Why your power bill is spiking faster than a nearby data center’s

Over the past few years, millions of Americans have seen their electricity bills skyrocket. Since February 2020, electricity prices have increased by an average of 40 percent across the country. In some areas, the rate is even faster — in Washington, D.C., electricity costs increased 93 percent from July 2020 to July 2025.

But the rise in costs hasn’t affected each type of user equally. According to recent data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity costs — the average price faced by ordinary home and apartment dwellers in the U.S. — rose by 10 percent between 2022 and 2024. Commercial users, spanning everything from small corner stores to giant, energy-sucking data centers, have seen rates increase just 3 percent. And industrial users saw prices fall by 2 percent during the same period. The data was recently covered by Yale Climate Connections.

That means that even as huge data centers — some using as much electricity as a small city — have plugged into the grid in recent years, they aren’t seeing the same spikes in prices as residential customers. That may come as a surprise to many electricity users.

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