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South Philadelphia resident Edoardo Vignani started tracking his utility bills when he lost his job in 2022.
Since then, he’s noticed many of his bills climbing higher each year. He worries most about electricity, which he uses for heating and cooling his house. One month this past summer, his PECO bill topped $400, he said.
Vignani is now working again, and he said he can afford his utility bills. But he worries the continuing increases could become unsustainable for him.
“That’s just kind of hard to budget for,” Vignani said.
Philadelphians were squeezed by multiple utility rate hikes in 2025. With water, electric and gas bills combined, the typical household is paying a little over $30 more per month. Another increase is around the corner in 2026 for PECO customers.
Here’s what to know.
Electricity bills shot up this year and will rise again in 2026
Over the past six years, average electricity prices have risen faster than inflation in roughly half of U.S. states — including Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
State regulators approved a plan for investor-owned electric utility PECO to raise distribution rates last year, mostly to pay for infrastructure investments. The typical residential bill rose 10%, from $135.85 to $149.43 in January 2025.
Demand for electricity is growing while a lot of the grid infrastructure is coming to the end of its useful life, said Abe Silverman, an energy consultant and research scholar at Johns Hopkins University.
“The cost of maintaining the system, the expansion of the system, these are all driving [prices up,]” Silverman said. “And inflation is just making it all very expensive at the moment.”
It’s not just the cost of transformers, wires and poles. Silverman said the cost of the electricity itself has also increased alongside the price of natural gas, which is used to generate most electricity in the region.
Separately, a supply-and-demand crunch on the regional electric grid has driven up capacity prices, which reflect the cost of paying power generators to commit to producing a certain amount of electricity in the future. An independent market monitor found that the expected growth of data center construction drove this price spike.
“The capacity prices have been going up just astronomically,” said Seth Blumsack, a professor of energy policy and economics at Penn State University.
