The instrument above is ComEd's residential Price to Compare, the cents per kWh figure every supplier offer is measured against, drawn for every month the Illinois Commerce Commission has posted since January 2017. The current value is 10.399 cents per kWh, effective June 1, 2026. Every number on this page comes from the ICC's official publication, and the current window is checked against a real ComEd bill that we reconciled to its printed supply lines to the cent. We do not sell energy and we take no commission; the page exists to keep the number honest and in one place.
What is the ComEd price to compare?
The Price to Compare is what ComEd charges for the energy itself when you have not signed with a third party supplier: the electric supply charge plus the transmission services charge. For the summer window of June 1 through September 30, 2026 that is 8.677 cents of supply plus 1.722 cents of transmission, 10.399 cents per kWh in total. ComEd does not profit on this energy. It buys power through state supervised procurement and passes the cost through, which is why the number moves on a schedule instead of standing still.
One adjustment rides outside the headline number. The Purchased Electricity Adjustment is a small monthly credit or charge that trues up the difference between the posted rate and what the electricity actually cost. It is not part of the Price to Compare as posted, and the full record keeps it as its own column.
When does the price to compare reset?
The rate is set at procurement resets in June and October, so the next scheduled reset is October 1, 2026. Between resets the posted number can still drift by small amounts in other months, and the chart draws every posted month rather than an idealized two-step year, so what you see is the record, not a simplification.
The June 2026 reset moved the rate from 9.66 to 10.399 cents per kWh, an increase of 0.74 cents, about 7.7 percent. On a home using 750 kWh a month, that reset alone added about five and a half dollars a month on the supply side. The record also holds the other direction: in June 2023 the rate fell by 2.86 cents in a single reset. A rate that looked bad against last year's Price to Compare can look fine against this year's, which is exactly why the comparison has to be made against the current posted value. The June 2025 reset was larger still, 6.552 to 10.028, and why Illinois electric rates are going up walks the record reset by reset, including the capacity charge that moved inside it.
What the nine year record shows: seven flat years, then two that were not
The chart above is easy to read as a line going up. Read at the June reset, which is where the rate is actually set, the record says something more specific, and it is the answer to whether prices have really risen or whether it only feels that way.
| June of |
Price to Compare |
Change from the year before |
| 2017 |
6.892 |
|
| 2018 |
7.358 |
up 6.8 percent |
| 2019 |
6.725 |
down 8.6 percent |
| 2020 |
6.473 |
down 3.7 percent |
| 2021 |
6.776 |
up 4.7 percent |
| 2022 |
11.041 |
up 62.9 percent |
| 2023 |
6.809 |
down 38.3 percent |
| 2024 |
6.900 |
up 1.3 percent |
| 2025 |
10.028 |
up 45.3 percent |
| 2026 |
10.399 |
up 3.7 percent |
All figures in cents per kWh, from the ICC's posted history.
In June 2024 ComEd's posted supply price was 6.900 cents per kWh, eight thousandths of a cent from what it was in June 2017. Seven years, and the supply half of the bill ended where it started. The rise everyone is describing happened in the two years after that: up 45.3 percent at the June 2025 reset, and up again in June 2026 to 10.399.
The record holds one more thing worth knowing before drawing a line into next year. The last increase of this size reversed completely: the rate rose 62.9 percent in June 2022 and was back at 6.809 cents by June 2023. That is one prior instance, not a pattern and not a forecast. It happened once, the procurement events that produce these numbers are run fresh each time, and nothing in this record says the next reset goes in either direction. What it does say is that a supply rate is capable of falling by more than a third in a single year, so a decision made on the assumption that today's number is permanent is a decision made on an assumption this record does not support.
Two limits belong with those two sentences. This is the supply half of the bill only, and the two halves do not behave alike: across every year on file, ComEd's residential delivery charges have not fallen once. And the posted rate is not the whole supply cost of a month, because the Purchased Electricity Adjustment rides on top of it and is a credit about as often as a charge.
What does the current rate do to a bill like yours?
A posted rate is an abstraction until it is multiplied by your usage. The instrument's panel links the free bill grader with the current Price to Compare already filled in: put in your bill total and your kWh and it shows the all-in rate you actually paid next to the rate printed on the page, which is almost always lower than the all-in number. That difference, not the headline rate, is what deciding blind costs.
