Pennsylvania Electricity Rates: What Your Utility Charges, and What Other Sites Get Wrong

Start with a rule that does not exist.

Search for Pennsylvania electricity and you will be told the state caps early termination fees at $50. ElectricRates.org states it flatly. There is no such cap. Real Pennsylvania contracts run from $0 to $500, and we link both of them below.

Here is the second thing. We checked twelve pages ranking for Pennsylvania electricity. The average home rate they report runs from 14.18 cents to 21.73 cents per kWh for the same month, and not one of them cites a dated source you can check. When we looked on 15 September 2026, ElectricityRates.com gave both numbers on the same page.

Every rate on this page comes from one place: the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission press release of 20 May 2026. One source, one date, so you can check every row.

What your utility charges today

If you have never picked a supplier, you are on your utility’s Default Service, and the rate you pay for supply is called the Price to Compare. Here it is for all eleven Pennsylvania utilities, for homes, from 1 June 2026.

Your utility	Where it serves	Price to Compare	Supply for 817 kWh a month
Duquesne Light	Pittsburgh and Allegheny County	14.14 cents per kWh	$115.52
Met-Ed	Reading, Allentown area, south central PA	13.951 cents	$113.98
Penn Power	New Castle and the northwest	13.477 cents	$110.11
Pike County Light and Power	Milford and Pike County	13.43 cents	$109.72
Citizens’ Electric	Lewisburg	13.215 cents	$107.97
PPL Electric Utilities	Lehigh Valley, Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster	13.147 cents	$107.41
Penelec	Erie, Johnstown, north central PA	13.142 cents	$107.37
UGI Electric	Luzerne and Northampton counties	12.617 cents	$103.08
Wellsboro Electric	Wellsboro and Tioga County	12.556 cents	$102.58
West Penn Power	Greensburg, Washington, southwest PA	12.075 cents	$98.65
PECO	Philadelphia and the five county area	11.572 cents	$94.54

Rates are the residential Price to Compare from the PUC’s 20 May 2026 release. The last column is that rate times 817 kWh, which is the average monthly use of a Pennsylvania home in the US Energy Information Administration’s 2024 figures. It is supply only. Your delivery charges come on top and differ by utility, and we have not printed them because we have not yet checked each utility’s current delivery charge.

Three utilities publish a slightly different figure on their own sites, because they fold in a state tax surcharge or a transmission component: PECO 11.759, Met-Ed 13.954 and West Penn Power 12.076. The gap is under two tenths of a cent. We use the PUC table so every row comes from the same source.

Every one of these except UGI changes on 1 December 2026. Pennsylvania utilities reset the Price to Compare twice a year, on 1 June and 1 December. UGI says its price to compare can change throughout the year and gives no next date.

Most Pennsylvania homes do not shop, and shoppers have paid more overall

In February 2026, the newest figures on PAPowerSwitch, 1,184,653 of Pennsylvania’s 5,296,693 residential electric customers were with a competitive supplier. That is 22.4 percent. More than three in four homes are on Default Service.

How that has worked out for the shoppers, in the words of the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, testifying to the General Assembly on 12 January 2026:

residential shopping customers were charged well over $2.2 billion more, in the aggregate, than if they remained on default service.

A press write up of the same testimony adds that shopping customers overpaid more than $400 million in 2024 alone, citing the Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate.

That does not mean switching is always a mistake. It means the default is a real benchmark, and most of the work is in reading the contract.

The $50 early termination fee cap is a myth

ElectricRates.org, among others, tells readers Pennsylvania caps early termination fees at $50. It does not. The PUC’s own end of contract guide requires a supplier to disclose the fee and how to avoid it. It sets no ceiling. Here are two real Pennsylvania contracts, at the two ends of the range:

Contract	Early termination fee
Green Choice Energy, PA dual fuel fixed	$500 if less than 12 months remain, $100 if more than 12 months remain
The Energy Co-op, PA	No cancellation fee at all

What the rule does control is timing. Under 52 Pa. Code Section 54.10, once your supplier has sent the options notice about your contract ending, it cannot charge an early termination fee at all. The PUC’s guide puts it simply: no fee applies in the final 30 days of a contract.

