Con Edison Rate Increase History: How to Trace Yours in 20 Minutes

Most people feel the Con Edison rate increase history before they can see it — the bill just keeps creeping up. Here’s how to pull the actual number off your own statements, and what it tells you about the next five years.

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes with opening a Con Ed bill in August. You didn’t buy a new appliance. Nobody moved in. The house ran the same way it did last summer. And the total is forty dollars higher than you remember.

That feeling is usually right, and it’s usually not about your usage. Across the Con Edison service territory — the five boroughs and Westchester — residential rates have climbed roughly 8% a year on average. Compounding quietly, in small increments, on a bill most of us glance at for six seconds before paying.

The good news is that you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, including ours. Your own rate history is sitting in your account portal right now. Here’s how to get it.

Step 1: Pull three bills from the same month

Log into your Con Edison account and download your statements for the same month across three different years — this August, last August, and the August before that. Same month matters. Comparing January to July will just show you seasonal swing, not rate movement.

From each bill, write down two numbers: total kWh used and total amount due. Divide the dollars by the kilowatt-hours. That quotient is your true all-in rate — what you actually pay per unit of electricity, including every line item.

Most Westchester and NYC households land somewhere between 32¢ and 52¢ per kWh, averaging around 38¢. For context, the national average is roughly 14¢. If your number came out near 38¢, you’re paying about two and a half times what the typical American household pays.

Step 2: Separate supply from delivery

Now look at how that total splits. Every Con Ed bill has two major components, and they behave very differently.

Supply is the electricity itself — the commodity. Delivery is what you pay for the poles, wires, substations, and crews that bring it to your meter. On a typical residential bill, delivery runs about twice the supply charge, meaning roughly two-thirds of what you pay has nothing to do with how much power you consumed.

This is the part that surprises people. You can switch to a third-party energy supply company and shop for a better commodity price, and you’ll have changed the smaller half of your bill. The delivery side stays exactly where it is — and delivery is the side that’s been driving most of the increase.

Step 3: Build your own Con Edison rate increase history

With three years of all-in rates in front of you, calculate the year-over-year change. Divide this year’s rate by last year’s, subtract one, and you have your personal increase percentage.

Do it for both intervals and average them. What most households find is a number in the neighborhood of 8% — sometimes a little under, sometimes well over, depending on the year and the rate case cycle. Rate increases don’t arrive evenly. They arrive in approved steps, which is why one year can feel flat and the next feels like a jolt.

What matters isn’t any single year. It’s the trendline, and the trendline has pointed one direction for a long time.

Step 4: Run it forward — this is where it gets uncomfortable

Take your current monthly bill and compound it at 8% a year. Not added — compounded. Each increase stacks on top of the last one, the same way interest does.

For a household paying $300 a month today:

That $300 bill becomes roughly $444 a month within five years, and it doesn’t stop there. Nothing about your house changed. You didn’t add a hot tub. The rate simply did what it has been doing.

This is the single most useful thing the exercise produces: a concrete number for what staying put actually costs. Most people budget around today’s bill. The honest comparison is against the bill you’ll be paying in year seven.

Step 5: Compare it to a rate that doesn’t move

Here’s the structural difference with solar, and it has less to do with panels than with math. When you finance a solar system, your monthly payment is fixed. It’s set the day the contract is signed and it stays there. Meanwhile the alternative — the Con Ed bill you’d otherwise be paying — keeps compounding.

In practical terms, a household paying $300 a month typically lands at $150 to $180 a month after going solar, a 40–50% reduction. The only remaining charge from Con Edison is a basic service fee of about $20 a month to stay connected to the grid — not a penalty for cloudy days, just the cost of keeping the connection open.

That connection is doing real work. Under New York’s net metering rules, the excess your system produces on long summer days is credited back at the full retail rate. Those credits carry you through the shorter, overcast stretches of winter. It’s why a properly sized system can offset 80–100% of annual household consumption even though the region gets about 9 peak sun hours a day in summer and 5 in winter.

You now have three things most homeowners never bother to calculate: your real cost per kilowatt-hour, how much of your bill is delivery you can’t shop around, and what your bill looks like in 2031 if nothing changes.

Whatever you decide to do next, that’s a better foundation than a sales pitch. The Con Edison rate increase history isn’t an argument anyone has to make for you — it’s arithmetic you can do yourself in twenty minutes with three PDFs and a calculator.

If the five-year number gave you pause, that’s the right reaction. It’s the one most people never see coming.