Are AI data centers driving up your electricity bill?
Americans pay 39% more for a kilowatt-hour than in 2019, as data centers take a growing share of the country's power. We followed household prices across every state, the grid markets that set them, and Ireland, where data centres use almost a quarter of the electricity.
Are AI data centers driving up your electricity bill?
American households pay about 18 cents for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, 39% more than in 2019 (EIA, 2026a). Prices in general rose 30% over the same years (BLS, 2026). Over the same years data centers became one of the fastest-growing users of power. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory counts them at 4.7% of US electricity use in 2024 and expects 11.8% by 2030, when they would account for about a third of all the growth in demand (Smith et al., 2026).
An average household uses 870 kilowatt-hours a month and pays about $157 for them. Every extra cent on the price of a kilowatt-hour adds about $8.70 to that monthly bill.
The claim holds in one place. PJM, the grid operator for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and their neighbours, runs a market in which every customer shares the cost of keeping enough power plants on standby. In June 2025 the price of that standby power rose ninefold, to a bill of $14.7 billion a year. PJM’s market monitor traces 63% of that bill to data centers (Monitoring Analytics, 2025a). Over the next year household prices in the PJM states rose 12.7%, more than twice the 5.3% in the rest of the country (Fig. 1), the widest gap of any year since 2011. Elsewhere the pattern runs the other way: since 2019 the states where demand grew fastest have seen the smallest price rises, a median of 25%, below inflation, against 51% in the fifth of states where demand fell most.
Since June 2025, household electricity prices in the PJM states have risen about 7 points a year faster than in the rest of the country.
Change on a year earlier in the household price, PJM states against the rest of the US (in print, the gap between them in points), monthly to July 2026. Dashed lines mark June 2025 and June 2026, when each year's new capacity price reached bills.
How we tested it
We measure the price households actually pay: what they spend on electricity divided by the kilowatt-hours they use, from EIA’s monthly survey of retail utilities, which EIA expands to state totals, from January 2010 to July 2026 (EIA, 2026a). Every price comparison uses 12-month totals, which take out the seasons. “Since 2019” compares the 12 months to July 2026 with the 12 months to July 2019, and a “year from June” runs from June to the following May, the year over which PJM sets its capacity price. Inflation compares the consumer price index for July 2026 with July 2019; averaged over the same 12-month windows it comes to 29.6% instead of 30.1%, which changes no comparison here.
The test checks three things: whether, across states, faster growth in demand went with faster price rises; whether household prices nationally followed natural gas, the fuel that sets most US power prices; and whether PJM prices pulled away from the rest of the country, by more than in any earlier year, once the capacity price that PJM’s market monitor ties to data centers reached bills.
The PJM test sets the eight jurisdictions almost wholly inside PJM (Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, DC) against the 38 states outside it, and leaves out the five states PJM shares with another grid operator. The eight are home to 22.3 million households, about 15% of the country’s. The same comparison for every year from 2011 to 2024 shows how far the two groups usually drift apart.
The calendar comes from the auction itself. PJM buys each year’s capacity at an auction held ten months to two years ahead, publishes the price soon after the auction closes, and every customer starts paying it on June 1 of the year it covers (Fig. 2). The price for the year from June 2025 was public from July 2024, so it reached bills on a date everyone knew in advance (PJM, 2024).
Each year's capacity price is set ten months to two years before households start paying it on June 1.
PJM's capacity auctions for the years from June 2024 to June 2028: the month the result was published, the price for the region as a whole in dollars per megawatt-day, and the auction's total cost.
| Year from June | Price published | Price, $ per MW-day | Cost, $ billion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | February 2023 | 28.92 | 2.2 |
| 2025/26 | July 2024 | 269.92 | 14.7 |
| 2026/27 | July 2025 | 329.17 | 16.1 |
| 2027/28 | December 2025 | 333.44 | 16.4 |
| 2028/29 | July 2026 | 325.00 | 16.4 |
In PJM, the data-center bill arrived on June 1, 2025
PJM pays power plants to be ready for the year’s highest demand. It buys that promise ahead of time at an auction, and every customer in the region pays the clearing price through their bill. The auction for the year from June 2025 cleared at $269.92 per megawatt a day, against $28.92 the year before. Its total cost rose from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion, a step made larger by Dominion’s zone in Virginia, which had supplied its own capacity outside the auction until then (PJM, 2023a; PJM, 2024). New Jersey’s regulator named the auction as the main reason household bills at its four utilities rose 17% to 20% that June (New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, 2025a).
Household prices followed. In the year from June 2025 they rose 12.7% in the PJM states and 5.3% in the rest of the country. The year before, the two had risen almost in step, by 3.4% and 3.6% (Fig. 3). In the 14 years from 2011 to 2024 the two groups never drifted more than 4.1 points apart. In 2025 the gap was 7.4 points, close to twice the old record.
The year from June 2025 opened a gap nearly twice as wide as any year since 2011.
How many points faster household electricity prices rose in the PJM states than in the rest of the US, each year from June to May.
Within PJM, Washington, DC rose most, by 27.2%, and New Jersey next, by 19.0%. Virginia, where data centers used a quarter of the state’s electricity in 2023 (EPRI, 2024), rose 10.5%. The capacity price is set for the whole region, with a few zones priced higher, so households in Washington and Philadelphia pay for demand that grows elsewhere: since 2019, commercial electricity sales, which include data centers, have grown 63% in Virginia and 35% in Ohio.
The average PJM household paid $169 a month for electricity in the year to July, $17 more than the year before.
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