Every figure on the page comes from a government agency or a regulated utility’s filing with one, and every calculation is set out here. Using official sources does not mean every inference has been validated; the last section lists what has not yet been checked line by line.
The page is rebuilt from raw files by scripts/refresh.sh, which downloads each series, then runs scripts/build.py. That script computes every derived number the page prints and writes them to data/dashboard.json; the page’s sentences are generated from that file, so a refresh updates the prose along with the charts. The refresh runs automatically every Monday, so it picks up EIA’s electricity and gas releases, which land on different days late in the month, and NYSERDA’s weekly oil survey. A build is published only if it passes the checks described under “Validation” below. Hand-collected records (water rates, rate cases, tax figures) live in research/ with the URL and a verbatim quote for each value.
Changes are stated year over year: a month against the same month a year earlier, or a 12-month window against the 12 months before it. Month-to-month changes in utility prices mostly reflect seasons and are not used.
sales_revenue.xlsx.Latest observation and last refresh are filled in from the published data file.
| Measure | Latest observation | Geography | Customers covered | Units | Averaging |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Con Edison electricity price and bill | – | Con Edison service territory: the five boroughs except the Rockaway Peninsula, plus most of Westchester | Full-service residential (buy supply and delivery from Con Edison) | Cents per kWh; dollars per month | 12 months of revenue over 12 months of kWh (or customer-months) |
| Selected other NY utilities | – | National Grid upstate, NYSEG, RG&E, Central Hudson, Orange & Rockland, LIPA (which includes the Rockaways) | Full-service residential | Cents per kWh | Sales-weighted, combined |
| NY State and U.S. electricity | – | State and national totals | All residential customers | Cents per kWh | Sales-weighted |
| Zone J wholesale energy | – | NYISO Zone J (New York City) | Day-ahead market, all load | $/MWh, shown as cents per kWh | Simple average of hourly prices |
| BLS metro electricity and gas prices | December 2024 (discontinued) | New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area | Survey sample of households in the area | Cents per kWh; dollars per therm | BLS monthly estimates; annual figures are 12-month means |
| EIA residential gas | – | New York State (city included), New Jersey, U.S. | Residential sales by distribution utilities (100% of New York deliveries) | $ per thousand cubic feet, shown also per therm | 12-month: sales-weighted. Annual: EIA’s published annual price |
| Henry Hub and NY city gate | – | Louisiana trading hub; New York State | Benchmarks, not household prices | $ per thousand cubic feet | 12-month, weighted by NY residential volumes |
| Heating oil | – | NYSERDA New York City region and statewide (city included); EIA U.S. | Dealer survey of residential No. 2 oil | Dollars per gallon | Weekly in season, monthly otherwise |
| Water and sewer | Fiscal year 2027 (adopted June 2026) | New York City | Metered accounts, billed to property owners | Dollars per 100 cubic feet | Adopted rate; sewer calculated at 159% of water |
| CPI (rent, all items, utilities) | – | New York metro area; U.S. for water | Urban consumers | Index | 12-month averages of monthly index values |
A utility’s average price in a month is residential revenue divided by residential kilowatt-hours sold. The 12-month average is total revenue over the 12 months divided by total kilowatt-hours over the same months, so heavier-use months count for more, as they do on bills. It removes the seasonal swing; Con Edison charges more for delivery from June through September.
Full-service customers only. EIA-861M reports a utility’s residential sales to customers who buy both the electricity and its delivery from the utility. Customers who buy their supply from an energy service company appear under that company, and their delivery revenue is reported separately. Con Edison’s figures therefore describe households that buy power from Con Edison, which were about 2.99 million accounts in August 2026, across a territory that includes most of Westchester and excludes the Rockaway Peninsula, which LIPA serves. They are not a New York City-only estimate. The state and national lines are EIA’s totals for all residential customers.
Price is not the same as a bill. Average revenue per kilowatt-hour can change because customers use more or less power, or because the mix of customers buying from the utility changes, as well as because tariffs change. The page does not calculate a bill for a fixed amount of use: doing that properly takes the actual tariffs, with their fixed charges, not an observed average price times a usage figure.