So the honest answer is $0 to $500, no state cap, and the fee disappears in the last 30 days. Find the fee in your disclosure statement before you sign. There is more on it in Pennsylvania electricity early termination fees.

What you pay if you do nothing when your contract ends

Every page we checked tells you to shop before your contract renews. None of them tells you what happens if you do not. Here is the honest answer, from PAPowerSwitch:

When your fixed contract ends, doing nothing does not send you back to your utility’s rate. Your supplier can keep serving you at the new price in its options notice, and that is often a month to month variable price. You only go back to the Price to Compare if the supplier returns you or you ask.

Before that happens, the PUC’s rules say you get two notices:

• An initial notice 45 to 60 days before the end.
• An options notice at least 30 days before the end, sent first class, with the envelope itself marked that it contains important information about your contract ending.
• If you do not reply, the supplier can move you to a month to month plan with no cancellation fee, or to a new fixed plan you can leave without penalty.
• Either way, it must tell you the new rate before the next billing cycle.

So what is the new rate? We looked for a published example: one Pennsylvania customer’s expiring fixed rate next to the variable rate that replaced it. We could not find one. The regulator’s disclosure templates leave the price blank, and public complaints show the high bill but not the old rate. We will not make one up.

There is no cap on variable rates in Pennsylvania either. After 2014 the state tightened disclosure and notice rather than capping the number. Under 52 Pa. Code Section 54.5 a supplier must state the factors it uses to set the price, and say in larger type that the price can change.

Put your contract end date in your phone calendar the day you sign, and open every envelope from your supplier. There is more on it in what happens when your Pennsylvania electricity contract ends.

What happened the last time variable rates went wrong

What we can show you is the record. In the 2014 polar vortex, households on variable rate contracts saw bills triple in weeks, and the PUC opened a formal case after more than 750 high bill complaints. In complaints against Pennsylvania Gas and Electric from February 2014, one customer’s bill “tripled in one month”, from about $49 to $224, as the rate went from $0.0790 to $0.2638 per kWh. Another described a “300% jump” in four weeks, “from $200 a month to over $800 a month.”

Here is what the regulator found when it looked, in its own settlements and orders.

Supplier	What was found	Result
IDT Energy, 30 June 2016	Slamming, which means switching customers without proper authorisation. Misleading savings claims. Charging a price different from the one disclosed	$6,577,000 in refunds and penalties. Barred from selling variable rate products for 21 months
Respond Power, 11 August 2016	Misleading marketing of a variable rate plan	About $5.2 million in refunds and penalties. Fixed price only for two years, and no cancellation fees on variable products
Blue Pilot Energy	4,490 residential and 3,371 small business overbilling occurrences, and a March 2014 price increase of more than 500 percent of the Price to Compare	$2,508,449 in refunds and a $1,066,900 penalty
American Power and Gas	Misleading sales scripts, agents not naming the supplier at the start of a call, not saying promptly that the rate was variable	$30,000 civil penalty, scripts and training revised

Blue Pilot argued the PUC was regulating competitive prices. The Commission’s answer was that it was not setting prices. It was checking whether the price charged matched what the company had disclosed and marketed. That is the protection you actually have: not a limit on the price, but a right to the price you were told.

In the Respond Power case, the Office of Consumer Advocate and the Attorney General argued that Respond customers paid above the Price to Compare in 402 of 615 monthly bills they examined. That is from their brief as advocates, not a final Commission decision. The patterns behind complaints like these are in Pennsylvania electricity supplier complaints.

The comparison almost everyone gets wrong

You will read on several comparison sites, in almost the same words, that your utility still delivers and only the supply rate changes, so you can compare a supplier’s rate straight against the Price to Compare. That is true on the day you compare. It stops being true over a two year contract, for two reasons.

• Delivery charges move. The PUC lets utilities charge a Distribution System Improvement Charge and adjust it every quarter between full rate cases. Utilities also file base rate cases that reset delivery for good, as PPL did in 2026.
• The Price to Compare moves too, twice a year. A supplier rate that beats it in September may not beat it after 1 December.

