Methodology & Sources

Sources

• EIA Form 861 (2025) - the Annual Electric Utility Data filing: sales and revenue by customer class, utility characteristics, operational data, reliability, advanced meters, net metering and service territory. Published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration; a work of the U.S. government in the public domain.
• EIA Form 861M - the monthly successor to Form EIA-826: state-level sales, revenue and average prices. This build uses data through August 2026 (preliminary).
• EIA average-bill tables (2025) - state average price, consumption and bill per customer class, derived by EIA from Form 861 schedules 4A-4D, 861S and 861U.

Definitions

• Average realized rate is revenue divided by sales for a customer class, in cents per kWh. It blends fixed customer charges, demand charges, energy charges and fuel riders into one figure. It is not a tariff rate: two customers of the same utility on different tariffs pay different effective prices.
• Estimated average residential bill multiplies a utility's average residential usage (sales divided by customers) by its average realized residential rate. It approximates what the average household paid per month in 2025.
• Retail totals sum Form 861 Part A (bundled/full-service) and Part B (energy-only) reports. Part C (delivery-only) reports are shown separately on utility profiles and excluded from totals, because a delivery company's kWh are the same kWh an energy supplier reports in Part B - adding them would double count. This matches how EIA builds its own published totals.
• Small utilities filing the EIA-861S short form report totals only; their profiles show no class breakdown because none is published.
• Reliability: SAIDI is average outage minutes per customer per year, SAIFI is average outages per customer, CAIDI is average minutes to restore. Figures are as reported by each utility for its largest reported state, with major event days included where its reporting standard includes them. Utilities choose between IEEE and other standards, so cross-utility comparisons are approximate. Only about 900 of 3,199 utilities report reliability data.
• Net-metered capacity is customer-sited generation (overwhelmingly rooftop solar) reported on the Form 861 net metering schedule, all technologies combined.
• AMI share is advanced-metering-infrastructure meters divided by total meters on the advanced metering schedule.
• Rankings apply minimum-size filters (stated on each page) so very small systems do not dominate rate and ratio rankings.

Caveats

• Form 861 is annual with a long lag: 2025 filings were published in October 2026. Monthly 861M state prices (preliminary, subject to revision) bridge part of the gap.
• A customer in a restructured state can appear in both a delivery company's and a supplier's reporting universe; state customer totals follow EIA's published convention.
• Some utilities report in several states; a profile aggregates all of them, and state pages show the in-state slice.
• Filings are as reported by utilities and are occasionally revised; this site reflects the files as published when the build ran.

The site is rebuilt when EIA publishes new Form 861 data (annually, each fall) and refreshed monthly for state prices.