Residents of 49 States and Washington, D.C., Face Increasing Electric and Natural Gas Bills

Brand new Center for American Progress and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) analysis finds that upward of 107 million electricity customers (65 percent of all U.S. electric utility customers) and more than 46 million natural gas customers (59 percent of all U.S. natural gas utility customers) across 49 states and Washington, D.C., will face increased—or proposals for increased—utility rates by 2027. At least 210 U.S. gas and electric utilities have either already raised rates or proposed higher rates to go into effect within the next two years.* For some residents of Massachusetts, Missouri, Connecticut, New York, and Oklahoma, utility bills could increase by at least $35 per month—in one case, up to $60. Collectively, the in-effect and proposed rate increases would raise customers’ electricity and natural gas bills by $71.2 billion and $18.7 billion, respectively, by 2028.¹

After closely mirroring inflation from 2013 to 2023, electricity prices have risen at double the rate of inflation over this past year.² The trend of rapidly increasing electricity prices is a departure from the prior decade: More than 70 percent of states saw electricity prices decline in real terms between 2013 and 2023.³ What has changed? A multipronged storm of high natural gas costs, extreme weather, and increasing demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers is colliding with an aging electricity grid and a policy assault on new clean electricity deployment from the Trump administration—driving electricity prices higher.

Instead of addressing rising utility costs, the Trump administration has canceled projects for new energy supply, issued massive new tariffs that worsen supply chain concerns, and increased consumer costs by forcing expensive coal plants to run past their scheduled retirements.⁴ President Trump’s giveaways for the fossil fuel industry and attack on clean energy, coupled with the effects of rolling back clean energy tax credits via the Big Beautiful Bill, means that American households could spend upward of $430 more per year on their energy bills within the next decade.⁵ Millions more individuals and families across the country will face even higher utility bills as a direct result of the federal government’s actions over the past few months—actions that are likely to continue in the months to come.

Americans are seeing higher energy bills due to a confluence of factors, including investment in outdated infrastructure, higher natural gas prices, and increasing energy demand. Some of the associated costs leading to increasing utility bills are necessary to build a modernized electric grid, while others will continue to inflict more costs on Americans due to natural gas price volatility or unchecked data center growth. Policymakers should prioritize the protection of ratepayers and invest in solutions to lower costs for households and businesses.

The U.S. electric grid is aging, with much of the system built in the 1960s and 1970s, and will not be able to meet expected energy and climate demands without undergoing significant upgrades and expansion.⁶ For example, transmission lines have a lifespan of 50 to 80 years, and 70 percent of current transmission lines are more than 25 years old.⁷ Likewise, more than half of distribution transformers in the United States are more than 33 years old, which means they are approaching their end of life.⁸ The aging domestic grid is vulnerable to risks that threaten energy access and affordability, which leaves Americans susceptible to power outages, increased costs from inefficient transmission and distribution, and cybersecurity risks.⁹

Climate-driven extreme weather is on the rise and showcases the vulnerability of the aging grid.¹⁰ Extreme weather is a leading cause of electric power outages: One study found that more than 70 percent of U.S. counties analyzed from 2018 to 2020 experienced at least eight hours of power outages during severe weather.¹¹ As climate change continues to worsen, it will cost both utilities and consumers billions of dollars, including costs from power outage recovery and building a more resilient grid to avoid power outages.¹²

The United States must invest in upgrading and modernizing the electric grid. Indeed, modernizing and building a more resilient grid will require parts such as poles, electrical conductors, and finished wires that are made up of steel, aluminum, and copper.¹³ The Trump administration’s 25 percent to 50 percent tariffs are significantly driving up the costs of these commodities, as about 20 percent of steel, 70 percent of primary aluminum, and 40 percent of refined copper are sourced from other countries.¹⁴ In addition, ongoing legal challenges and the risk of new and changing tariffs create uncertainty, making it hard for domestic manufacturers and developers to make sourcing decisions to obtain the materials they need for grid modernization projects.¹⁵

