Average Electric Bill in New Jersey

What the average New Jersey electric bill actually is

The average residential electricity bill in New Jersey is $154.05 a month, the product of roughly 662 kWh of consumption billed at 23.27 cents per kWh as of May 2026. Set that beside the national picture — 863 kWh at 18.44 cents, for $159.14 — and the state looks like a contradiction. New Jersey electricity costs about a quarter more per unit than the national average, and the monthly bill comes in slightly below it. Consumption is the reconciliation. The typical New Jersey household buys roughly 23 percent fewer kilowatt-hours than the typical American one, and that gap is wide enough to swallow the price premium whole.

The average describes almost no one. It is one number stretched across a pre-war apartment in Jersey City with steam heat from a shared boiler and one window air conditioner, and a 3,500-square-foot house in Hunterdon County with central air, a pool pump and a heat pump. The first may not clear 300 kWh in a mild month; the second can pass 2,000 kWh in August. Neither is unusual, and the average occupies a space between them that neither does.

The annual figure flattens the calendar as well. New Jersey bills are strongly summer-weighted: humid July and August cooling load stands far above April and October, and for a household with central air conditioning the peak month commonly runs to twice the shoulder-season month. Winter is quiet on the electric bill precisely because it is expensive on the gas bill instead.

If you are judging whether your own bill is reasonable, compare kilowatt-hours, not dollars. Take the usage figure printed on your statement and run it through an electricity bill calculator. Usage is the part you can influence; the rate is handed to you.

Why New Jersey electricity costs 23.27 cents per kilowatt-hour

New Jersey sits inside PJM, the regional wholesale market that dispatches generation across a large slice of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Prices there are set at the margin by natural gas plants for most hours of most days, so the wholesale cost of power in New Jersey tracks the delivered price of gas even though a substantial share of the state's own generation is nuclear. The nuclear fleet in the south of the state is genuinely stabilising — once built, a reactor has almost no fuel-price exposure — but it does not set the market price. Gas does.

Default supply is not bought day to day. New Jersey procures it through a competitive auction whose results take effect at the start of June, layered across multi-year tranches so no single year's result lands on customers all at once. The supply price therefore moves in an annual step at the start of the cooling season rather than drifting monthly, and a June bill can rise for two reasons at once: more kilowatt-hours, and a new price per kilowatt-hour.

The delivery side — what you pay the wires company to move electricity to you, regardless of who generated it — is the other half, and in New Jersey a growing half. The state is small, dense and expensive to build in. Siting transmission is slow and contested, the coastal system carries real storm-hardening costs, and the older urban networks are capital-hungry. Layered on top are state programme charges recovered through the distribution bill; they are non-bypassable, applying whoever supplies your generation. Our guide to supply versus delivery charges explains how to read the split.

Why New Jersey homes use so little electricity

At 662 kWh a month, New Jersey households are among the lighter electricity users in the country, and the explanation is mostly about which fuel does the hard work.

The first and largest factor is natural gas. Gas mains reach the overwhelming majority of New Jersey homes and do the heating, most of the water heating and much of the cooking and drying. Space heating is the single biggest energy load in a cold-climate house, and here it almost never appears on the electric bill — which removes the winter spike that dominates all-electric households elsewhere.

The second is housing form. New Jersey has an unusually high share of attached houses, row houses and multifamily buildings, concentrated in the dense corridor between Newark and Camden. A unit with two shared walls and neighbours above and below has far less exposed surface area per square foot than a detached house, and it loses and gains heat far more slowly. Smaller conditioned area compounds the effect.

The third is the cooling season, which is real but short. New Jersey summers are humid and genuinely uncomfortable — humidity matters because a large share of an air conditioner's work is condensing water out of the air rather than lowering the temperature — but the season runs weeks, not months.

The fourth is price feedback. At 23.27 cents per kilowatt-hour, inefficiency is expensive enough to be noticed. The exceptions are worth flagging: all-electric new construction, shore condominiums with electric heat, and homes with heat pumps replacing gas furnaces run far above 662 kWh and should not be measured against it.

