Source
All prices come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), specifically its open-data API (v2) “retail sales of electricity” dataset. Figures are average retail prices in U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour (¢/kWh), reported monthly for each state and sector.
Coverage
We track all 50 states and the District of Columbia across three sectors — residential, commercial, and industrial — from January 2001 to the present. Average residential bills start in January 2008, which is when EIA began reporting customer counts.
Methodology
Each state’s price is the EIA’s reported average for that state, sector, and month. The national average is sales-weighted — total revenue divided by total sales across all states — so it reflects what Americans actually pay rather than a simple average of state figures. Year-over-year change compares a month to the same month one year earlier.
The average monthly bill is total residential revenue divided by the number of residential customers EIA reports for that state and month. Summed across all 51 jurisdictions this reproduces EIA’s own published national figure.
Bills are quoted as a trailing 12-month average rather than a single month. Actual bills are strongly seasonal — the national figure swings by roughly $80 between November and July while the price per kilowatt-hour barely moves — so one month is a poor answer to “what is the average bill”. Each bill page reports its seasonal high and low month separately rather than hiding the swing.
A bill is exactly price × usage, and both components are published alongside it. That distinguishes a state that is expensive because rates are high from one that is expensive because homes use more power — Hawaii and Alabama sit near the top of the table for opposite reasons.
Update cadence
The EIA publishes retail-sales data monthly, typically with a two- to three-month lag. US Power Gauge refreshes recent months on a schedule and re-validates every page at least once a day, so the latest available month appears automatically once the EIA releases it.
Reuse
EIA data is a work of the U.S. government and is generally free to reuse; see the EIA copyright & reuse policy.