The honest answer is that it depends on your home, and anyone who gives you a confident yes or no without looking at your usage is guessing. What follows is how the program actually works and the one thing that decides it, so you can tell whether it is worth looking at for your house.
What is ComEd Hourly Pricing?
Hourly Pricing changes the supply half of your bill, the energy itself. Instead of a flat cents per kilowatt hour rate, you pay the real hourly wholesale market price, which ComEd passes through without a markup. That price is set by the regional grid market and is averaged over each hour, so it moves all day and is not fully known until the hour has passed. ComEd publishes the live and day-ahead prices so participants can see them.
It does not touch delivery. ComEd still delivers your power and bills the delivery charges the same way regardless of the supply rate you are on.
What decides whether it saves you: when you use power
Because the price changes hour to hour, the entire question of whether Hourly Pricing saves you comes down to timing. A home that runs most of its load overnight and on mild days tends to sit in cheaper hours than the flat rate. A home that runs heavy air conditioning on hot summer afternoons sits in the most expensive hours of the year.
Those summer afternoons are the crux. Grid prices spike hardest on hot weekday afternoons, and ComEd also applies a Capacity Charge tied to how much power your home draws during those high demand summer hours. That charge is already on Hourly Pricing bills, and its published rate rises about 21 percent in June 2026. That second piece behaves like a residential version of a commercial demand charge: it is not about how much energy you use over the month, it is about your draw at the worst moments. Two homes using the same total energy can land very differently on both counts, depending on when that energy is used.
Does ComEd Hourly Pricing actually save money?
This is why a blanket "hourly pricing saves you 10 to 15 percent" claim is meaningless. The program can save a well timed home money and cost a poorly timed one more, and nothing about the average tells you which one you are. The variable that decides it, your hourly usage shape, is specific to your house and is exactly the variable a generic calculator does not have.
What are the risks of ComEd Hourly Pricing?
The main risk is concentration. The price is not evenly risky across the day: most hours are cheap, a few are many times more expensive, and your whole result depends on how much of your usage lands in the few. A home can sit below the flat rate for the great majority of the year and still finish behind, because losing badly in a handful of hours is enough to undo it.
That is easier to see measured than described. Over the twenty four hours ending the morning of August 5, 2026, ComEd's public five minute price feed ran from a low of 1.6 cents per kWh at 7:25 in the morning to a high of 33.0 cents at 7:50 in the evening, and averaged 5.7 cents across the day. That is a twenty fold spread inside a single day. Spread a flat load across it and the most expensive ten percent of those intervals would have carried about thirty one percent of the day's supply cost. That is one summer day, not a forecast of your year, but it is what the volatility looks like when you actually pull the numbers rather than characterize them.
Four risks follow from that shape.
You cannot lock the price. Each hour is billed at the market's real time price, which is not final until the hour has ended. There is no fixed rate to fall back to inside the program and no supplier absorbing the swings on your behalf. On Hourly Pricing you are holding that risk yourself, which is the trade the program makes.
An inflexible home carries the volatility without the upside. The saving comes from moving load out of expensive hours. A household that cannot move its load, because someone is home all day, because the heat is electric, because equipment runs on a fixed schedule, keeps the exposure and loses the lever.
Summer afternoons cost twice. Hourly Pricing bills also carry a Capacity Charge set by your draw during the grid's highest demand summer hours. It is on bills now, not arriving later, and its published rate rises about 21 percent in June 2026. Those hours overlap the hours the energy price spikes in, so one hot afternoon can move two separate lines on the same bill.
It asks something of you. ComEd publishes the day ahead price so you can plan around it, and that planning is where the saving comes from. A household that never looks at it is on a variable rate with none of the behavior that makes a variable rate worth being on.
One risk we cannot size for you is the exit. Whether ComEd applies a minimum enrollment term, a fee, or a waiting period before you can return to a flat rate is a program rule we have not verified against the filed tariff, and we are not going to guess at it. Ask ComEd directly before you enroll, and get the answer in writing. Telling you the question is more useful than inventing the answer.
How to know if it is worth it for your home
There is a real answer, and it is not a forecast. Your meter already recorded your usage hour by hour, and the market already recorded what each hour actually cost. Put the two together and you can reconstruct exactly what you would have paid on Hourly Pricing over the last year versus the flat rate. That is a reconstruction of what already happened, not a projection of what might, which is the only honest way to answer the question.
We are building an independent tool to do exactly that on your own ComEd usage, with no commission and nothing to sell you. Until then, the takeaway is simple: do not switch on a general promise, and do not stay on a general fear. The answer is in your own hours, and it is knowable.
The first step toward those hours is the bill you already have. The free bill reader below rebuilds what you are paying now, which is the flat-rate side of the comparison, and it can request your hour-by-hour usage from ComEd so the other side becomes answerable.
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