Why Is My ComEd Bill So High? Pick the Question, Get the Read

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.

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.