Most US electricity rate data is out of date
There is one comprehensive public source of US electricity tariffs: the Utility Rate Database, maintained by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It holds rate structures for thousands of utilities, it is free, and almost every tool that prices American electricity is built on it.
It also has a problem that is easy to miss and hard to unsee once you have.
An empty end date does not mean a live tariff
Every rate in the database has a start date and an end date. A rate with no end date reads as current. That is how everyone, ourselves included, initially decides what to publish.
But an empty end date does not mean the tariff is in force. It means nobody recorded an end. NREL re-verifies roughly 150 utilities a year — about 70% of US electricity load — and everything outside that set keeps whatever it was last filed with, indefinitely, with no end date ever added.
The scale of it is larger than we expected. Of the 6,357 active residential tariffs in our September 2026 snapshot:
- 4,961 were filed before 2020.
- Only 154 of 2,589 utilities have any residential tariff filed in 2024 or later.
- The largest single cohort was filed in 2014.
How wrong does that make them?
This is measurable, so we measured it. The EIA's annual utility survey reports residential revenue and residential sales for each utility. Divide one by the other and you get what that utility genuinely billed, per kWh, on average. Compare that against what each tariff computes to, and the filing date predicts the gap almost perfectly:
| Filed | Tariffs | Median deviation from what the utility actually billed |
|---|---|---|
| 2025–2026 | 637 | +6.9% |
| 2023–2024 | 111 | +0.8% |
| 2015–2019 | 701 | −16.5% |
| Before 2015 | 1,717 | −16.8% |
| No date recorded | 123 | −20.4% |
Recent filings land within a few percent. Filings more than a decade old run about 17% low — which is roughly what a decade of price increases would predict. The data is not random noise. It is a snapshot of the past, still labeled as the present.
Why this quietly breaks every ranking
Here is the part that matters if you are comparing tariffs rather than just reading one.
Being out of date and being cheap are indistinguishable in the arithmetic. A tariff filed in 2013 computes to a low number because 2013 prices were low. A genuinely cheap 2026 tariff computes to a low number because it is genuinely cheap. Sort by price and the stale entries float to the top, because staleness looks exactly like a bargain.
In Georgia, the cheapest residential tariff on file reads $614 a year at 1,000 kWh a month. That figure comes from a 2018 filing. Restrict the same comparison to tariffs filed since 2020 and the cheapest is $1,224 a year.
Same state, same method, same day. The answer differs by a factor of two, and the entire difference is the age of the paperwork.
Across the whole dataset the effect is just as clear. Priced against every vintage, our figures sat a median of 13.2% below what utilities actually collect. Restricted to filings since 2020, they sit 4.9% above — close enough that the remaining gap is explained by a single tariff differing from a utility's blended average across all its customers, which it should.
What we do about it
We publish the filing year on every figure, and we rank only tariffs filed since 2020. Older tariffs stay visible, because the tariff document itself is still a useful reference, but they are never ranked and never given their own page. In our bill calculator the filter is on by default, and unchecking it tells you plainly what you are looking at.
That decision cost us most of the site. We catalog 6,357 tariffs and publish 911 of them, from 183 utilities rather than 2,589. It is the right trade: the alternative is thousands of pages quoting a decade-old filing as today's price.
The loss is also smaller than it looks. The utilities NREL re-verifies are the large ones, so those 183 cover a substantial share of US electricity load. The coverage shortfall is much bigger in pages than it is in people. We publish the full list of which utilities are maintained, so you can check yours.
What to do with this
If you are reading a rate comparison anywhere, look for the filing date. If a tool does not show you one, it either does not know or is not telling you, and neither is reassuring. A surprisingly cheap tariff is more often an old tariff than a bargain.
If you are building on the URDB, do not treat an empty end date as a currency signal. Join to EIA-861 revenue and sales, check your computed rate against what the utility actually collected, and be suspicious of anything more than about 2x away from it. That single check would catch most of what we found.
If your utility is one of the 2,406 without a recent filing, the most reliable source of your rate is your own bill, and your utility's own tariff page after that. That is not a satisfying answer, but it is the true one, and we would rather say so than publish a confident number we do not believe.