Mapped: America's highest electric bills
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Americans are spending an average estimated $158/month on their home electric bills, per a new Axios analysis of data collected and shared by climate newsroom Heatmap News.
Why it matters: Tensions over rising energy bills and power-hungry AI data centers are emerging as a key political issue, and should be a potent force in this year's midterms.
- Americans are also paying more for other forms of energy, like auto gas, amid the Iran war — though the ceasefire deal could lead to some relief, if it holds.
Zoom in: Nantucket County, Mass. ($296); San Francisco County, Calif. ($282) and Nobles County, Minn. ($273) had the highest estimated average monthly electric bills in the continental U.S. across 2025.
Zoom out: Counties in Alabama and Texas dominate the top of the most-expensive list, broadly speaking.
- Alabama's electric bills are relatively steep partially due to higher consumption, per local news outlet WBRC. Experts also cite the state's rate structure.
- A new measure there will freeze base rates until 2029, among other reforms to the state's utilities regulator.
Between the lines: Costs are also higher than average in many parts of Alaska, whose isolation and geography often drives up prices across the board relative to the lower 48.
What we're watching: Whether efforts to contain energy prices — like forcing tech companies to foot the bill for their AI power needs — actually work.
Methodology: Heatmap News provided Axios with a dataset of average electrical bills by utility company.
We identified which utilities serve each ZIP code by using OEDI crosswalks. When multiple utilities operated in a ZIP code, we averaged their reported bills. This assumes each utility serves an equal number of customers within the ZIP code, which may not hold.
We then mapped ZIP codes to counties using HUD ZIP-to-county files, which provide the share of each ZIP code's households located in each county. Household counts by ZIP code were estimated using U.S. Census data and HUD county-to-ZIP relationship files.
Using these inputs, we calculated county-level averages by weighting each ZIP code's average bill by its number of households and the share of those households in the county.
For counties without ZIP codes in the OEDI crosswalks, we used EIA data on which utilities operate in each county and calculated a simple average of their bills. This again assumes equal customer counts across utilities.
