When a business owner asks what their ComEd rate is, they usually mean the cents per kilowatt hour someone quoted them. That number is real, but it is only one piece of what a commercial account actually pays, and on many bills it is not the piece that matters most.
A ComEd commercial rate is really three different prices doing three different jobs: a supply rate you can shop, a delivery rate you cannot, and a demand charge set by a single thirty minute interval. Each is measured differently, and only one of them is the number on the flyer. Together they are the account's rate structure, and it is the mix, not the quoted rate, that decides the bill.
What are the current commercial electric rates in Illinois?
There is no single current commercial rate in Illinois, and the honest version of that answer is more useful than a number: of the three prices on a commercial bill, only one is published as a figure you could look up.
That one is the delivery demand rate. For ComEd in 2026, at Secondary voltage, the filed base Distribution Facilities Charge is:
- Small Load: $12.50 per kW
- Medium Load: $12.78 per kW
- Large Load: $12.47 per kW
- Very Large Load: $11.49 per kW
- Extra Large Load: $11.63 per kW
The 2025 column of the same schedule read $12.71, $13.02, $12.72, $11.77 and $11.43 for those same five classes. That comparison is worth a moment: the rate barely moved, and four of the five classes came down. Only Extra Large Load rose, by twenty cents. If a ComEd business bill is higher this year, the demand rate is unlikely to be the reason.
Those are base rates, not the rate on your bill. Delivery service riders are added on top, which is why the reconciled 2026 account further down this page was billed about $12.93 per kW against a filed base between $12.50 and $12.78. The Distribution Facilities Charge is where that gap is broken down.
Supply is where the question quietly breaks down. Residential supplier offers in Illinois are listed publicly through the state's offer listings. Commercial offers are not. They are negotiated per account against your load shape and your contract term, and there is no public record of what Illinois businesses are actually paying. Any single cents per kWh figure presented as the current commercial supply rate for Illinois is an average of contracts nobody can show you, and it is not a price anyone can quote you off a page.
One more thing the word Illinois hides. ComEd serves the northern corner of the state; most of the rest is Ameren Illinois, on a different tariff. We reconcile ComEd bills to the cent and we have not reconciled an Ameren Illinois bill, so we do not quote Ameren rates, windows or determinants. Every figure above is a ComEd figure. If your bill says Ameren, none of these numbers are yours.
The ComEd supply rate: the one you were quoted
Supply is the energy itself, measured in kilowatt hours and priced in cents per kWh. This is the half of the ComEd bill that Illinois opened to competition, so a third party supplier can sell it to you and compete on the rate. It is also the number everyone talks about, because it is the one a salesperson can change.
The supply rate moves. ComEd's own default supply rate is reset periodically through a state supervised auction, and third party offers rise and fall around it. That is worth knowing before you sign a fixed rate, because the honest comparison is against ComEd's current price to compare, not against last year's. But supply is only ever part of the story, and for a lot of commercial accounts it is the smaller part.
Delivery: the rate you cannot shop
Delivery is what it costs to move that energy over ComEd's wires to your building. Illinois left this half a regulated monopoly, because it makes no sense to run three sets of wires down the same street. You cannot shop it, and you cannot get off ComEd, no matter who supplies your energy.
The delivery rate is not a single cents per kWh figure. It is a bundle: a fixed customer charge, some energy based distribution charges, and, for commercial accounts, a demand charge that is often the largest single line on the bill.
The demand charge: the rate set by one interval
On ComEd commercial accounts the delivery demand charge appears as the Distribution Facilities Charge. It is a flat rate per kilowatt, applied to the highest thirty minute demand your site recorded inside the on-peak window, nine in the morning to six in the evening on weekdays. Not the energy you used. The single highest rate at which you pulled it.
That per kilowatt rate depends on your delivery class and the year. Reconstructing it from real reconciled ComEd bills:
- A Small Load account (under 100 kW) on a 2025 bill was billed about $14.59 per kW. On one such account, a 40.91 kW peak demand produced a $596.88 Distribution Facilities Charge for the month.
- A Medium Load account (100 to 400 kW) on a 2025 bill was billed about $14.92 per kW. On one such account, a 242.57 kW peak produced a $3,619.14 charge in a single month.
- A 2026 Retail Delivery Service account was billed about $12.93 per kW under the newer bill format. On one such account, a 46.20 kW peak produced a $597.37 charge.
Each of those figures was reconciled to the cent against the bill it came from. The per kilowatt rate is not the point. The point is that one interval, often lasting half an hour, sets a line that can rival or exceed the entire supply cost for the month.
Which rate applies to you follows from the delivery class named on your bill, and the instinct that follows from reading it, holding demand under a threshold, turns out to be worth less than it sounds.
When the bill jumps and the rate did not
The three prices above are stable between filings. Bills are not. When a ComEd business bill rises sharply from one month to the next, the cause is almost never the rate, and there are only a handful of candidates worth checking: which of them moved your bill is answerable from the bills themselves before anyone is called.
Why the rate you were quoted is not the rate you pay
Put the three together and the reason a quoted rate rarely predicts the bill becomes clear. The quote changes the supply price. The delivery price is fixed by regulation. The demand charge is set by your own load, on the one interval you probably were not watching. Two businesses on the identical supply rate can pay very different totals depending on how peaky their demand is and when that peak lands.
This is also why switching suppliers so often barely moves the bill. The switch touches the one price you can shop, while the delivery charge and the demand charge, the parts you cannot shop, keep doing what they were doing.
See your own numbers
Everything above was reconstructed from real bills reconciled to the cent against their interval data. You can run the same reconstruction on your own ComEd bill and see the exact interval that set your demand charge, with the free demand charge tool. That one needs your interval export alongside the bill. If you only have the bill, the free ComEd bill reader starts from the PDF, rebuilds every charge, and works out which delivery class you are actually on by reconciling the demand line to the filed ratebook. We do not sell energy and we take no commission. The tools exist to make the rate legible, nothing more.
If you are weighing a battery against that demand charge, which the new Illinois incentives have made a live question for a lot of commercial accounts, start with the bill itself: the free bill reader reads your ComEd bill PDF, rebuilds every charge, checks it against what ComEd printed, and offers to request the interval data that a battery decision has to be built on. It is free, and we take no commission.
