The typical American household is on track to pay 18.6 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity in 2027, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s September forecast. That would be 1.3 cents above the 17.3 cents the agency records for 2025, a rise of about 7.5 percent over two years.
The projection comes from the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook, released September 9 with the forecast itself completed on September 3. It is a modeled estimate rather than a bill, and it describes a national average that individual states and utilities will land above or below, since rates are set state by state through regulators and utility rate cases.
The EIA price path from 2024 to 2027
The residential price table in the EIA’s electricity, coal and renewables section lists four figures: 16.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2024, 17.3 cents in 2025, 18.2 cents in 2026 and 18.6 cents in 2027. The step from 2024 to 2025 was 0.8 cents, or nearly 5 percent, and the forecast keeps prices climbing from there. Moving from 17.3 to 18.2 cents in 2026 is an increase of roughly 5 percent, while the step from 18.2 to 18.6 cents in 2027 is closer to 2 percent, which suggests the forecast expects the pace of increases to slow even as the level keeps climbing.
The EIA publishes its outlook every month, and the numbers move with each release, so the 2027 figure is a snapshot of one forecast rather than a settled outcome. The full set of projections sits on the Short-Term Energy Outlook home page, where the September edition is the current one.
Measured from the 2024 starting point, the 2027 figure is 2.1 cents higher than the 16.5 cents recorded that year, a cumulative increase of about 13 percent across three years. Over the same stretch the agency expects total electricity sales to keep rising, so households are forecast to face both a higher unit price and a grid that is serving more load than at any point in the series the outlook reports.
Data centers and record demand behind the forecast
Demand is the driver the agency points to most directly. In the September outlook, the EIA forecasts record electricity consumption and attributes it to “data center development and increased manufacturing activity in the commercial and industrial sectors,” a pairing that puts computing campuses and factories at the center of the demand story. The agency expects U.S. electricity sales of 4,135 billion kilowatt-hours in 2026, an increase of almost 2 percent over 2025, and 4,211 billion in 2027.
The commercial sector supplies most of that growth. The agency forecasts commercial sales to rise 3.3 percent in 2026 and 2.7 percent in 2027, accounting for 63 percent and 56 percent of the increase in total sales in those years. Texas has paused connecting new data centers to the grid while regulators audit proposed projects, yet the West South Central region, which includes Texas, still accounts for the largest regional share of growth, according to the outlook.
The outlook builds on a trend the agency flagged in January, when it forecast the strongest four-year growth in U.S. electricity demand since 2000. In that press release, EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey said that electricity demand “rises through 2027, driven largely by increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers.”
What sits inside a retail electricity price
Rising demand is only part of what shows up on a household bill. In a May 2025 analysis, the EIA noted that retail prices “include the cost of generating, transmitting, and delivering electricity to ultimate customers, as well as taxes and other fees,” and that electric utilities “have increased capital investment to replace or upgrade aging generation and delivery infrastructure, among other factors.” The same analysis found utility spending on electricity distribution has surpassed spending on transmission and production, and that retail prices have risen faster than inflation since 2022.
The agency’s monthly Electric Power Monthly, whose latest edition covers July 2026 and was released September 24, is where the actual average price paid by each customer class is reported once a month is over. That report is the check on whether the outlook holds, because the Short-Term Energy Outlook is revised every month as new price and demand data arrive, and forecasts of this kind can move in either direction between editions.
The national average also hides wide gaps. The same analysis found the Pacific, Middle Atlantic and New England regions had seen larger increases than the national average, so a household in one of those regions could pay well above the 18.6-cent figure in 2027 even if the forecast is met on average.
The next monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook will show whether the agency keeps its 2027 residential estimate at 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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