The spread between states is far wider than most people assume
The national picture is one tidy line: the average US household uses 863 kWh a month at 18.44¢ per kilowatt-hour, which works out to about $159.14. The rate is EIA's May 2026 figure, the usage its most recent annual state data (2024), and the bill the two multiplied, computed identically for every state. Nationally, the residential price rose 6.2% in the year to May 2026.
Underneath that line the variation is enormous. Idaho households buy electricity at 12.35¢ per kWh; Hawaii households pay 52.00¢, more than four times as much for an identical commodity. Strip out Hawaii as the obvious island outlier and California still sits at 33.25¢, nearly triple Idaho.
Bills spread almost as widely, and not in the same places. New Mexico averages $92.34 a month; Hawaii averages $257.40; Maryland, an unremarkable mid-Atlantic state with an unremarkable climate, averages $202.24. Between New Mexico and Maryland alone that is well over $1,300 a year, for households doing nothing differently except living in different states.
People expect a gap of twenty or thirty percent, the sort they see in fuel prices. What they get is a factor of two or three, because electricity is not traded into a national market — it is generated, moved and priced inside state and regional systems whose costs barely touch.
Rate and consumption move independently, so the cheapest rate is not the cheapest bill
A bill is a rate multiplied by a quantity, and the two are set by different forces. The rate comes from how a state generates and delivers power; the quantity comes from weather, house size and what heats the rooms and the water. Nothing links them, so the rankings cross constantly.
The clearest case is Louisiana against California. Louisiana buys at 14.15¢ per kWh, California at 33.25¢ — well over double. Yet the average Louisiana bill is $170.08 and the average California bill is $167.25, because a Louisiana household burns 1,202 kWh a month against California's 503.
The same reversal appears at the cheap end. Idaho has the lowest rate in the country at 12.35¢, uses 944 kWh a month and averages $116.58. Colorado pays 16.16¢, about 31% more per unit, and averages $108.92 on 674 kWh. The state with the cheapest electricity in America does not have the cheapest electric bill.
Two more worth holding onto. Alabama buys below the national average at 16.77¢ and still carries one of the highest bills in the country, $191.68 on 1,143 kWh. Maine pays 28.63¢, more than half again the national rate, and lands at $157.47 — under the national average bill — on 550 kWh, because Maine heats with oil and gas rather than electricity.
Rates vary across the states by a factor of about four, consumption by about two and a half. Multiply two independent variables and you get the observed spread.
Three things set the rate
Generation mix and fuel exposure. A state whose power comes largely from long-built hydro or nuclear plants has low, stable fuel costs and rates reflecting capital paid for decades ago. A state running on natural gas is exposed to the gas market, so its rates rise and fall with a commodity most households never think about. Hawaii is the extreme: fuel is shipped to the islands and burnt there, and it shows in a rate no mainland state comes near.
The delivery network. A large part of a residential bill is not energy at all — it is the delivery charge, what you pay the wires company to move electricity to your meter regardless of who generated it. That cost follows the age of the poles and substations, the number of customers per mile of line, and what the terrain demands: undergrounding, storm hardening, wildfire mitigation. A dense, flat, mild service territory is cheap to wire. A sparse, mountainous one is not.
State policy. Regulators decide what a utility may recover and over how long. Efficiency programme charges, renewable procurement, the cost of retiring old plants, storm recovery bonds, franchise fees and taxes all land in the rate or in a line item beside it. Reasonable states have made different choices here, which is much of why two neighbours with the same weather and the same fuel post rates several cents apart.
Three things set the consumption
Climate. Cooling is the single largest electric end use in the average American home, which is why the Gulf South dominates the top of the consumption table: Louisiana at 1,202 kWh a month, Mississippi 1,156, Tennessee 1,154, Alabama 1,143, Florida 1,104, Texas 1,096. Long, humid seasons run compressors for months at a time.
What heats the house and the water. This is the variable people forget, and the biggest one. A home heated by gas, oil or propane moves its entire winter load onto a different bill, which is why the cold, expensive Northeast sits at the bottom of the consumption table — Maine 550 kWh, Rhode Island 567, Massachusetts 570, New York 571. Swap in an electric-resistance furnace, which draws several times what a heat pump does for the same comfort, and two identical houses on one street can differ by hundreds of kilowatt-hours a month.
Housing stock and size. Detached houses use more than apartments, and a 1970s single-storey with original windows behaves nothing like a modern build of the same footprint. Hawaii's 495 kWh a month, the lowest in the country, combines a climate that needs no heating, a lot of multi-family housing, and the strongest price signal in America to switch things off.
A state average describes a population, not a household
This is the caution that matters most, and the table above cannot express it. A state average is one number stretched over every household in the state. Inside Texas's 1,096 kWh a month sit a 600-square-foot apartment with gas heat and one window unit, and a 3,200-square-foot house with an electric furnace, a pool pump and a second fridge in a hot garage. Neither uses 1,096 kWh.
The same applies to the rate. The figure here is total residential revenue divided by total residential sales, so it already blends the fixed customer charge, the energy price, delivery, riders and taxes across every customer in the state. Your own all-in rate — your bill total divided by the kilowatt-hours on it — is the number worth knowing, and the one to put into the electricity bill calculator.
Use the table for what it is good at: comparing states, sanity-checking a quoted rate, and telling whether a big bill is a regional condition or a household problem. Then work the household side separately, reading the kWh line on twelve months of your own bills rather than the dollar line. The appliance data gives realistic consumption for the loads that actually shift a bill, and why your electric bill is so high works through the diagnosis in order.
Two households can pay identical bills for opposite reasons: one buys a little very expensive electricity, the other a lot of cheap electricity. The first should attack the price, the second the load, and reading a state average without splitting it into rate and quantity is how people do the wrong one.