Average Electric Bill in Maryland

What Maryland households actually pay

The average Maryland household pays about $202.24 a month for electricity — an average residential price of 21.77 cents per kilowatt-hour as of May 2026 against average consumption of roughly 929 kilowatt-hours a month. The national comparison is 18.44 cents, 863 kWh and $159.14.

Most expensive states are expensive for one reason. New England pays a high price for very little electricity; the Gulf South pays a low price for a great deal of it. Maryland is above the national line on both measures at once, and the two effects compound. That is the whole story of why the bill here clears $200 while neither individual number looks extreme.

The average describes almost no one, because Maryland is three different places wearing one outline. A Baltimore rowhouse shares walls on both sides, has limited exterior surface to lose heat through, and often heats with natural gas; its electric bill can sit far below the state average for most of the year. A detached house in Howard or Anne Arundel County with a heat pump, a finished basement and a family of five can run several times that household's bill in August. A home in Garrett County in the western mountains faces a real winter and a nearly irrelevant cooling season, while a house near Salisbury on the Eastern Shore faces the opposite.

Averages across that range are arithmetic, not description. The number worth knowing is your own cost per kilowatt-hour and your own monthly usage, both printed on your bill; the electricity bill calculator turns those two into the same figure this page reports for the state.

Why the rate is what it is in Maryland

Maryland sits inside PJM, the regional grid operator that runs the wholesale power market across the mid-Atlantic and much of the Midwest. Two features of that market drive Maryland's price.

The first is that Maryland consumes considerably more electricity than it generates and imports the difference from neighboring states. Imported power has to cross a transmission network into one of the most densely populated corridors in the country, and when those lines run near capacity, the wholesale price on the Maryland side rises above the price on the exporting side. Congestion is not a line item you will find on the bill, but it is embedded in the cost of supply.

The second is capacity. PJM pays generators to be available for peak demand as well as for the energy they actually produce, and the cost of those capacity commitments has risen sharply in recent auctions as older coal and oil units retired and demand forecasts climbed. Those costs flow through to retail supply prices for every Maryland customer, whether they buy from the utility's default service or from a competitive supplier.

On the delivery side, Maryland's utilities maintain an unusually varied network: underground urban distribution in Baltimore and the Washington suburbs, which is costly to build and repair but relatively storm-resistant, alongside long overhead rural lines on the Eastern Shore and in the western counties. Maryland also funds statewide energy efficiency programs through a surcharge on delivery, the EmPOWER Maryland programs, and recovers renewable portfolio standard compliance through supply. None of these individually dominates the bill; together they explain why Maryland's delivery charges are not cheap.

Why Maryland households use as much as they do

At about 929 kWh a month, Maryland runs above the national average, and the reason is summer. Maryland's climate is humid subtropical across most of its populated area — the Chesapeake basin holds heat and moisture, and the Baltimore-Washington corridor adds an urban heat island on top of it. Cooling load builds from May and does not release until late September, and an air conditioner in that air is spending part of its energy removing humidity rather than lowering temperature, which raises consumption without moving the thermostat.

Heating is more mixed than in the Northeast. The urban corridor is well served by natural gas, and gas-heated homes keep their winter electric bills modest. Outside it — on the Eastern Shore, in parts of the western counties, and across much of the newer detached suburban construction — electric heat pumps are common, with electric resistance backup that engages in cold weather. Those homes see two peaks a year rather than one, and their February bill can approach their August bill.

Housing type matters as much as climate. Maryland's suburban counties contain a great deal of large detached single-family housing with high ceilings and conditioned basements, which is simply more volume to heat and cool. Its cities contain rowhouses, which are among the most thermally efficient housing forms in America almost by accident, since a shared wall loses no heat.

The practical implication: if your Maryland bill is high, the diagnosis depends on which month it is high in. Summer-only means cooling, insulation and duct losses. Year-round means water heating, a pool pump, an old second refrigerator or a resistance heating backup that is running more than it should. Our guide to why an electric bill runs high works through the sequence.

Shopping for supply in Maryland, and the traps that matter

Maryland offers residential retail choice statewide. Every household can buy the electricity itself from a competitive supplier while its utility continues to deliver it and restore service after storms. The default, if you never choose, is Standard Offer Service — supply your utility procures through staggered wholesale contracts, so no single market moment sets your price.

The record for households that shopped is not good. Maryland regulators tightened the rules governing supplier marketing after findings that many residential customers who switched ended up paying more than Standard Offer Service, not less. That is the single most important fact about this market, and it should set your default posture: an offer must be demonstrably better, over its full term, or it is not worth taking.

The structures that produce those losses are consistent:

• Teaser rates that convert. A low fixed price for the first few months rolling onto a month-to-month variable rate the supplier sets at its own discretion. Most of the documented overpayment sits here.
• Rates quoted at a benchmark usage level. Some plans advertise an effective price that only holds at a specific monthly consumption, often around 1,000 kWh. Use less and your effective price is higher than advertised.
• Bill-credit plans. A monthly credit that only applies above a usage threshold, paired with a high underlying rate. These reward you for using more electricity, which is a strange thing to optimize.
• Minimum-usage and monthly service fees. Charged on top of the cents-per-kWh figure and rarely in the headline.
• Automatic renewal onto variable rates. A fixed contract that ends quietly and continues at a price nobody agreed to.

If you do shop, take a fixed rate for a defined term, calendar the end date, read the fee schedule, and compare the total to Standard Offer Service rather than to another supplier's headline. Note also what switching cannot do: it never changes your delivery charge, the half of the bill nobody competes on. See supply versus delivery charges.

Four utilities, three parent companies, one commission

Four investor-owned utilities cover most of Maryland, and their differences are largely geographic and engineering ones.

Baltimore Gas and Electric, an Exelon company, serves Baltimore City and the surrounding central counties — the state's largest customer base, and the only major Maryland utility that delivers both electricity and natural gas to most of its territory. Its network mixes dense underground urban distribution with older overhead suburban circuits.

Pepco, also Exelon, serves Montgomery and Prince George's counties in the Washington suburbs, an area with high load density, significant underground infrastructure and heavy tree canopy on its overhead sections.

Delmarva Power, the third Exelon utility here, serves the Eastern Shore — a rural, low-density, largely overhead system across flat coastal terrain, with a summer population surge in the beach communities that shapes its peak demand.

Potomac Edison, part of FirstEnergy, covers western and north-central Maryland including Frederick, Washington and Garrett counties. It is a multistate operation with affiliates in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, so its costs and practices are shaped by more than one regulator, and its mountainous territory carries the state's harshest winter conditions.

Three of the four sharing a corporate parent does not mean they share rates. Each is a separately regulated entity that files its own rate cases before the Maryland Public Service Commission, with its own cost structure and its own delivery charges. Two large cooperatives also serve substantial territory — Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative in the southern counties and Choptank Electric Cooperative on the Eastern Shore. Cooperatives are member-owned and governed by an elected board rather than by shareholders.

Frequently asked questions