“Selected other NY utilities” is the sales-weighted combination of National Grid’s upstate company (Niagara Mohawk), NYSEG, RG&E, Central Hudson, Orange & Rockland and the Long Island Power Authority (operated by PSEG Long Island), the large utilities that serve most of the rest of the state. It is not the statewide total, and it is not wholly outside the city: LIPA serves the Rockaways. Municipal utilities and smaller companies are not included.
The ratio in the opening sentence divides Con Edison’s 12-month average price by EIA’s U.S. residential average over the same 12 months, both stored unrounded. For September 2025 through August 2026 that is 38.5239 cents against 18.0396 cents, a ratio of 2.1355.
Every utility in the published EIA-861M data with 12 months reported in the latest 12-month window and at least 50,000 full-service residential customers on average, ranked by 12-month average price (total revenue over total kilowatt-hours). EIA-861M is a monthly sample of utilities, with state totals estimated and adjusted, so this ranks the eligible utilities in that dataset, not every utility in the country, and it compares average revenue per kilowatt-hour across each utility’s customers, not any one household’s tariff. Utilities in several states are combined. Rooftop-solar lessors that appear in the survey are excluded. “Eastern states” are those east of the Mississippi. The bill ranking divides 12 months of residential revenue by 12 months of customer counts, the same definition as the average bill below.
Residential revenue divided by residential customers for each month. The 12-month figure is total revenue over the 12 months divided by total customer-months (the sum of the 12 monthly customer counts), the same pooled definition the ranking uses. Values are stored unrounded and rounded only for display, and percentage changes are computed from the unrounded figures. It is an average across all households, large and small, and includes every charge the utility bills (supply, delivery, taxes and surcharges). Changed Nov. 6, 2026: the page earlier averaged the 12 monthly bills and computed the change from rounded values, which gave $148 a month and a 9.6% rise for the year through August 2026; the pooled figures are $149 and 10.0%.
The yellow line is the simple average of hourly NYISO day-ahead prices for Zone J (New York City) over the 12 months, converted from dollars per megawatt-hour to cents per kilowatt-hour. The red line is Con Edison’s 12-month average residential price. The dashed line is the first minus the second, labelled “retail price minus wholesale benchmark.” It is not a measured delivery charge or a division of a customer’s bill, and the benchmark is not a lower bound on supply costs. The two series describe different things: the benchmark is an unweighted market average for all load, while the retail price reflects households’ consumption pattern, the utility’s procurement timing and hedges, capacity and ancillary costs, and line losses, which can put actual supply costs above or below the benchmark in a given year. Changed Nov. 6, 2026: this chart earlier stacked the benchmark inside the retail price and called the rest delivery, capacity, taxes and programs.
Pearson correlation between monthly Zone J day-ahead averages ($/MWh) and monthly Henry Hub spot averages ($/MMBtu), January 2010 to the latest month both exist.
For each month from January 2011, the change in Con Edison’s average price from the same month a year earlier (cents per kWh) is paired with the same year-over-year change in the Zone J price (converted to cents per kWh) zero to six months earlier. The bars show the Pearson correlation at each lag; the slope is from a straight-line fit of retail change on wholesale change at the lag with the largest correlation. Through August 2026 that is the same month, r = 0.245, so R² is about 0.06, and the slope is 0.226.
This is an exploratory association, not an estimate of pass-through. Year-over-year changes in overlapping months are serially dependent; both series respond to common shocks such as weather and fuel prices; average revenue per kWh also moves with use; and choosing the largest of seven correlations inflates it. The page draws no conclusion about why the association is weak. Measuring how wholesale costs reach bills would need a different design, built on the utility’s supply-charge filings.
Kilowatt-hours per customer, price and bill by calendar month, averaged over the last three complete calendar years.
BLS average price per kilowatt-hour, averaged over the 12 months of 2014 and of 2024, for selected metro areas. With January 2025 data, BLS discontinued electricity and piped-gas indexes and average prices for all metropolitan areas, census divisions and regional size classes; they continue only nationally. The averages are estimates for the covered population, built from a sample, and for New York the area includes northern New Jersey, Long Island, the lower Hudson Valley and part of Pennsylvania. BLS says its average prices per kilowatt-hour and per therm are generally not suitable for place-to-place comparisons, because the bills priced differ in consumption and rate schedules. The page therefore shows the table alphabetically, leads with each metro’s change over the decade, and makes no ranking claim from it.
