Compare Rates

How this works

Most rate comparisons put an advertised cents-per-kWh number next to a utility average. That comparison is meaningless — the two figures include different things, and an advertised rate is only valid at one exact usage level.

This tool does the defensible version. It takes one identical year of electricity use, calculates the real bill under the CPS Energy residential tariff, calculates the real bill for every qualifying competitive offer in the market you pick, and compares the totals.

Why it asks about your house instead of your kilowatt-hours

It used to ask for a monthly usage figure in kWh. Almost nobody knows that number, and the ones who guessed a round 1,000 got a worse answer than they realised — because a single figure applied flat across twelve months is a shape no house in Texas has.

That is not a rounding error. Both sides of this comparison charge differently for summer. CPS adds a peak capacity charge on every kWh above 600 from June through September. A bill-credit plan pays out only in the months your usage clears its threshold. Price a flat 1,000 kWh and you hand that plan twelve wins it would never get in a real year — which is exactly how a comparison site ends up recommending a plan that costs you more.

So pick a house instead. Each size carries a real twelve-month curve, and the tool prints the twelve numbers it used underneath the results so you can check them.

• How much a home that size uses. The EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2020, restricted to its 1,016 surveyed Texas households and grouped by floor area. RECS measures metered consumption; it is not a model.
• What shape the year has. Texas residential sales divided by Texas residential customers for each calendar month, from EIA Form 861M, averaged over 2021–2025 so no single mild winter or brutal August sets the curve.

Those two sources do not know about each other, which is what makes the cross-check worth something: RECS puts the average Texas household at 13,440 kWh a year and Form 861M puts it at 13,508 — half a percent apart.Source: EIA RECS + Form 861M

They are also Texas figures being used for a San Antonio question, so here is the check on that too: CPS Energy’s own residential customers averaged 12,845 kWh in 2024, about 2% below the state average. Close enough to stand in, and stated rather than assumed.

Advertised prices and what the market actually delivered are two different measurements

The results open with a panel headed “What people actually paid,” before any advertised offer appears. That is deliberate. It is the most important number on this page, and putting it after the offer comparison meant most readers took away “competition looks cheaper” and never reached the part where, for most households, it was not.

It is also the easiest number here to misread, so it is worth being blunt about what it is not.

Everything else in the tool prices offers: a fixed rate you are quoted today and hold for twelve months. The panel prices outcomes: total revenue divided by total electricity sold, from federal filings covering every residential customer in Texas for a whole year. That figure includes the large majority who never shop, everyone whose contract quietly lapsed onto a month-to-month holdover rate, everyone on a variable plan, and every fee that landed on a bill.Source: EIA Form 861

So do not subtract one from the other and expect your own bill. A household that shops carefully, reads the label and re-shops on time is buying the advertised price, not the average outcome. The gap between the two is not a prediction about that household — it is a measurement of how the market performs for everybody, which is the question a legislature deciding whether to restructure CPS Energy actually has to answer.

Both numbers are true. They answer different questions, and this tool shows both rather than picking the flattering one — the outcome first, because that is the finding, and the advertised comparison after it. See what each retailer’s customers actually paid →

Think one of these figures is wrong? Tell us — corrections matter more to us than the argument does.

What is included

• Electricity service only. City of San Antonio fees on a CPS bill — garbage, brush, environmental — are excluded, because they are not electricity costs and have no counterpart on a Houston bill.
• All delivery charges, on both sides. Competitive prices already carry the regulated delivery charge every provider passes through identically.
• The real CPS tariff. The published Residential Service rate plus the actual monthly fuel and regulatory adjustment factors, including the summer peak capacity charge on usage above 600 kWh from June through September.
• Fixed-rate offers only. Variable and indexed plans are excluded, because a future price nobody can know cannot be compared against anything.

The full method, and its known limits, are set out on the Sources page. Source: full method

Why you should trust it against us

This tool will tell you when a competitive offer beats CPS Energy, because in several Texas markets the typical advertised offer currently does. We publish it that way on purpose. A calculator that could only produce one answer would not be worth using, and you would be right not to believe it.

What the tool also shows is the spread. In a single market, the difference between the best and worst offer runs to hundreds of dollars a year for identical electricity. Under competition your bill depends less on the market than on whether you shop well, every year, without lapsing.