If you are weighing a supplier offer, the honest comparison is the offer's cents per kWh against 10.399, on the same window, with the same treatment of any monthly fee. An offer that beats the Price to Compare saves money on the supply line; an offer that only beats last year's number does not.
The same ICC publication posts a separate Price to Compare for Ameren Illinois, and why Ameren Illinois rates are going up charts that record, including its June 2026 step from 8.769 to 11.326 cents per kWh.
How to reduce it
These two lines are what a supplier is selling. The Price to Compare is their sum: the electric supply charge plus the transmission services charge, posted by the Illinois Commerce Commission and printed on the bill.
Put the offer's cents per kWh next to that printed number, for the same months, counting any monthly fee the same way on both sides. An offer that beats the printed number is cheaper on these lines. An offer that only beats last year's number is not. Nothing here promises a saving. The next reset can move the posted rate, and the rest of the bill is delivery, which a supplier cannot touch.
Hourly pricing is not this comparison. It settles hour by hour, and a new connection to ComEd's interval data does not cover a full year of the hours that set capacity. This page does not recommend it.
The price to compare covers the supply half only
Nothing about this number touches the delivery side of the bill. Delivery is ComEd's regulated charge for the wires and it is identical no matter who supplies the energy, so a supplier switch leaves it untouched. That split is the whole of whether ComEd is a monopoly: a regulated one on the wires, a no-markup pass-through on the energy. For a residential account, supply is most of the bill and the Price to Compare is the number that matters. For many commercial accounts the weight flips.
Two things sit inside the supply half that a headline rate can hide. One is capacity, set by what a building drew during a handful of hours last summer and priced for the year that follows: an offer that quotes a low energy rate while passing capacity through separately is not comparable to one that includes it. The other is the option nobody markets, ComEd's own hourly-priced supply, Rate BESH, worth a look if your load runs outside summer afternoons.
Why supply is often not the number that matters on a commercial bill
For many commercial accounts, the demand charge on the delivery side, set by a single thirty minute interval, can rival or exceed the entire supply cost for the month, and no supplier switch touches it. This is the mechanism behind a common experience: a business switches suppliers and the bill barely moves. The switch did what a switch can do. It changed the price on the half you can shop, and it could not change the half that was running the bill.
The only way to know which half is driving your account is to look at both. The free ComEd bill reader rebuilds every charge from an uploaded bill and separates the shoppable half from the regulated half; the free demand charge tool reconciles the interval that set the demand charge against the bill.
Where these numbers come from
Every value in the chart and table is the ICC's own posted figure. The history is compiled from the Illinois Commerce Commission's Historical Prices to Compare publication, and the current value and window are cross-checked against the ICC's Plug In Illinois page for ComEd. The June and July 2026 months are additionally verified against a real ComEd residential bill whose printed supply lines we reconciled to the cent. A month the ICC has not posted does not appear here: nothing on this page is estimated, interpolated, or projected. The filed sheets behind the posted number, including the five nonresidential customer groups and the summer and nonsummer split the headline hides, are recorded in the ComEd supply charges by customer group, where every filed window since September 2025 reconciles to this page's posted history to the thousandth of a cent.
Download the data or cite this page
The posted series also has a companion record: what the wholesale energy behind it settled at, month by month, for every month both series cover.
The full series is downloadable as CSV or JSON. Every row carries its source URL and retrieval date, so a row cut out of the file still says where it came from. The JSON additionally holds the full source record, including the archived copy of the ICC workbook the series was compiled from.
The compiled dataset is published under CC BY 4.0: reuse it freely, with attribution. It is also archived on Zenodo with a DOI, 10.5281/zenodo.21969015, which always resolves to the latest version. A citation that covers it:
Phantom Grid, "ComEd residential Price to Compare by month, 2017 to present," phantomgrid.io/insights/comed/comed-supply-rate/, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21969015. Compiled from Illinois Commerce Commission, Plug In Illinois, Historical Prices to Compare.
If you are writing about Illinois supply rates and need a month, a window, or the whole series checked against the record, the data above is the record.
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