Con Edison’s tax figures are from the annual 10-K reports of Consolidated Edison Company of New York, which cover its electric, gas and steam businesses in every jurisdiction where it owns property, not New York City alone; no official source breaks out the city’s share. The city’s figures are the Department of Finance’s property tax levy on Class 3 (equipment owned by regulated utilities, excluding their land and buildings, and covering every regulated utility, not only Con Edison) and the utility tax revenue reported by the city’s Office of Management and Budget and Comptroller. The company reports calendar years; the city reports fiscal years ending June 30. The two series are shown side by side, not combined. The commission’s statements on property taxes’ share of each rate increase are quoted from its orders, press releases and summaries. For the 2026–2028 plan, the Department of Public Service’s one-page summary says property taxes are “approximately 26%” of the electric revenue increase; its visual supplement shows $305.6 million of a $1.024 billion three-year increase, which is 29.8%. The two may use different denominators, so the page quotes the summary’s figure, attributed, and leaves out the dollar amounts until they are reconciled with the order. As a check on the EIA price data, Con Edison’s 10-K reports average residential revenue of 36.7 cents per kWh for 2025; the EIA-861M monthly figures give 36.7 cents for the same year (total revenue over total kilowatt-hours, January to December).
Approved delivery revenue increases are the Public Service Commission’s figures for plans from 2020 on, and Con Edison’s 10-K figures for earlier plans, where case numbers and order dates are not included. The table’s first column is when each rate year begins. That can differ from the order date and from when new rates reach bills: the 2026–2028 Con Edison plan was approved Jan. 22, 2026, for a rate year beginning in January, and the department says revenue recovery began in February, with a make-whole surcharge. Bill effects are quoted as each source states them, for the typical customer it describes; they are not comparable across plans. Each dated event links to its source and is a documented event, not an estimate of its effect on prices. Entries describing expected changes are forecasts as of the source’s date.
These residential series cover gas used for cooking and hot water as well as heat. No official monthly price for residential gas in New York City alone exists after December 2024, when BLS dropped its New York-area series. The page uses BLS’s New York-area average price per therm through 2024 and EIA’s statewide residential price, which includes the city, after that, and labels which is which. EIA prices in dollars per thousand cubic feet are converted to dollars per therm at 10.36 therms per thousand cubic feet (1.036 million Btu, EIA’s typical heat content for pipeline gas). BLS prices are survey averages that include taxes and fixed charges; EIA’s are utility revenue divided by volume.
Weighting. EIA’s monthly residential price is highest in summer, when fixed charges are spread over little gas. A simple average of the 12 monthly prices gives each month equal weight and so overstates what households paid per unit over a year: for New York in 2025 the simple monthly mean is $21.10 per thousand cubic feet, against EIA’s published annual price of $17.58. The page therefore uses EIA’s published annual prices for calendar-year figures, and for rolling 12-month figures divides the sum of each month’s price times its residential volume (EIA’s residential consumption series, N3010NY2 and its New Jersey and U.S. counterparts) by total volume. EIA reports that 100% of New York residential deliveries are included in its price, so price and volume cover the same customers; for New Jersey and the U.S. the weights are all residential deliveries. As a check, each build compares the weighted 12 months through December with EIA’s annual figure; for New York from 2006 to 2025 they agree within 1.4%, mostly within 0.5%, and the build stops if any year is more than 3% off. The BLS line is a simple 12-month average of BLS’s monthly survey price. Changed Nov. 6, 2026: the page earlier used simple averages of monthly EIA prices throughout.
Twelve-month averages of the Henry Hub spot price (converted to dollars per thousand cubic feet at 1.036 million Btu each), the New York city-gate price and the New York residential price, each weighted by New York residential volumes so all three cover the same months in the same proportions. EIA withholds some monthly city-gate prices (March 2026 is one); the city-gate line uses the 11 months available in those windows. These are benchmarks, not parts of a bill. Henry Hub is a Louisiana trading price, not the cost of all the gas New York utilities buy. The city-gate price is what distribution utilities pay where they receive gas, which reflects where, how and when they bought it. So city gate minus Henry Hub is not a pipeline charge, and residential minus city gate is not a measure of local delivery, taxes and charges. Changed Nov. 6, 2026: this chart was earlier a stacked breakdown with the Henry Hub band labelled as the share of what households paid.