What you can actually control: shopping for supply in New Jersey

New Jersey is a retail choice state. Customers of the investor-owned utilities can buy the generation portion of their service from a third-party supplier instead of taking Basic Generation Service, the default supply the utility procures on your behalf. The utility still owns the wires, reads the meter, restores your outage and sends the bill. Only supply is in play, and supply is well under half of a typical New Jersey bill.

The default is a fair benchmark, not a penalty rate: procured under regulator supervision and reset on a published annual schedule. The only honest comparison against it is the all-in price per kilowatt-hour, including every recurring fee, across the full contract term.

The traps in this market are consistent and worth naming plainly:

• Teaser rates quoted at benchmark usage. Marketing prices are frequently illustrated at 750 or 1,000 kWh a month. New Jersey's average is 662. Any plan carrying a fixed monthly charge produces a higher effective per-kWh price at 662 kWh than the advertised number suggests.
• Introductory pricing that rolls to variable. A low fixed rate for a few months followed by a price the supplier sets at its own discretion is the single most reliable way to end up paying more than the default.
• Bill-credit plans. A monthly credit awarded only above a usage threshold rewards you for consuming more, and a household at 662 kWh may never reach the threshold at all.
• Monthly service fees and early termination fees. Three dollars a month spread over 662 kWh is nearly half a cent per kWh. A termination fee removes your ability to leave when the price turns against you.
• Doorstep and phone enrolment. Nothing about a supply contract is urgent. Get the terms in writing and read them.

Run the arithmetic first. At 662 kWh, beating the default by two cents per kWh saves about $13 a month — roughly $159 a year. Real money, and small enough that one monthly fee or one month on a post-teaser variable rate erases it. Our overview of deregulated electricity states covers how these markets differ.

The utilities that serve New Jersey, and what differs between them

Three investor-owned utilities distribute nearly all of New Jersey's electricity, across territories shaped by very different terrain and customer densities. All three have their delivery rates set by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities; none sets the wholesale price of power.

Public Service Electric and Gas is the largest, covering the dense diagonal corridor from Bergen County through Newark and New Brunswick toward Trenton and Camden. It is a combined electric and gas utility, so most customers receive both commodities from one company, and its territory is the highest load-density system in the state. Dense urban networks fail differently from rural ones: fewer weather-driven outages, but far more expensive underground construction.

Jersey Central Power & Light, part of FirstEnergy, serves a discontinuous territory covering the wooded northwest of the state and a long stretch of Monmouth and Ocean counties on the coast. It is an electric-only utility with substantial tree exposure across its northern half and substantial coastal exposure across its southern half — a combination that makes vegetation management and storm restoration a permanent line of cost.

Atlantic City Electric, part of Exelon, covers the southern shore counties. Its distinguishing feature is seasonality: a customer base that swells with summer visitors and second homes, salt-air corrosion on coastal equipment, and a system built for a peak that exists part of the year.

A small number of New Jersey municipalities run their own electric utilities. Those systems are community-owned and governed locally rather than by the state board, and their customers are generally outside the retail choice market — supplier solicitations do not apply to them.

The shore, the second home, and the summer that drives the system

New Jersey has a load pattern few states share: a coastal population that multiplies in July and August and largely vanishes by November. That seasonality has consequences for the individual bill as well as the system.

A beach house is a hard building to run efficiently. It is often older, frequently uninsulated in the way a house built as a summer cottage tends to be, and it spends the season full of people, wet towels and open doors. Humidity is the recurring problem: coastal air is saturated, and a house that sits closed and unoccupied for weeks will grow mould unless something is running. The usual answer is a dehumidifier or an air conditioner left on a high setpoint, and a dehumidifier is a compressor — a meaningful continuous load, running in an empty house, for months. Check what yours actually draws with the appliance energy cost calculator before assuming it is negligible.

Pool equipment is the other quiet driver. A single-speed pool pump running long hours through the summer is among the largest discretionary loads a residential customer can have, and variable-speed replacements cut that consumption substantially because pumping power falls much faster than pumping speed. This is one of the few efficiency upgrades where the arithmetic is dramatic rather than marginal.

There is a billing consequence too. Seasonal properties accumulate months of low usage and then a very high one — the pattern that produces estimated reads followed by a large true-up. Submit your own meter readings rather than accepting estimates.

Frequently asked questions