Your electricity rate is not what you think it is
Ask most people what they pay for electricity and you will get a single number in cents per kilowatt-hour. It is almost always wrong, and not by a little.
Three things are missing from it.
1. The adjustment that is not in the rate
Utility tariffs frequently separate the base energy charge from an adjustment — a fuel cost recovery rider, a storm surcharge, an environmental compliance component. The filing lists them separately. Your bill adds them together.
Georgia Power's residential time-of-use demand schedule is a clean example. The base off-peak energy charge is $0.01467 per kWh. The adjustment on top of it is $0.04454. What you actually pay off-peak is $0.05921 — four times the headline figure.
This is not unusual or hidden; it is how tariffs are structured. But it means any comparison built on the base rate alone is meaningless. Roughly 4,700 of the tier entries in the national tariff database carry a non-zero adjustment.
2. The fixed charge you pay before using anything
Almost every residential tariff has a charge that does not depend on consumption at all — a customer charge, a basic service charge, a facilities charge. It is typically $8 to $20 a month, and on some tariffs considerably more.
That charge changes which tariff is cheapest, and it changes the answer differently depending on how much you use. A tariff with a low energy rate and a $25 monthly charge beats a tariff with a high energy rate and no monthly charge — but only above a certain usage. Below it, the ranking flips.
This is why every figure on this site is an effective rate: the annual total, fixed charges included, divided by annual consumption. It is the only number that compares like with like.
Watch for one wrinkle. Some utilities file this charge per day rather than per month. A "$0.4603" charge sounds trivial next to a $14 one, until you notice it is daily — and therefore the same $14.
3. The tiers, which may not reset when you think
Tiered tariffs charge more per kWh as you use more. The threshold is usually monthly: the first 500 kWh at one price, everything above at another.
But not always. A meaningful minority of tariffs set the threshold per day. A tariff with a 10 kWh daily first tier gives you 310 kWh at the cheap rate in January and only 280 in February. Same tariff, same usage, different bill — purely because of the calendar.
What to do with this
If you want to know what you actually pay, take your annual total cost — every line, including the fixed charges — and divide it by your annual kWh. That single number is comparable across tariffs and across utilities. It is usually higher than the rate you thought you were on.
Then, if you want to know whether a different tariff would be cheaper, the question is not which has the lower rate. It is which produces a lower total at your consumption, which depends on your usage level, and for time-of-use tariffs, on when you use it.
You can run that comparison here against every residential tariff on file in your state.