is the whole point. A calculator that people trust because it is impartial cannot also be a lead form, and every incumbent ranking for these questions has made the opposite choice.
Every number is sourced and dated. Rate and consumption figures come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration; appliance figures come from the Department of Energy, the EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey, ENERGY STAR, and utility engineering tables. The period each figure covers is printed on the page that uses it, so you can tell at a glance whether you are reading something current.
How the figures are produced, and how often they change
The two classes of data on this site move at very different speeds, and it is worth knowing which is which.
State rates and consumption come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which collects residential price and sales data from utilities and publishes it on a recurring schedule. We take the most recent complete period available when a page is built, state that period on the page, and revise when a newer one is published. An EIA average price is total residential revenue divided by total residential sales, which means it already contains every fixed charge, rider and tax the utilities collected — it is not the headline rate on a tariff sheet, and it is usually higher. That is a feature for our purposes, because it is closer to what people actually pay.
Appliance figures move much more slowly. Wattages, typical run times and annual consumption come from the Department of Energy, the EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey, and ENERGY STAR product criteria. The survey is periodic rather than continuous, and ENERGY STAR criteria are revised category by category as efficiency standards tighten, so a refrigerator figure can stand unchanged for years while the underlying stock of refrigerators slowly improves. We date these too, for the same reason: a reader who can see the period a figure covers can judge for themselves whether it is stale. We do not smooth, interpolate or forecast; if a period is missing, the page says the period it does have.
What this site deliberately does not do
Several obvious features are absent on purpose.
- We do not negotiate or pay bills. Both require acting as your agent with your utility, which means holding your account credentials and having an interest in the outcome. Neither is compatible with being a reference.
- We do not connect to accounts. No bank link, no utility login, no data aggregator. A calculator that runs entirely in your browser cannot leak what you type, and that guarantee disappears the moment an account connection exists.
- We do not sell leads or recommend suppliers. The moment a page earns more when you enrol with one company than another, every sentence on it has to be read as advertising. We describe how shopping for supply works and leave the choosing to you.
- We operate no mailing list. There is no email field anywhere on this site, which is the simplest possible way of guaranteeing we cannot misuse your address.
What we are careful about
Utility rate design is genuinely complicated, and a calculator that hides that does its user no favours. Tiered rates, time-of-use rates, minimum-usage fees, seasonal sewer caps and fuel adjustment clauses all change the answer, and we say so where they apply rather than quietly averaging them away. Where a figure is an estimate we call it an estimate.
We also try to be direct about which things are worth your attention. Some widely-repeated advice about lowering a utility bill produces savings too small to measure. A reference that only flatters is not a reference, so where the evidence says a popular tactic does not work, that is what the page says.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know, and we will fix it and say what changed. The contact page is the fastest route. Corrections about rate data are particularly welcome — tariffs change constantly, and the utilities do not announce it to us.