Average Electric Bill in Wyoming

What the average Wyoming electric bill actually is

The average residential electricity bill in Wyoming is $127.72 a month, made up of 863 kWh of consumption at 14.8 cents per kWh as of May 2026. The national figures are 863 kWh at 18.44 cents, for $159.14. Wyoming households therefore use precisely the national average quantity of electricity and pay about twenty percent less per unit, producing a bill about twenty percent below the national one.

The usage figure is a coincidence, and worth pausing on. Wyoming has one of the harshest heating climates in the country and one of the mildest cooling ones, and because most of the heating load runs on natural gas rather than electricity, the two happen to cancel out near the national number. Nothing about a Wyoming household's electricity use resembles the profile it matches. A Florida home reaches 863 kWh with a compressor running eight months a year; a Wyoming home reaches it with a furnace blower, a well pump and a stock tank heater.

The average also hides an unusually wide internal spread for a state with so few people in it. A ranch house outside Lusk on a propane tank, a new build in Jackson and a seasonal cabin in the Bighorns share almost nothing. To judge your own bill, start with the kilowatt-hours on the statement and run them through an electricity bill calculator rather than measuring dollars against a state mean.

Why Wyoming electricity is priced below the national average

Wyoming is a vertically integrated regulated state. Utilities generate, deliver and sell as one business, with rates approved in advance by the Public Service Commission. No retail marketing layer, no supply shopping, and utility-grade borrowing costs on capital.

Fuel is the story. Wyoming's fleet is built on coal from the state's own basins, mined at scale and burned close to where it comes out of the ground, and on one of the largest wind resources in the country. Coal here avoids the long-haul rail cost that dominates delivered fuel prices in importing states, and wind has no fuel cost once the turbine is standing. Both push the same way on the price of a kilowatt-hour.

Wyoming generates far more electricity than it consumes. It is a substantial net exporter, so the fleet and the transmission system are sized for a customer base that mostly lives elsewhere. That has advantages and a catch, covered below.

Working the other way: density. Wyoming is the least populous state and one of the largest by area. Poles, wire, substations and line crews cost what they cost anywhere, but here the bill for them is divided among very few meters per mile. That is why the rate is not lower still, and why the fixed monthly customer charge — what you owe before using a single kilowatt-hour — is a bigger share of a Wyoming bill than a national comparison suggests.

Multi-state ownership. The largest utility here is part of a six-state system, so what Wyoming customers pay depends partly on how that system's shared cost is allocated between jurisdictions.

Why Wyoming homes use the electricity they do

Wyoming's climate is severe, but the severity mostly misses the electric meter. Understanding why explains the whole bill.

The heating season is long and runs on gas. Winters here are cold, high and windy, with heating demand among the heaviest in the country. But Wyoming is a major gas producer and service reaches the towns, so the dominant heating fuel in populated areas is gas. The furnace burns therms; the electric meter sees only the blower. Homes outside the gas network — on propane, fuel oil, wood or electric heat — have a much larger picture, and they are common in ranch country.

The cooling season barely exists in load terms. Wyoming is dry and high, with low dew points and large day-to-night swings, so a hot afternoon is followed by a cool night that flushes the house for free. Humidity — the hidden half of an air-conditioning bill in the humid states — is largely absent, so evaporative coolers work well here and draw a fraction of what a compressor does. Plenty of older Wyoming homes have no central air conditioning and do not miss it.

What fills the gap is a distinctly Wyoming set of loads. Private well pumps and septic pumps. Stock tank heaters running all winter to keep water open for livestock. Heat tape on pipes in crawlspaces and along roof edges. Engine block heaters plugged in overnight. Heated shops, garages and tack rooms. Ventilation and circulation fans. None of these appear in the standard national list of household energy loads, and collectively they can dominate a rural Wyoming meter.

Wind is a load factor too. Sustained wind drives infiltration through a leaky envelope far harder than still cold does, which is why sealing beats insulation thickness on return here.

What you can actually control in a regulated state

Wyoming is a regulated electricity state. There is no residential supply market, no competitive retailer and no rate to switch to, so any call or knock offering a cheaper Wyoming electricity supply price is selling something else. Four levers remain.

