What "typical bill" means when a utility quotes it
When a utility says a rate case "adds $8.73 to a typical monthly bill," the number depends entirely on what it decided typical means. There is no standard. Understanding that is the difference between reading these figures and being misled by them.
Every utility picks its own benchmark
Xcel Energy in Colorado quotes 601 kilowatt-hours a month. Ohio's utilities and Entergy Texas use 1,000. Puget Sound Energy uses 800, Idaho Power 900, Avista 925, and NYSEG 600 for electricity and 83 therms for gas heat. A 10 percent increase quoted on 601 kWh is a much smaller dollar figure than the same increase quoted on 1,000, which is one reason two utilities asking for the same percentage can report very different "typical" impacts. Every case page here names the benchmark next to the dollar figure whenever the utility published one.
What we do when only a percentage is published
Many filings and most news stories give a percentage without a dollar figure. To turn it into dollars we use the US Energy Information Administration's average monthly residential bill for your state, from its annual Form 861 data (the 2024 figures at the moment). Georgia's average is about $151 a month on 1,074 kWh, New York's about $140 on 571, Colorado's about $101 on 674. A 5 percent increase on the Georgia average is therefore about $8 a month. Figures we calculated this way are labeled "estimate" everywhere they appear, and the methodology page spells out the arithmetic.
Scaling it to your house
Everything on the bill except the fixed customer charge scales with usage. So: find your monthly kilowatt-hours on your bill, divide by the benchmark the figure was quoted on, and multiply the dollar figure by that ratio. A home using 1,500 kWh against a 1,000 kWh benchmark should expect roughly one and a half times the quoted increase. If the case raises the customer charge, that part does not scale; the case page notes it when we know.
Requested versus approved
The other way a typical-bill figure misleads is timing. The figure in the news at filing is the request. The figure that matters is in the commission's order, months later, and it is almost always lower. This site keeps the two apart on purpose: pending cases show the ask and say so, decided cases show what was approved, and a case that settled below the request shows both.
Electric and gas are not the same bill
Gas cases quote therms or hundreds of cubic feet, not kilowatt-hours, and a "typical" gas customer usually means a heating customer whose winter bill is several times the summer one. A monthly figure for gas is an average across the year; the January impact is larger. Gas cases are labeled as gas throughout the site.