A ComEd bill has a block of small line items with names like Coal to Solar and Energy Storage, Environmental Cost Recovery Adj and Low Income Discount Recovery. There are usually eight or nine of them, most are under a dollar, and there is no document anywhere that tells you what they are in plain English.
This page is that document. Every figure below comes off one of two real bills, and every rate is checked against ComEd's filed tariff rather than inferred from the bill.
The two bills
Bill A: 953 kWh, June 16 to July 16, 2026. Total $184.03, which is 19.31 cents per kilowatt hour all in.
Bill B: 1,518 kWh, May 1 to June 2, 2026. Total $281.06, which is 18.52 cents per kilowatt hour all in.
They are unrelated accounts. Seven of the rates below are identical on both, to the digit, which is what you would expect from a uniform filed rate and is a useful check that neither bill is doing anything unusual.
Every rider line, both bills
The whole block nets to almost nothing
This is the finding worth carrying away, and it is not visible unless you add the column up.
The biggest of these lines is a credit. Carbon-Free Energy Resource Adj takes $11.70 off Bill A and $20.40 off Bill B. Nobody expects the largest rider on their bill to be money coming back, and you can check it on your own bill in about five seconds.
Now total the rest. The other rider charges come to $13.95 on Bill A and $21.15 on Bill B. Set the credit against them:
- Bill A: $13.95 in charges, $11.70 in credit. Net $2.25, on a $184.03 bill. That is 1.2 percent.
- Bill B: $21.15 in charges, $20.40 in credit. Net $0.75, on a $281.06 bill. That is 0.27 percent.
Bill A also carries a $1.40 Peak Time Savings credit, which takes its net to 85 cents.
Nine line items, four statutes, several ICC dockets, an annual prudence review and a monthly wholesale settlement. On one of these bills the entire apparatus nets to seventy five cents.
That is the honest answer to whether these lines are worth your attention. The arithmetic sets a ceiling on what any effort directed at them could possibly recover, and the ceiling is under two dollars fifty. Where the money actually is on a ComEd bill is a different question with a much larger answer.
The credit is scheduled to shrink
The reason the block nets to almost nothing right now is that one credit is unusually large, and ComEd has already filed the months in which it stops being large.
The Carbon-Free Energy Resource Adj is two numbers added together. The filed sheet publishes both: a Carbon-Free Resource Adjustment, and a monthly reconciliation factor that corrects it. The total of the two is what prints on the bill, which the sheet states directly.
| Billing period |
CFR Adjustment |
Monthly reconciliation |
Printed total |
| June 2026 |
(1.466) |
0.122 |
(1.344) |
| July 2026 |
(1.466) |
0.238 |
(1.228) |
| August 2026 |
(1.466) |
0.776 |
(0.690) |
| September 2026 |
(1.466) |
to be determined |
to be determined |
| October to December 2026 |
(1.057) |
to be determined |
to be determined |
| January to May 2027 |
(0.984) |
to be determined |
to be determined |
Values in cents per kilowatt hour, brackets denoting a credit, exactly as filed.
Two things are visible there that no bill will show you. The reconciliation factor is climbing fast, from 0.122 to 0.238 to 0.776 in three months, and it works against the credit. And the base adjustment itself steps down twice, to 1.057 in October and 0.984 in January.
The practical effect is that the August 2026 credit is roughly half the July credit, on the same usage. If your bill goes up and your consumption did not, this is the first line to check. The whole rider block nets to under a dollar today largely because of this credit, and that will not hold.
That line has its own page: why the biggest rider on a ComEd bill is a credit, including what the tariff means by a carbon-free energy resource, which turns out to be narrower than the name suggests.
The fixed floor, before you use anything
Two lines on the bill do not move with usage at all: the Customer Charge at $15.50 and the Standard Metering Charge at $3.87, a fixed $19.37 a month on both bills.
That one number explains almost everything about why the two bills' headline rates differ. Bill A paid 19.31 cents per kWh all in and Bill B paid 18.52, but strip the fixed charges out and their variable rates are 17.28 and 17.24, four hundredths of a cent apart. Why using less power makes your rate look worse works through it, along with the second charge filed inside the Customer Charge line that the bill never names.
The two lines that can actually be avoided
Almost every page written about utility bill riders says the same thing, that none of them can be avoided. That is very nearly true and it is not exactly true, and the exceptions are specific enough to be worth stating.
