Reading your bill

What a delivery charge is, and why you can’t shop it

Sources named throughout. Ohio figures read from filed PUCO tariff books; Texas figures from Oncor’s published delivery rates. Reviewed at the start of each month.

Two halves, two different companies

In a deregulated market your bill covers two separate jobs done by two separate businesses. A retail supplier sells you the electricity. A utility owns the wires and delivers it. You chose the first one, or were assigned a default. You did not choose the second and cannot: there is one set of poles into your building.

This matters more than it sounds. Every comparison site, every broker quote and every “we’ll lower your energy bill” cold call is about the supply half. If the reason your bill rose sits on the delivery half, all of that activity changes nothing at all.

What the delivery half is made of

The names differ by state, but the structure is consistent: a couple of fixed monthly charges, then a set of per-unit factors that each get set separately by the regulator and each move on their own schedule.

Look down the middle column. Several of these are billed per kW rather than per kWh once an account is commercial. That is the difference between paying for how much you used and paying for how fast you used it at your busiest moment — and it is why two businesses with identical consumption can get very different delivery bills.

The threshold that changes everything: 10 kW

Oncor, the largest delivery utility in Texas, publishes three service classes. Residential. Secondary service at or below 10 kW. Secondary service above 10 kW. The first two bill every variable factor on kWh. The third does not.

Above 10 kW, the distribution system charge, the distribution cost recovery factor and the nuclear decommissioning charge all switch to being billed on billing kW. The transmission factor switches to something stranger still: NCP kW or 4CP kW — coincident peak. That bills you on your draw during the moments the whole ERCOT grid peaked, which are four fifteen-minute windows across the summer that nobody tells you about in advance.

Crossing 10 kW does not make your bill proportionally bigger. It changes what you are billed on. A business that grows past the threshold gets a bill computed a different way, and nothing on the bill announces that this happened.

Oncor’s filed tariff carries two further rules that decide a commercial bill and appear on no summary page: the distribution charge is banded by annual load factor, and above 25% an 80% ratchet bills you on your highest peak from the previous eleven months. Both are worked through here.

A rate change that cut the fixed charge and still raised bills

On June 1, 2026, Oncor’s residential delivery rates changed. The fixed monthly charge went down, from $4.23 to $4.06. The per-kWh charge went up, from $0.056183 to $0.061196 — a rise of 8.9%.

Coverage of the change has almost universally quoted the residential case at 1,000 kWh, where it works out to a few dollars. But the cut to the fixed charge is $0.17 a month and it does not grow, while the increase is charged on every kilowatt-hour and therefore does. Those two facts pull in opposite directions, and only one of them scales.

The break-even is 34 kWh a month — less than an empty apartment uses. In practice there is no one on the winning side of this change. The $0.17 cut to the fixed charge is the part that got quoted; the 8.9% rise on every kilowatt-hour is the part that shows up on a commercial bill.

How to find your own split

Before assuming a high bill is a supply problem, work out which half it came from. It takes about two minutes with a bill in front of you.

1. 1.Find the supply line — it may be called supply, generation, or energy charge, and on a Texas bill it comes from your REP rather than your utility.
2. 2.Add up everything else: customer charge, metering, distribution, transmission, riders, and any demand charge. That is your delivery half.
3. 3.Divide each half by your kWh for the month. Now you have two cents-per-kWh figures that are directly comparable.
4. 4.Compare the two. If delivery is the larger number, shopping suppliers is not the fix, and no quote you collect will change it.

The one lever that is left

Delivery is regulated, so the rate itself is not negotiable. But which rate schedule the utility applies to you is a different question, and that decides how the delivery charges are calculated for your account. Eligibility usually turns on your peak demand and service voltage.

The schedules are public — they are filed with the state commission and anyone can read them. What they are not is easy to compare, because the difference between two schedules is rarely a single rate. Ohio Edison’s general service schedule bills a minimum of 5 kW no matter what your meter says. Duke’s Rate DS recalculates billing demand as your monthly kWh divided by 71 when your load factor drops. Neither of those rules is visible on a bill.

Businesses are commonly left on whichever schedule they were assigned when the meter went in, and the utility does not move them when their usage changes. Nobody sells the fix, because there is no commission in it.