US households served by investor-owned electric utilities paid an average of 17.8 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, about 23% more than the 14.5-cent average at publicly owned providers, according to an analysis of federal utility data published by Kadoa.
The comparison also put the average rate at electric cooperatives at 14.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. Kadoa based its calculations on the US Energy Information Administration's annual Form 861 survey, which reports utility-level residential revenue, electricity sales and customer counts. Its analysis covers customers buying both supply and delivery from their utility.
The ownership gap sits alongside a broader divergence in price growth. Between 2020 and 2025, Kadoa calculated that average residential prices at investor-owned utilities increased 34%. Rates at public utilities and cooperatives each rose 19% over the same period. For context, the analysis placed overall inflation, measured using the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index, at 24%.
That means the investor-owned average increased faster than inflation, while the two nonprofit ownership categories increased more slowly. Kadoa found investor-owned prices grew faster than public-provider prices in 38 of the 48 states included in its state-level comparison.
The figures describe averages within ownership groups, rather than the bill charged by every provider. Electricity costs vary substantially with generation mix, infrastructure, regulation and geography. Kadoa separately highlighted hydro-heavy states including Washington, Vermont, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Alaska and South Dakota when presenting state comparisons. The analysis therefore does not establish that ownership alone caused a particular utility's rates.
Kadoa also published downloadable annual data extending back to 2015, allowing comparisons by state, ownership type and utility. The dataset includes residential revenue, kilowatt-hours sold, household counts, calculated prices and bills. Charts accompanying the analysis show the distribution of households across rate bands, rather than relying only on a national mean.
The project includes reliability data as another point of comparison. Its outage measure uses average minutes without power for a household while excluding major storms, again drawing on the EIA's annual utility survey. That distinction matters because price alone does not capture service quality, and storm exposure can otherwise dominate outage totals.
The central result is a national ownership-level difference, not a forecast or a claim that each public system is cheaper than each private one. Still, the five-year trend indicates that the average price gap widened during a period of sharp increases in energy and other household costs. The published data gives customers and policymakers a way to examine whether that pattern holds in their own state and at large individual utilities.