All these factors combine to increase the costs for utilities to make necessary upgrades or replacements to the grid. The Trump administration has pursued policies that not only counter climate action but also take away support for grid resilience. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has terminated more than $7 billion in grants, some specifically for grid deployment and mineral development for domestic manufacturing and energy supply chains.¹⁶ At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to rescind the endangerment finding, the basis for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act; it has cited the DOE’s climate report—which was written by climate skeptics and utilizes cherry-picked data—in support of this rollback.¹⁷ The administration’s reversal on climate progress will slow greenhouse gas emission reductions—increasing emissions by an estimated 470 million tons in 2035, which is more than the emissions from every diesel car and truck on U.S. roads today and will likely increase the threat of extreme weather events in an ever-warmer world.¹⁸

Another reason that Americans’ energy bills are going up is the recent increase in U.S. wholesale electricity prices, which have risen by around 40 percent since the beginning of 2025.¹⁹ This increase is a direct result of rising natural gas prices. Natural gas generation currently provides about 42 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States—the highest it has ever been—and is often the fuel source setting the price for electricity in the market.²⁰ With so much of the electricity market supplied and set by natural gas, U.S. electricity prices are now highly susceptible to changes in natural gas markets.²¹ In recent years, the gas market has been highly volatile, with massive swings and price spikes due to global forces, both man made and natural, and geopolitics.²²

These high, volatile prices ultimately are passed on to electricity consumers. For example, during Winter Storm Uri in 2021, Oklahoma gas prices spiked 400-fold (from $3 to $1,200 per 1,000 cubic feet). The jump in natural gas prices was so large that Oklahoma utility customers will now be making monthly payments for the next 25 years to pay off the gas bill from one week in 2021.²³ In 2022, Dominion spent an additional $1 billion on fuel costs due to the spiking of fossil fuel prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which paired with other COVID-19 and inflationary forces.²⁴ These excess fuel costs were charged to and recovered from Dominion’s Virginia customers over the next three years to avoid the “rate shock” that would have occurred if Dominion had attempted to recover the costs over a single year, as normally done.²⁵

Although natural gas prices fell and saw less volatility in 2024, gas prices are again on the rise.²⁶ The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects natural gas prices to increase by more than 75 percent in the United States between 2024 and 2026.²⁷ This increase in natural gas prices is largely attributable to rising U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, which increase demand for U.S. natural gas and link the domestic natural gas market to the global market.²⁸ LNG exports are projected to increase by more than 36 percent from 2024 to 2026, outpacing expected growth in U.S. gas supplies and leading to tightening domestic supplies and higher prices for U.S. consumers.²⁹ The Trump administration has expanded U.S. LNG exports, including approving numerous export projects and brokering a deal with Japan on a joint venture for Alaskan LNG.³⁰

For the first time in a decade, U.S. electricity demand is on the rise,³¹ and it could grow by 25 percent by 2030, driven by data centers that provide AI, cloud-based, and crypto services.³² Without policy interventions, such as requiring data centers to pay their fair share of the generation and infrastructure costs necessary to connect them to the grid, data centers could potentially increase costs at alarming rates for American households and businesses if utilities do not have proper cost allocation approaches for new and large commercial and industrial customers.³³

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in 2024 alone, utilities in seven states covered by regional transmission organization PJM passed on more than $4 billion in additional costs to customers due to local transmission upgrades to provide transmission-level service directly to data centers.³⁴ For areas located near large data centers, a Bloomberg News analysis found that each month, electricity costs rose 267 percent above where they were just five years earlier.³⁵ Rising electricity demand, spiking due to data center use, could be responsible for increased electricity rates of 15 percent to up to 40 percent for all U.S. households in the next five years alone.³⁶

Fair solutions that address affordability would require that data center customers, at a minimum, cover the full costs incurred by utilities to provide them with electricity and that guardrails are put in place to ensure those costs are never passed on to other customers, such as small businesses and households that are already facing an affordability crisis. Utilities must ensure that cost distribution of service and contribution of total system costs reflect each different class of customer accordingly and fairly—from residential to large industrial—especially with new and increasing data center demand. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” that emphasizes deregulation, including guidance to skirt environmental protections to spur the rapid development of data centers, offers inadequate solutions to address affordability and does nothing to address the distribution of costs for households.³⁷ The plan recommends embracing new energy generation such as geothermal and nuclear fission but fails to prioritize renewables, such as wind and solar, that are low cost and quick to deploy compared with conventional generation sources such as fossil fuels.³⁸ Rushing data centers online without cheaper and new generation sources likely will increase consumer prices and risk rolling blackouts.³⁹

The need to modernize the grid, coupled with Trump administration actions and rising natural gas prices, means the surge in energy demand will continue to increase costs for Americans.