Neither side of the comparison stands still. And never compare a supplier’s rate against your total bill. At 817 kWh a month, every one cent per kWh is worth $8.17 a month. The gap between the highest and lowest Price to Compare in the table above, Duquesne Light against PECO, is about $21 a month in supply alone.

If you are on a Customer Assistance Program

The shopping rules are different for low income customers, and not one of the twelve pages we checked mentions it. The Pennsylvania Utility Law Project told legislators: “Low income shoppers are subject to even higher rates in the competitive market, suggesting suppliers may actively target low income communities with higher priced offers.”

FirstEnergy’s own Pennsylvania supplier guidance, for Met-Ed, Penelec, Penn Power and West Penn Power, says a CAP customer may only shop under a contract that:

• stays at or below the Price to Compare for the whole contract,
• has no early termination fee, and
• is billed through the utility, on one bill.

If you are already in a fixed contract when you join CAP, you stay until it ends. Then the supplier must either offer you a contract that meets those rules or return you to the utility, and you have to agree before being moved. A supplier dropping a CAP customer must give 30 days notice. If you are on a month to month supplier product when you join, the supplier has 120 days to put you on a compliant contract or return you to Default Service. That is not a general promise that every CAP shopper goes back to the utility after 120 days.

This is confirmed for those four FirstEnergy utilities only. If you are with PECO, PPL, Duquesne Light or another utility, ask your utility how its CAP rules work before you shop.

How switching actually works here

A switch takes about three business days once your utility is told, according to PAPowerSwitch and the PUC. It then takes effect at your next regular meter read.

Pennsylvania sped switching up to three business days after 2014, so a customer stuck on a bad variable rate can get out faster.

Your details are on a marketing list unless you opt out

Pennsylvania utilities must hand your name, billing address, service address, rate class and usage to competitive suppliers for marketing, on what is called the Eligible Customer List, unless you opt out.

The opt out does not last. PUC guidance dated 15 May 2024 says:

even if a customer has indicated in a prior solicitation that they do not want their information released, if they do not opt-out when re-solicited, they will be included in the ECL.

Utilities must ask again every three years. The Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate has argued this is weaker than the federal Do Not Call list, which never expires. When the letter comes, opt out again.

Watch who comes to the door, too. A customer in East Germantown, Philadelphia, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that agents said “they were working with Peco to lower energy costs in low-income neighborhoods.” She gave a verbal yes, signed nothing, and was enrolled with a supplier anyway. Her bill went from about $50 a month to over $200. She got an $800 partial refund only after Community Legal Services stepped in. In a separate case, the PUC fined Vista Energy Marketing more than $50,000 in 2019 for sending door to door agents out without the required criminal background checks.

Where to compare, today

Pennsylvania’s regulator runs its own shopping site, PAPowerSwitch. Use it with this page open, and check any offer against your utility’s Price to Compare above.

We are not live in Pennsylvania yet. We cover Texas today, and you can see how our plan comparison works there. Leave your email if you want to know the day we launch here.

Questions

Is there a cap on early termination fees in Pennsylvania?

No. Real contracts run from $0 to $500. What the rule controls is timing: no fee applies in the final 30 days of a contract.

If I do nothing when my contract ends, do I go back to my utility’s rate?

Not automatically. Your supplier can keep serving you at the price in its options notice, often a month to month variable price, unless it returns you or you ask.

Is there a cap on how high a variable rate can go?

No. Pennsylvania requires disclosure and notice instead. The supplier must state how it sets the price and say that the price can change.

When do these rates change?

On 1 December 2026, for every utility in the table except UGI, which gives no next date.

How long does a switch take?

About three business days once your utility is told. It then takes effect at your next regular meter read.

How do I stop suppliers getting my details?

Opt out of the Eligible Customer List when your utility asks. It asks again every three years, and you have to opt out again each time.

I am on a Customer Assistance Program. Can I shop?

With Met-Ed, Penelec, Penn Power or West Penn Power, only under a contract at or below the Price to Compare for its whole term, with no early termination fee. With any other utility, ask your utility first.