NYSERDA surveys dealers weekly from October through March and monthly the rest of the year. The year-over-year comparison pairs the latest NYSERDA reading with the reading closest to 364 days earlier. EIA’s national residential series covers the heating season only.
The monthly average of NYSERDA’s New York City readings minus EIA’s monthly New York Harbor No. 2 heating oil spot price. The spread is not observed dealer profit, and not necessarily the gap between what dealers paid and what they charged: dealers buy ahead and carry inventory, so the oil sold in a month was often bought at an earlier price, and the spread also covers delivery, taxes and overhead. In summer months the retail side rests on a single reading.
Each panel has its own key, because the geography differs: electricity compares Con Edison’s service territory with six other large New York utilities and the U.S.; gas, the BLS New York metro area with New York State (city included) and the U.S.; oil, NYSERDA’s New York City region with the statewide average (city included) and the U.S. Electricity: 12-month average prices at each December and the latest month. Gas: BLS calendar-year averages for the metro area, through 2024, and EIA’s published annual prices for the state and the U.S. Heating oil: averages of October-to-March readings, labelled by the year the season ends. Water: fiscal-year rates. “Change since 2016” divides each value by the 2016 value (for electricity, the 12 months through December 2016). The national water line is BLS’s CPI for water and sewerage maintenance averaged over fiscal years, since no national dollar rate exists.
Sources: the board’s rate schedules, annual rate reports, adoption notices and minutes, and the NYC Water and Sewer System’s audited financial statements, all on nyc.gov. Metered water rates per 100 cubic feet are sourced for fiscal 1997–2027; annual increases for fiscal 1988–2027 (1988–1996 read from a bar chart in a board report). The board’s rate history page also lists rates before fiscal 1997, which the page does not yet include. The sewer charge is 159% of the water charge in every year from fiscal 1997; the share varied before fiscal 1993, so the 159% rule is not applied to earlier years. The sewer and combined rates are calculated from the adopted water rate (water × 2.59, rounded to the cent) and labelled as calculated. The board’s informational history prints a few combined rates a cent or two different (for example $13.07 for fiscal 2026, $11.12 for 2023 and $10.61 for 2022, against $13.08, $11.14 and $10.62 here), and some of its entries do not equal its own water rate times 2.59. The board says its adopted schedules control, so the page follows them. In fiscal 2017 the board adopted a 2.1% increase with a $183 credit for one- to three-family homes; a court annulled it and the board repealed it in January 2018, so the rate stayed at $3.81 from fiscal 2016 through 2018. Typical bills use the board’s assumed annual use, which changed (single-family homes: 100,000 gallons in fiscal 2009, 80,000 from 2010, 70,000 from 2019), so they are not comparable across those breaks. The rental payment figures are actual payments from the audited statements, except the latest year, which is the budgeted amount.
The NYC Water Board adopts one schedule of rates each spring for the fiscal year that starts July 1. The page uses the metered rate per 100 cubic feet for water and for sewer (wastewater), and the board’s stated overall increase. Typical bills are the board’s own figures. Reasons for each year’s increase are summarized from the board’s and DEP’s rate documents, each linked. BLS publishes no water index for the New York area.
Before a refreshed build is published, scripts/check.py stops it if any latest month moved backward; if any series, peer list or research file shrank or vanished; if a headline number is empty; if a monthly series has a gap inside it; if the Con Edison, state and national electricity windows end in different months; if Con Edison is missing from the ranking or the ranking is out of order; if stored ratios and changes do not match the values they come from; or if the gas weighting check fails. It warns when the hand-collected research files have not been updated in more than a year. It also logs every historical value that changed from the previous build to data/revisions.log, and the build writes a fingerprint of every raw file it read to data/sources.json, so a revision by the source can be told apart from a mistake here. One example: EIA’s final 2025 utility archive, downloaded Nov. 6, 2026, moved Pacific Gas & Electric’s 12-month price from 34.89 to 34.74 cents; Con Edison’s figures were unchanged.
A review on Nov. 6, 2026, recalculated the headline electricity figures from the source files and checked selected claims against BLS, EIA, NYSERDA, Water Board and Public Service Commission sources. It did not certify every historical entry. Still to be audited row by row against their sources: the historical tax figures, the water system’s rental payments and rebates, bill-assistance eligibility details and the older rate cases (before 2020, from Con Edison’s annual reports). The research files in research/ list their own gaps.