Average Electric Bill in Massachusetts

What the average Massachusetts electric bill actually is

The average Massachusetts household pays roughly $164.27 a month for electricity, built from an average residential price of 28.82 cents per kilowatt-hour as of May 2026 and average consumption of about 570 kilowatt-hours a month. The national figures are 18.44 cents, 863 kWh and $159.14.

Massachusetts pays over half again the national price and lands only slightly above the national bill, because it uses about a third less electricity than the country does. High price, small quantity. That shape has a practical consequence worth stating plainly: in Massachusetts, saving a cent per kilowatt-hour is worth less in dollars than it would be almost anywhere else, while avoiding a fixed monthly fee is worth more. At 570 kWh a month, a $10 monthly supplier charge works out to roughly 1.75 cents per kWh on its own, which is enough to swallow most rate advantages a supplier will advertise.

The average conceals the usual spread and one extra layer. A one-bedroom apartment in Somerville with gas heat and gas hot water bills a small fraction of the state average. A single-family home in the western hills with an electric water heater, a well pump and heat pumps carrying the winter can bill several times it in February. Beyond that, dozens of Massachusetts communities are served by municipal light plants rather than by the investor-owned utilities, and those customers frequently pay noticeably less per kilowatt-hour than their neighbors one town over — a difference of address, not of behavior.

So compare yourself to your own history and your own square footage, not to the state mean. The two numbers on your bill that matter are your monthly kilowatt-hours and your all-in cost per kilowatt-hour, and the kWh cost calculator will produce the second from the first.

What makes Massachusetts power expensive

Massachusetts buys power in the New England wholesale market, where the price is usually set by a natural gas plant. New England sits at the end of the interstate pipeline network, and in cold weather the pipeline capacity that exists is committed first to buildings that heat with gas. Power plants take what is left, or burn costlier fuels, and the wholesale price rises accordingly. That winter constraint is the single largest structural reason electricity in this region costs what it does, and no amount of consumer behavior touches it.

Layered on top is the cost of the transition. Massachusetts has committed to substantial clean energy procurement, net metering credits for distributed solar, and efficiency programs administered through the statewide Mass Save collaboration. These are policy choices with defensible aims, and they are also charges on the bill — some appearing in supply, some in delivery, most under names that give no hint of their purpose. Regional transmission investment, rebuilt over the past two decades to move power around a constrained network, adds another growing block.

What Massachusetts does not have is Maine's density problem. This is a compact, populous state; there are many customers per mile of distribution line, which should make delivery relatively cheap. That it does not is a sign of how much of the delivery charge here is policy and capital recovery rather than pure wire maintenance.

The result is a bill where the components are unusually numerous and unusually opaque. Reading it line by line is genuinely worth an hour of your time — how to read your electric bill walks through what each charge is for.

Why consumption is so low here

At about 570 kWh a month, Massachusetts uses less electricity per household than nearly every other state. Three things account for it.

Heating happens elsewhere on the energy budget. Natural gas is the dominant heating fuel across metropolitan Boston and the older industrial cities, with heating oil common in the suburbs and rural areas and propane in pockets beyond the gas mains. The largest energy load in a New England home for six months of the year is therefore mostly absent from the electric meter.

The cooling season is short. July and August are hot and often humid, but the season that would push a Texas or Florida household to 1,500 kWh a month simply does not last here. Window units and mini-splits used a few weeks a year do not move an annual average much.

The housing stock is small and shared. Massachusetts has an unusual concentration of multifamily housing — triple-deckers, converted two-families, dense apartment buildings — and older single-family homes that are modest by national standards. Shared walls, shared floors and less conditioned volume all reduce load. An apartment surrounded by other heated apartments has very little exterior surface through which to lose energy.

This is shifting as heat pumps spread. A household that installs mini-splits and reduces or eliminates its oil or gas use will see its electricity consumption climb, sometimes sharply, while its total energy spending falls. Interpreting that rise as a problem is a common and expensive mistake — it leads people to abandon a system that is working. Judge the change on total annual energy cost across every fuel, not on the electric bill alone.

Basic service, aggregation and competitive suppliers

Massachusetts is a deregulated state for supply, but the practical menu here is three items, not two.

Basic service is the default supply your utility procures if you make no other arrangement. Its price is reset on a fixed schedule in seasonal blocks rather than drifting month to month, and the winter block has generally been priced above the summer one, reflecting the region's cold-weather gas constraint. This means a competitive offer compared against the summer basic service price can look very different a few months later.

Municipal aggregation is the Massachusetts distinctive. A city or town negotiates a supply contract on behalf of everyone within its borders and enrolls residents automatically, with the right to opt out. If you live in an aggregating community and never signed anything, this is probably what you are on. Aggregation is generally a reasonable deal — it is negotiated in bulk by a municipality with no incentive to deceive you, and contracts often run longer than basic service periods, which cuts both ways. It can beat basic service, and in periods when basic service falls it can sit above it for a while. It is not a scam; it is a fixed price with the ordinary risks of a fixed price.

Individual competitive suppliers are the third option and the one demanding the most caution. State officials have reported repeatedly that Massachusetts residential customers on individual competitive contracts paid more in aggregate than they would have on basic service. The mechanisms are familiar: an introductory fixed rate that converts to a variable one, monthly account fees that hit hard at Massachusetts usage levels, early termination penalties, and automatic renewal at a price you never agreed to. Door-to-door and phone solicitation is heavily represented in that record.

If you want to reduce a Massachusetts bill, optional time-of-use and EV charging rates, plus efficiency work, are usually better ground than supplier shopping. Start with what a time-of-use rate is.

The utilities here, and the towns that own their own

Eversource Energy is the largest electric distribution utility in the state, serving Boston and much of eastern Massachusetts along with a large western territory around Springfield. It operates across several New England states, and its Boston network includes a substantial underground urban system — expensive to maintain and repair, but less exposed to the tree and wind damage that dominates outages elsewhere.

National Grid serves a broad territory including much of central Massachusetts, the North Shore, parts of the South Shore and Nantucket, with a mix of dense city circuits and heavily wooded suburban and rural overhead lines. Its parent operates in New York as well, though Massachusetts rates are set by Massachusetts regulators.

Unitil is much smaller, serving Fitchburg and surrounding communities. A small utility spreads fixed administrative and capital costs over far fewer customers, which is a structural cost pressure no amount of efficiency fully offsets.

The genuinely important structural fact is what these three do not cover. Dozens of Massachusetts communities are served by municipal light plants — publicly owned utilities that predate restructuring and were never opened to retail competition. They own or contract for their own power, answer to a local board rather than to shareholders, and are not part of the competitive supply market at all. Their customers cannot shop for a supplier and generally have no reason to want to.

Whichever serves you, the delivery portion of your bill goes to that utility, is set through rate proceedings before the Department of Public Utilities, and does not change when you switch supply. Reliability, restoration and metering all stay with them regardless of whose electrons you have nominally bought.

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