Co-op, city utility or investor-owned: who charges more?

Nobody chooses who owns their electric utility; it depends on where you live. But ownership shapes what you pay, and not always in the way people expect.

There are three main kinds. Investor-owned utilities are companies owned by shareholders, and they serve 61% of US residential customers. Cooperatives are owned by their members and mostly serve rural areas: 12%. Municipal utilities are run by a city or town: 8%, with public power districts, a similar public form, serving another 2%. Most of the rest are counted under retail suppliers, in states where households can buy their electricity separately from its delivery.

What each charged in 2025

Dividing what each utility collected from residential customers by what it sold them gives the average price per kWh actually paid, fixed charges included. For 2025:

Kind of utility	Utilities	Median price per kWh
Public power district	52	11.0¢
Municipal	455	13.0¢
Cooperative	551	14.3¢
Investor-owned	140	17.0¢

That comparison flatters the public utilities, because investor-owned ones are concentrated in expensive places such as California, New York and New England. A fairer test is to compare within the same state.

Within the same state

• City utilities charged less than the same state's investor-owned utilities in 39 of 44 states, typically about 19% less.
• Public power districts charged less in 6 of 9 states, typically 7% less.
• Co-ops were cheaper more often than not, in 28 of 43 states, but typically by only 6%.

Where co-ops cost more: the fixed charge

The monthly charge for being connected, before the first kilowatt-hour, differs much more than the price per kWh. On the residential tariffs filed since 2020:

Kind of utility	Utilities	Median fixed charge
Cooperative	42	$29.75 a month
Public power district	6	$27.32 a month
Municipal	28	$18.88 a month
Investor-owned	83	$13.08 a month

A co-op's typical fixed charge is more than double an investor-owned utility's. The usual explanation is the territory: a rural co-op maintains more miles of line per customer, and recovers more of that cost through the fixed charge than through the price per kWh.

That matters most to households that use little electricity, because the fixed charge is a larger share of a small bill. The fixed charge on your bill has probably gone up looks at how those charges have moved.

What you can change

You cannot switch utility, but you can usually choose among its tariffs. Your utility probably offers more than one rate, and on a co-op the gap between options often comes down to how the fixed charge and the price per kWh are balanced.

How we measured this

• Prices: EIA-861 for 2025, residential revenue divided by residential sales, for bundled service: customers who buy their electricity from the utility itself. 1,206 utilities have both a price and an ownership type. NSTAR Electric (Eversource) in Massachusetts is left out: its 2025 bundled price as reported sits barely above what it collected for delivery alone, which points to a reporting error.
• Medians across utilities: each utility counts once, whatever its size.
• Within the same state: the median of each kind in each state, set against the median of that state's investor-owned utilities. A utility serving several states counts in each, at its price in that state.
• Fixed charges: current tariffs open to any household, filed since 2020, priced as a whole home's bill and not flagged as a likely data error, the same set this site ranks. Each utility counts once, at the median of its tariffs.
• Ownership is as EIA reports it. Customer shares use EIA's 2025 residential customer counts.

What to do with this

Find your utility in the calculator and enter your usage. It prices every current tariff your utility files with the fixed charge included, which is the only fair way to compare them.