The administration’s actions over the past 10 months, including signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, have exacerbated rising rates.⁴⁰ Notably, the administration has consistently blocked and attacked clean energy, particularly on large wind and solar projects,⁴¹ that would make utilities less dependent on volatile and costly fossil fuels.⁴² A Princeton analysis found that the average U.S. household could spend more than $430 more per year on its energy bills within the next decade due to the Trump administration’s attack on clean energy, giveaways for the fossil fuel industry, and elimination of pollution standards.⁴³

In August, the DOE extended an emergency stay-open order to delay the retirement of the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan until mid-November.⁴⁴ The Campbell coal plant was slated to close in May 2025; continuing to extend retirement is estimated to cost ratepayers nearly $140 million per year.⁴⁵ The DOE also announced more than $600 million in investment to bail out the coal industry.⁴⁶ Propping up the coal industry will drive up costs for consumers, as 99 percent of coal plants are more expensive to run compared with replacement by new solar or wind.⁴⁷ Moreover, some coal-related efforts will not provide any domestic benefits, as the United States is a net exporter of coal, especially to Asia.⁴⁸ The Big Beautiful Bill’s production tax credit for metallurgical coal, an ingredient in steel and other metals, gives a subsidy to nations that will benefit from producing more steel than the United States does.⁴⁹

All these actions are increasing electricity costs for American consumers and exacerbating the rising energy affordability crisis that the United States is already facing.⁵⁰

As millions of Americans face increasing utility bills, the Trump administration continues to prop up the fossil fuel industry while blocking projects and investments that would make it easier for utilities to deploy reliable and affordable energy.

CAP plans to continue tracking utility rate hikes across the country. If your energy bill has increased and it is not reflected in the tracker, please fill out this form.

* Authors’ note: This estimate is accurate as of October 8, 2025.

The authors would like to thank Jasia Smith, Frederick Bell, Mark Haggerty, Will Ragland, Adam Conner, Ryan Mulholland, Jenny Rowland-Shea, Kendra Hughes, Carl Chancellor, Meghan Miller, Cathleen Kelly, Sam Zeno, and Trevor Higgins of the Center for American Progress and Alice Lin, Sam Krasnow, Derek Murrow, Dawone Robinson, and Jackson Morris of the NRDC for their contributions to this analysis.

The electric and natural gas utilities listed in the tracker, and the associated increases in rates, were identified through online filings by utilities and records of decisions in state public utilities commission (PUC) dockets. The list includes rate increases that went into effect or were proposed to go into effect from January 2025 onward. The list is not comprehensive and will be periodically updated with additional rate increases from across the country in subsequent iterations of this report.

Each state’s PUC has different requirements for reporting data related to rate increases, bill impacts, distributional impacts, and monthly increases. The number of customers—including residential, commercial, and industrial—affected by rate increases, column E, primarily used Energy Information Administration (EIA) and S&P Global data for electricity and natural gas, respectively. Authors used 2024 EIA 861 data, as well as aggregated customer data, from three files: 1) Sales_Ult_Cust_2024: Aggregated total number of customers across customer classes by “Utility Number” and “State” for “Bundled” and “Delivery” service types, and for Parts A, B, C, and D; removed state level “Adjustments”; removed “Ownership” types of “Behind the Meter,” “Community Choice Aggregation,” and “Retail Power Marketer”; 2) Short_Form_2024: Aggregated total number of customers by “Utility Number” and “State”; and 3) Delivery_Companies_2024: Aggregated total number of customers by “Utility Number” and “State.” For S&P data, authors aggregated total customers by “Company Name” and “State.”

EIA and S&P data did not report the number of customers for some utilities, in which case the data were collected directly from utilities’ websites, investor presentations, or press releases. In some instances, rate increases affected only a portion of the customer base in a utility’s service territory and were reported by the utility through press releases or in the docket filings. The authors aggregated the total number of natural gas customers across sectors using EIA data to calculate the percentage of natural gas utility customers affected by the rate increases.

