The price that changes with the month

Every tariff that varies its price publishes a grid: twelve months by twenty-four hours, each cell naming the period that applies. A time-of-use plan changes the period along the row, hour by hour. A seasonal plan changes it down the column, month by month — and a great many plans do both.

The boundary is the utility’s to draw, and it does not follow the calendar seasons. Across the plans here the dear stretch runs four, five or six months, starting as early as May and as late as November. Which stretch is the dear one follows what its customers use electricity for: 55 of these plans price the summer highest, where the load is air conditioning, and 20 price the winter highest, where it is heating.

One row per utility, at the widest gap it publishes. The cents are read from the tariff: the price of the period covering most hours of the month, so it describes an ordinary hour rather than a peak. The dollars are priced by the rate engine, billing 1,000 kWh in every month of 2026 and reporting each month on its own.

20 of these 75 plans price every hour of a day alike and change only with the month. They carry two prices in the filing, so a plan summary calls them variable — but there is no hour to shift a load into, and the time-of-use guide leaves them out for exactly that reason. This is where they are counted.

The other 55 do both: an hourly ladder that is itself steeper in the dear months. For those, the two guides describe one plan from two directions.

Not shift it. Nobody moves July into January, which is what separates a seasonal price from an hourly one: the hourly price is a choice, the seasonal one is a date. What it changes is what a number means. A bill from a dear month is not evidence that a plan is expensive, and one from a cheap month is not evidence that it is not — comparing either against a neighbour’s, or against last year’s, only works month against the same month.

It also moves what an appliance costs. Running the same dryer through the dear stretch costs more than the same dryer in the cheap one, on the same plan, and the cost-to-run pages price a year rather than a month, so they average the two. The bill analyzer takes a real month’s consumption and prices it against the plan as filed, season included.

Consumption is spread evenly: 1,000 kWh in every month, including the dear ones. A real household usually uses most in the months its utility charges most for, which makes the gap between a July bill and a January one larger than the gap shown here, not smaller.

A utility can file one schedule with different seasons in different territories, and this table states one of them — the one belonging to the plan shown. Taxes are not included, and the figures describe published tariffs rather than an offer made to anyone.

Every figure here is computed when the site is built, from the records named below, by the same rate engine that fills the state, utility and appliance pages this guide links to. When those records are refreshed, the figures change with them; the words around them do not, which is why no sentence here states a direction the data has not been checked for.

The text was reviewed by the editor before publication. The methodology page sets out what the rate engine assumes and where its figures stop being reliable.