Purchased Electricity Adjustment. This one is supply side, not delivery side. The filed sheet says the factor is designated on bills as the Purchased Electricity Adjustment pursuant to Rate BES, ComEd's default supply service. Buy your electricity from a retail electric supplier and the line is not on your bill. The catch is that it is a credit about as often as it is a charge. Across the fifteen filed monthly factors from June 2025 to August 2026, six were credits, and excluding a single extraordinary month the rest net out in the customer's favour. The full monthly series is here.
Energy Efficiency Programs. Rider EEPP is the one rider in this set whose applicability does not read "all retail customers". It carves out an Opt-out Group, defined as private customers whose single premises established a thirty minute demand above 10,000 kilowatts in one of the twelve months before the efficiency plan began. That is a large industrial threshold. But a business entity with one qualifying Illinois site can bring its other sites onto the ICC notice form alongside it, which makes the provision relevant to multi-site operators well below 10 MW at most of their locations. The filed test is here.
Everything else on the list states in its own text that it applies to all retail customers, is charged on delivered kilowatt hours, and is unaffected by who supplies you.
What sets each one, in one line each
Carbon-Free Energy Resource Adj, Zero Emission Standard, Energy Transition Assistance and Renewable Portfolio Standard are the four statutory riders that say, word for word, that they are applicable to all retail customers. They are covered together here, because the applicability is the durable finding and the rates move on separate schedules.
Energy Efficiency Programs recovers ComEd's cost of running the efficiency and demand response programmes the Public Utilities Act requires, with a shareholder return that moves up or down on an independent evaluator's assessment of whether the programmes hit their targets.
Purchased Electricity Adjustment is a monthly true up against the PJM wholesale settlement, which is why it changes every month and why it is settling a month that has already closed.
Low Income Discount Recovery funds a bill discount for households up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, worth as much as 80 percent of a qualifying bill. Residential customers pay $1.35 a month, small business $13.50 and large industrial $506.25.
Environmental Cost Recovery Adj pays to investigate and remediate former manufactured gas plant sites, the coal gas works that lit Chicago before natural gas arrived.
Coal to Solar and Energy Storage buys renewable energy credits from projects built on the sites of plants that burned coal as of January 1, 2016, and funds a state storage grant programme through the Illinois Treasurer.
Peak Time Savings Event is not a charge at all. It is a credit for reducing load during a called event, and Bill A earned $1.40 of it. Whether it is worth enrolling in is a separate question.
What this page was checked against, and why that matters
Every rate above is a filed value from ComEd's Schedule of Rates or its informational sheets, and every dollar figure is what a real bill actually printed. Where those two agree to the cent, we say so on the individual page.
That distinction is the point of this set. There is no shortage of pages describing ComEd charges. What is missing everywhere is any statement of whether the number being quoted was checked against the filed tariff or simply copied off a bill, and those are different claims with different reliability. A rider factor pulled off a filing once and left on a page for two years is exactly the kind of confident, stale, unsourced figure this site exists to argue against, which is why every rate here carries the billing periods it belongs to.
Rates move. Two of the ten lines above changed inside 2026 alone, and one of them changes every month.
Where to look instead
If the whole rider block nets to under two dollars fifty, the useful question is what does move.
A demand charge, if your bill has a line priced in dollars per kilowatt. It is set by a single measured interval, which means small changes in behaviour move real money. Whether ComEd ratchets your demand charge is worth checking, because the standard commercial classes do not carry one.
The distribution facilities charge, which is the largest delivery line on most bills. What it is and how it is calculated, on a business and on a home.
The two lines that are neither riders nor delivery in the usual sense. The IL Electricity Distribution Charge is a state tax ComEd passes through per kilowatt hour at one filed rate for every class, and the State Tax and Municipal Utility Tax are the only lines on the bill printed without a rate, so the filed tiers are the only way to check them.
The supply rate, which is genuinely contestable because you can buy it elsewhere, and where the right answer depends on your load shape rather than the headline price. The ComEd supply rate explained.
If you are working through a bill for the first time, how to read a commercial electricity bill covers the structure these lines sit inside. If the total itself is what changed, why a ComEd bill goes up works through the causes in order of how much they move. The ways a line can actually move, and the ones that cannot, are on how to reduce my ComEd bill.