The time periods for revenue increases, column F, were collected using utilities’ press releases, webpages, and docket filings from PUCs. The time periods for increases fell into three categories: 1) increase in annual revenues, in which utilities did not specify a time period for the rate increase and instead requested or were approved to increase their annual revenue requirements until the next time they file and are approved for additional revenues; 2) specific time periods, in which single-year, part-year, and multiyear periods were explicitly mentioned in filing documents, press releases, or utility webpages; or 3) calendar years, such as 2025 or 2026. Some utilities did not specify whether the rate increase was annual or for a specific time period. The authors used the best available information from the utility to assign a time period when relevant.

The effective date and status for rate increases, columns J and K, respectively, were also collected using utility press releases, utility and PUC webpages, and docket filings. In most cases, authors were able to identify a specific date, month, or year from which a rate increase would be effective. In some instances, the request for a rate increase was ongoing and did not specify an effective date, with PUCs often suspending effective dates for 6 to 12 months. The authors made a conservative estimate based on available information, including expected decision dates or expected effective dates, such as “early 2026” or “second half of 2026,” to adopt an effective date.

The total revenue increase in column G was calculated based on revenue increases reported by utility websites or press releases, in news articles that included a direct quote from a utility spokesperson, or from docket filings. The total revenue numbers include additional revenues to be recovered from all customer classes, including residential, commercial, and industrial. Not all utilities reported an increase in revenue as a result of increased utility prices, and not all utilities reported monthly average bill impacts even when there was an increase in revenue and/or rate of return.

Since the time periods for revenue increases were not aligned across utilities, the authors calculated an estimated total additional revenue generated starting in January 2025 through the end of 2028, assuming that rates remained steady after the covered period. This methodology likely results in an underestimate of revenues for the time period because utilities often file for additional rate recovery to begin in the next cycle after the covered period, thus increasing utilities’ revenues beyond what authors estimated. Revenue estimates were calculated using the additional revenues reported by the utilities, the time period for increase (column F), and effective date for increase (column J). The time period for implementation of most revenue increases is before December 31, 2028, and the authors assumed that revenue increases during the effective time period for an increase continued until the end of 2028. Revenue increases prior to 2025 were not included in the totals. In cases where the implementation period stopped before December 31, 2028, revenues were prorated for the remainder of the four-year time period in order to standardize the data. Further, some utilities either requested or collected interim revenues before final approval from PUCs, which were included in the calculation below for the relevant amount of time. Authors assumed the revenue increase was evenly split across all days of the year and calculated prorated revenues using the remaining number of days until December 31, 2028. For example, Ameren Missouri was approved for additional annual revenues of $355 million starting in June 2025. To estimate its total revenue through the end of 2028, the authors assumed an annual increase of $355 million for each year from June 2025 through June 2028 and then calculated partial revenues for the remaining 214 days (four months) in 2028 at the rate of $355 million per year.

The monthly percentage increase (column I) and the dollar amount increase (column H) to the average residential bill were collected through utility webpages, press releases, news articles that included a direct quote from a utility spokesperson, or docket filings. In the case of multiyear increases, when utilities reported multiple increases to residential bills through the time period, the authors reported the total increase in monthly bills, when available. When percentage increases were not reported but the appropriate data were available, authors calculated a percentage increase across the relevant time periods. In instances where utilities had implemented an interim rate increase resulting in an interim increase in monthly bills, authors reported the interim increase and included footnotes with the final expected increase pending PUC approval. In instances where utilities reported multiple values for a monthly and percentage increase, either based on geography or type of customer, the authors reported the lowest reported estimate and included footnotes indicating other relevant increases.

The authors prioritized using primary sources for the revenue increases, monthly increases, time periods, and effective dates. In some instances, these values were not publicly reported by the utility or the PUC so are labeled as “N/A.” The authors note that this does not necessarily mean that there is no associated increase in revenues or customer bills; instead, it represents a lack of public data from the utility or PUC.

To calculate the total number of utilities increasing rates, the authors counted each individual subsidiary that filed for an increase with the respective state regulators as a unique utility. For example, CenterPoint Energy Resources Corp. filed for rate increases in both Minnesota and Texas. However, the company filed the requests doing business as two separate subsidiaries—CenterPoint Energy Minnesota Gas and CenterPoint Energy Entex—and were counted as two unique utilities.