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About Average Energy Cost

Average Energy Cost exists for one narrow job: telling you, state by state and fuel by fuel, what home energy actually costs — the average electricity price and bill, the delivered price of natural gas, and the surveyed prices of heating oil and propane — before you judge your own bill against them.

Editorial policy & methodology: how the figures are sourced and verified

Every figure on this site comes from a named U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) publication that we opened and read during the October 2026 research pass:

Electricity — annual averages. Average price, average monthly consumption, and average monthly bill by state come from EIA's Electric Sales, Revenue, and Average Price (Form EIA-861), Table 5A, for 2024 — the latest full year EIA has published.
Electricity — latest month. Where we show a current snapshot, it is the Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A (Form EIA-861M) — labelled with its month and marked preliminary, never blended into the annual figures.
Natural gas. Residential delivered prices by state come from the Natural Gas Annual, Table 23 (Form EIA-176), for 2024. Per-therm figures are the same prices converted at 1 Mcf ≈ 10.37 therms, and are labelled as conversions.
Heating oil & propane. Per-gallon residential prices come from EIA's weekly Heating Oil and Propane Update, always labelled with the survey week. EIA surveys these fuels October through March, and only in the states where they are common heating fuels.

Three working rules follow from that method. Where EIA does not publish a figure, we say so on the page — there is no EIA residential heating-oil average for 29 states and no propane average for 12, and those state pages print "not published" rather than an estimate. Where a bill would need a consumption figure EIA's price tables don't carry — an "average gas bill" is the standing example — we publish the price and price the reader's own usage in the calculator instead of multiplying a verified price by an unverified guess. Arithmetic we perform ourselves (per-therm conversions, the cost of a standard tank fill at a published price) is labelled as arithmetic, with the published figure it starts from. Every page carries its source and data period, and figures are re-checked against the EIA publication when a page is updated.

What this site is not

Average Energy Cost is an educational publisher, not a utility, energy supplier, broker, or marketplace. We sell nothing, take no sign-ups, and recommend no plans, suppliers, tariffs, or installers — there are no affiliate offers here. State averages describe the typical household, never your exact bill: your cost depends on your utility's tariff, your home, and your usage. Confirm any figure you act on against your own bill or your utility's published rate schedule.

The rest of the network

This site is part of a small portfolio of cost-guide sites built on the same principle — researched figures, named sources, free calculators — including home project costs at averagehomecost.com, court filing costs at courtcostguide.com, and business formation fees at llccostguide.com.

Corrections

Energy prices move, and EIA revises its preliminary monthly figures. If a figure here no longer matches the EIA publication it cites, tell us through the contact page with the publication link, and we will update the page and note the change.