Average Electric Bill in Pennsylvania

What the average Pennsylvania electric bill actually is

The average residential electricity bill in Pennsylvania is $176.06 a month — roughly 817 kWh billed at 21.55 cents per kWh as of May 2026. The national comparison is 863 kWh at 18.44 cents, for $159.14. Pennsylvania households use about five percent less electricity than the national average and still pay about eleven percent more, because the price per kilowatt-hour runs roughly seventeen percent above the national figure. This is a price problem, not a consumption problem, and the distinction determines which remedies are worth your time.

The average also conceals more variation than in most states, for a structural reason. Pennsylvania households do not all buy electricity on the same terms. Two neighbours can be served by the same wires company and pay noticeably different supply prices — one on the utility's default service, one on a fixed-rate contract signed eighteen months ago, one on a variable rate that has drifted upward since. Add to that four large utilities with different delivery charges and different default-service reset dates, and the state average becomes a very coarse instrument.

Then there is the housing split. A gas-heated Philadelphia row home with a window air conditioner peaks modestly in August. An all-electric house in the northern tier heated by baseboards peaks violently in January and may use three times as much electricity across the year. Both are ordinary Pennsylvania households. If you want to know where you sit, take your own twelve months of kilowatt-hours and run them through an electricity bill calculator rather than comparing dollar totals with anyone.

Why Pennsylvania electricity costs more than the national average

The paradox is real: Pennsylvania is a leading natural gas producer thanks to the Marcellus Shale and operates one of the largest nuclear fleets in the country, yet its retail price sits well above the national average. Cheap fuel at the wellhead is not a cheap rate at the meter, and the gap between the two is where the money goes.

Start with structure. Pennsylvania restructured its electricity market in the 1990s, separating the generation you buy from the delivery that brings it to you. Your bill has a supply portion — the electricity itself, purchased either from a competitive supplier or from your utility's default service — and a delivery portion, paid to the wires company regardless of who supplies you. Our guide to supply versus delivery charges explains why only one of those halves is shoppable.

The supply half is priced in PJM Interconnection, the regional wholesale market covering all or part of thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Two things happen there. Energy is dispatched cheapest-first, which is where abundant gas and nuclear help. But PJM also runs a capacity market that pays generators simply to be available in future years, and capacity prices rose sharply in recent auctions, an increase widely reported as flowing through to retail supply prices across the region. Pennsylvania is not insulated from that by producing gas.

The delivery half carries its own pressures: an ageing distribution system, mountainous and heavily wooded terrain that makes vegetation management expensive, storm restoration, and a large transmission build-out across PJM recovered through formula rates that rise with investment. Delivery charges have been the quieter half of the increase, and they do not respond to shopping at all.

Why Pennsylvania homes use less electricity than average

At 817 kWh a month, Pennsylvania consumption runs below the national norm, and three structural features explain it.

Natural gas heats a large share of the housing stock. Pennsylvania has extensive gas distribution across its populated areas, and where gas heats the house and the water, the two biggest energy loads in a cold climate never touch the electric meter. That single fact removes more electricity demand than every efficiency measure combined.

The housing stock is old, dense and attached. Row homes and twins in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the older river towns share walls with their neighbours, which cuts exterior surface area sharply. A middle-of-row house loses heat through two faces instead of four. Units are also smaller than the national average, and smaller conditioned volume means less energy per household regardless of insulation quality.

The cooling season is genuinely short. Serious air conditioning demand in most of the state runs from late June to early September, and much of the older stock cools with window units in a few rooms rather than a central system running whole-house. Compare that with the South, where a compressor works from April into October.

The counterweight is the all-electric minority. In the northern tier, the Poconos and rural counties beyond the gas mains, homes heat with electric resistance baseboards, electric furnaces or older heat pumps that fall back on strip heat in deep cold. Those households can consume double the state average in winter and pay Pennsylvania's above-average rate on every unit of it. The state figure describes them very badly.

Shopping for supply in Pennsylvania, and how it goes wrong

Pennsylvania is one of the genuine deregulated electricity states, so you can buy the supply portion of your bill from a competitive supplier. Doing it well requires one number and a short list of traps.

The number is the Price to Compare: the per-kilowatt-hour supply price your utility charges if you do nothing. It is printed on your bill, and it is not a penalty rate: utilities procure default supply through competitive solicitations and pass the result through without markup. It resets on a schedule that differs by utility. Every offer should be judged against it, never against your total bill, because the delivery half does not change no matter whom you buy from. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission operates a state shopping site, PAPowerSwitch, listing current offers alongside each utility's Price to Compare.

The traps are consistent:

• Teaser rates. An introductory price that converts to a variable rate at the end of the term, often without a second reminder.
• Variable products. A rate that can move month to month with no ceiling. For a household that will not check it monthly, this is a bad choice, and it is where the worst outcomes come from.
• Monthly fees. A flat charge attached to a low per-kWh price. Divide the fee by your monthly usage and add it to the rate before comparing.
• Cancellation fees and auto-renewal. Both determine what happens when the term ends, which is when most of the damage occurs.

A fixed rate slightly above today's Price to Compare can still be sensible if you value knowing the number for a year. Chasing the lowest advertised figure without reading the terms is how households end up paying more than default service.

The utilities that serve Pennsylvania, and how they differ

Four companies deliver most of Pennsylvania's electricity. None of them generates the power you use — restructuring separated those businesses — so each is a wires company that also procures default supply on behalf of customers who have not shopped.

PECO Energy, a subsidiary of Exelon, serves Philadelphia and its surrounding counties: a dense urban and suburban territory where a great deal of distribution runs underground and customers per mile of line are high.

PPL Electric Utilities serves a broad band of central and eastern Pennsylvania including Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton and Lancaster, mixing cities with substantial rural and mountainous territory.

FirstEnergy Pennsylvania brought together the legacy Met-Ed, Penelec and West Penn Power operations, which historically served separate parts of the state under separate tariffs. Those legacy territories continue to carry distinct rate structures, so "FirstEnergy" is not one price in Pennsylvania.

Duquesne Light serves Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, the smallest of the four by territory and independently owned rather than part of a large multi-state holding company.

Two structural differences matter to you. First, delivery charges are set separately for each company through its own rate cases, so the non-shoppable half of your bill depends on your address. Second, each procures default supply on its own schedule, which means Price to Compare changes land on different dates and in different sizes across the state. Advice from a friend in another utility's territory about when to sign a contract is not advice about your situation.

What restructuring did and did not deliver

Pennsylvania's retail market has now run long enough to judge honestly, and the record is mixed rather than either triumphant or disastrous.

What it delivered: real choice, a functioning price-comparison mechanism run by the regulator, and genuine savings for households that shop deliberately and re-shop when a term ends. Competitive suppliers also brought product variety that regulated states do not offer — long fixed terms for people who want certainty, renewable-backed products for people who want them.

What it did not deliver: a systematically lower price. Default service is not the expensive fallback that supplier marketing implies. It is a portfolio of contracts procured in advance, which makes it lag the wholesale market in both directions — slow to rise when prices spike, slow to fall when they collapse. In periods when wholesale prices are falling, default service often beats what suppliers are advertising, and in periods when they are rising, it often looks cheap by comparison for a while. Neither condition is permanent.

The practical conclusion is unglamorous. Shopping rewards attention and punishes inattention. A household that signs a twelve-month fixed contract, diarises the end date, and re-evaluates against the Price to Compare when the term expires will do well. A household that signs once, forgets, and rolls onto a variable rate will very likely pay more than if it had never shopped at all. If the second description fits you better than the first, staying on default service is a defensible decision rather than a lazy one.

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