A high electric bill feels like one big mystery, but it is usually one of a
small number of specific things: the rate you actually pay, the load in your
house that never turns off, something new that arrived and stayed, or the shape
of your day colliding with how you are billed. Different causes, different
evidence, different fixes.
So instead of one generic answer, the instrument above asks which version of
the question is yours. Two of them can be settled on the spot with numbers off
your bill. The others live in your meter's own half-hour records, and we say so
plainly rather than pretending a web page can see them.
The rate you actually pay is not the rate on the bill
Every ComEd bill advertises a supply rate. It is real, but it is only half the
story: delivery charges, the fixed customer charge, taxes and riders make up
the rest, and none of that appears in the advertised number. Divide the whole
bill by the kilowatt-hours it delivered and you get your all-in rate, the only
price that survives contact with the actual bill. On real ComEd residential
bills we have reconciled line by line, the all-in rate ran far above the
printed one, with nothing wrong on the bill.
That is also why switching suppliers so often disappoints. The advertised
saving applies to the supply half only; the delivery half is set by tariff and
was never in play.
The load nobody chose to buy
Every home draws power around the clock. Refrigeration, network gear, chargers,
standby electronics, a pump you forgot exists. That always-on floor runs all
8,760 hours of the year, so even a modest floor is real money at ComEd rates.
A bill cannot show it to you, because it hides inside the monthly total. Your
meter records it directly, every half hour, all year.
Something arrived and never left
Bills that climb year over year have a direction inside them. A rate increase
moves every month at once; a new load moves the floor and stays. Telling those
apart takes history: the same months compared across years, from the meter's
own records rather than from memory.
Two measured cases show what that looks like on a commercial meter: a seasonal site whose overnight floor went from 1 kW to nearly 6 and whose winter usage doubled, and the opposite shape, a distillery whose demand charge nearly doubled while usage fell.
Before any of that, rule out the rate
A bill can climb without your usage moving at all, because several ComEd rider
rates change mid-year on their own schedules. That is the cheapest thing to
check and almost nobody checks it, because the filed rates are not published
anywhere a customer would look.
Every line on a ComEd bill
carries the filed rate for each line and the billing periods it applies to, so
you can compare what your bill charged against what was actually filed for that
month. If the rate moved and your usage did not, the rest of this page does not
apply to you.
If the rate held and the total still rose, the largest delivery line is usually
the Distribution Facilities Charge,
and on a business account it is set by a single half hour rather than by the
month.
Why did my ComEd bill go up this month?
Start with the two numbers the bill itself gives you, because between them they settle most cases before the meter has to be asked anything.
The first is the rate. ComEd's supply rate, the Price to Compare, resets on a schedule the Illinois Commerce Commission posts every month, and a bill that straddles a reset is billed at the new figure for the whole period. The reference bill on this site covers May 1 to June 2, 2026, 1,518 kWh, printed at 10.399 cents; the posting for May was 9.660 and for June 10.399, so the reset alone put $11.22 on that bill without a single kilowatt hour changing. The year before, the June 2025 posting was 10.028, so June 2026 is 0.371 cents above the same month a year earlier, $5.63 on the same 1,518 kWh. The bigger step is further back: June 2025 reset the posted rate from 6.552 to 10.028, and why Illinois electric rates are going up follows that whole record month by month, with the posted history charted since 2017.
The second is the usage graph printed on the bill, thirteen months of kWh. On the reference bill it ran from 1,259 kWh in May to 2,894 in August, a 2.3x swing across the year, and June 2025 to June 2026 was 1,519 against 1,518. That last comparison is the one that matters: same month, same house, same usage to within one kilowatt hour, so everything that bill went up was the rate. If your graph shows this June well above last June, the answer is in the house and the rest of this page applies. If the graph is flat and the bill still rose, it was the rate, and the section below on ruling out the rate is where to look.
The free bill reader does both comparisons from the PDF: it joins the printed Price to Compare to the ICC's posting for the months the bill covers, states the dollar difference when the period straddles a reset, and reads the usage graph against the same month a year earlier.
How do you keep a ComEd bill low?
The levers are different on each half of the bill, so the first job is knowing which half is moving. On the supply half the choices are the flat Price to Compare, a supplier contract measured against it, or Hourly Pricing, and which one costs less for your home is already recorded in your meter's own hours, not in anyone's pitch. On the delivery half, most lines are filed rates that no choice removes, and the ones that do respond to you respond to when you draw power rather than how much. A bill total on its own will not say which half is driving it, which is what reading the bill line by line settles before any lever is worth pulling.
One thing that does not keep it low is budget billing. It levels the payments and leaves the cost alone, and whether ComEd budget billing is worth it depends on whether you keep reading the kWh line once the payment stops moving.