Judge any time-varying rate on a winter profile. Most published advice about time-of-use rates is written for summer-peaking states, where the point is dodging the late-afternoon air-conditioning peak. Wyoming has no such peak. If your utility offers a time-varying option, the hours that matter are winter mornings and evenings, and the loads worth shifting are flexible ones — water heating, overnight vehicle charging, a shop heater — not the air conditioner.

Know what the fixed charge does to your savings maths. In a low-density state a larger share of the bill is a fixed monthly customer charge that does not fall when you use less. Cutting a hundred kilowatt-hours saves the energy price on those units and nothing more. That is not an argument against efficiency, but for measuring the saving honestly before paying for it.

Target the loads that are actually here. Put stock tank heaters on thermostatic controls rather than leaving them running continuously. Put heat tape and block heaters on timers or thermostats — an overnight block heater on a timer set for the last two hours before you leave does the same job for a fraction of the energy. Air-seal before you add insulation, because wind-driven infiltration is the bigger loss here. Check whether an outbuilding or shop is heated more than it needs to be.

Budget billing smooths the seasonal swing into a flat monthly figure with a true-up. It is a cash-flow tool, not a saving, and worth being clear-eyed about.

The utilities that serve Wyoming, and how they differ

A small number of companies cover an enormous area, and their structures differ in ways that show up on the bill.

Rocky Mountain Power is the largest, serving much of Wyoming. It is the Rocky Mountain operating name of PacifiCorp, itself part of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and it runs a single integrated system across six western states. That matters more than it sounds: the generating plants and transmission lines are shared assets, and the share of their cost that Wyoming customers carry is set by an inter-jurisdictional allocation process. Decisions made in proceedings in other states can therefore move what a Wyoming household pays, which is unusual and often misunderstood.

Black Hills Energy serves eastern Wyoming and belongs to a multi-state holding company that sells both electricity and natural gas across the region. It has a much smaller Wyoming customer base than Rocky Mountain Power, which has a real consequence: a single large generating or transmission investment is spread across fewer customers, so capital decisions move rates more sharply than they would at a larger utility.

Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power serves Cheyenne and is part of the same Black Hills group. It is a combination utility, supplying both electricity and natural gas to the same households. That means one company, two commodities and two separate tariffs on what may be a single statement — and it means a Cheyenne household's total energy cost is set almost entirely in proceedings involving one company.

Across the rural remainder of the state, member-owned cooperatives serve ranch and small-town territory, generally buying wholesale power from generation-and-transmission cooperatives rather than owning much plant. Cooperatives fund no shareholder return, but they serve the thinnest customer density in the country, which typically appears as a higher fixed monthly charge. They are governed by member-elected boards, so a complaint or rate objection travels a different route than at an investor-owned utility.

Living next to the power plant does not make the power free

Wyoming produces far more electricity than it uses and exports the surplus, and residents reasonably expect a bargain from that. It partly delivers one — the rate is roughly a fifth below the national average — but less than the raw fact suggests, and the reasons apply to every energy-exporting state.

The first is that you pay a retail price, not a wholesale one. Generation is only part of what a household buys; the rest is delivery — substations, poles, the meter, line crews, outage response. Those costs are local, they do not fall because a coal unit sits an hour away, and in a state this empty they are spread across very few customers.

The second is that the export system is a shared one. Long-distance transmission built to move Wyoming power to markets elsewhere is regional infrastructure with regional cost allocation, and the state's largest utility operates a six-state fleet whose costs are divided among jurisdictions by formula rather than by proximity. Being near the generator is not the same as owning it.

The third is that state policy interacts with the fleet in ways specific to Wyoming. The state has both a very large coal industry and a very large wind resource, and is widely reported as the only state that taxes electricity generated from wind. The politics of retaining coal while the wind fleet expands runs through commission proceedings, and the outcome shapes long-run capital costs in the rate base.

The practical upshot is unchanged: the price is set for you, and the part you control is the meter. Where the fixed charge is a large share of the bill and the cooling load is small, the wins sit in winter loads — heating equipment, envelope leakage, water heating and the outbuilding you forgot was heated.

Frequently asked questions