The Electricity Rate Gap by State: 51 Jurisdictions Ranked
The electricity rate gap by state runs from a 22.3% residential-to-industrial premium in Alaska to 184.5% in New York, on trailing 12-month average prices through June 2026.
The electricity rate gap by state is not one number but a distribution: across 51 U.S. jurisdictions, the premium residential customers pay over industrial customers, measured on trailing 12-month average retail prices through June 2026, ranges from 22.3% in Alaska to 184.5% in New York. The thesis of this report is narrow and data-bound: the same national retail-price story looks entirely different depending on which customer class you sit in and which state you sit in, and the size of that within-state gap varies more than eightfold across the country.
This report ranks every state, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. total on two rate-class spreads: residential versus industrial, and commercial versus industrial. Both are computed on trailing 12-month mean prices to cancel the seasonal swing that distorts any single month. The median residential-to-industrial spread across the 51 jurisdictions was 84.7%, and the U.S. benchmark stood at 102.7%. The dataset is prices only. It contains no rate-design, tariff, fuel-mix, or load data, so this report measures the size of each gap and where it sits in the ranked field; it does not, and cannot, explain why.
50 states + DC; U.S. as benchmark
New York
Alaska
51 jurisdictions
The rate-class spread is a structural feature of where a customer is billed, not a national constant. A residential customer in New York paid 184.5% more than an industrial customer in the same state on trailing 12-month prices; in Alaska the same premium was 22.3%. Both figures are true, and only nine of the 51 jurisdictions exceed the national 102.7% benchmark at all, the nine widest, from New York at 184.5% down to Louisiana at 103.0%. Any claim about what U.S. electricity costs is incomplete without naming the state and the customer class. This report states the size and rank of each gap. Why a given state's spread is wide or narrow is outside a prices-only dataset.
Two structural findings anchor the report. First, the residential/industrial spread distribution is highly dispersed: a median of 84.7%, a 25th percentile of 59.2%, a 75th percentile of 99.6%, and a full range from 22.3% to 184.5%. Second, the commercial/industrial spread is both narrower and more dispersed at its floor, with a median of 33.7% and a minimum of -4.5% in North Dakota, where commercial customers paid slightly less than industrial on a trailing-12-month basis. New York holds the widest gap on both measures.
A residential/industrial spread of 102.7% means the residential rate was 102.7% above, or roughly double, the industrial rate over the trailing 12 months. Spreads are computed on 12-month mean prices rather than single-month values, to remove seasonality. The U.S. row is the benchmark the state field is measured against; it is never ranked among the states.
Retail price is what a customer is billed per kilowatt-hour. It is not generation cost, and this report draws no cost-of-supply conclusions from it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Executive SummaryFree
- The Residential-to-Industrial Gap, Ranked🔒
- The Commercial-to-Industrial Gap, Ranked🔒
- New York and Alaska: The Two Extremes🔒
- The National Benchmark and the Spread Distribution🔒
- The Bottom Line🔒
- Data Appendix🔒
- Endnotes🔒
- U.S. Energy Information Administration
The full report ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia on two retail electricity rate-class spreads, residential-versus-industrial and commercial-versus-industrial, computed on trailing 12-month average prices through June 2026. It details the New York and Alaska extremes, the full spread distribution, and the U.S. national benchmark, with per-state ranking tables and monthly price series.
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