Why your Arizona electric bill keeps going up

Your Arizona electric bill keeps going up for two reasons that pull in different directions. The price per kilowatt-hour has risen, but more slowly than the national average. The amount of electricity an Arizona home uses is roughly a quarter higher than the US norm, which is what turns a below-average rate into an above-average bill.

That distinction matters, because it decides which fixes actually work.

The short version

Arizona’s rate is below average. Arizona’s bill is not.

Start with the numbers rather than the impression.

In 2024, the average Arizona residential customer paid 14.91 cents per kilowatt-hour and used 1,075 kWh per month, producing an average bill of $160.24. The national figures for the same year were 16.48 cents, 863 kWh, and $142.26. Those come from the US Energy Information Administration’s Form 861 sales, revenue and price tables (opens in a new tab), released October 7, 2025.

Arizona’s electricity is cheaper per unit than the national average and has been for the entire decade. Arizona homes simply buy more units, because cooling a house through a Phoenix summer is not optional.

• Arizona
• US

View the numbers as a table

Average residential electricity price, Arizona vs US, 2015 to 2025 — full dataset

Period	Arizona (¢/kWh)	US (¢/kWh)
2015	12.13¢/kWh	12.65¢/kWh
2016	12.15¢/kWh	12.55¢/kWh
2017	12.44¢/kWh	12.89¢/kWh
2018	12.77¢/kWh	12.87¢/kWh
2019	12.43¢/kWh	13.01¢/kWh
2020	12.27¢/kWh	13.15¢/kWh
2021	12.54¢/kWh	13.66¢/kWh
2022	13.02¢/kWh	15.04¢/kWh
2023	14.02¢/kWh	16¢/kWh
2024	14.91¢/kWh	16.48¢/kWh
2025	15.32¢/kWh	17.3¢/kWh

Source: EIA Form 861 (2015-2024, final) and Electric Power Monthly Table 5.6.B (2025, preliminary).

Two things stand out in that chart. The lines were nearly on top of each other in 2015 and have separated since, with the national line climbing faster. And Arizona’s own curve is not a smooth ramp: it was flat from 2015 through 2021, then rose in every year from 2022 onward.

This means the bill pressure Arizona households have felt is recent, concentrated in the last four years, and not primarily a unit-price story. It is a usage story with a rate increase layered on top of it.

What is actually on the bill

An APS residential bill is a base rate plus a stack of adjustors. The adjustors are separate tariff sheets, each recovering a specific category of cost, and each reset on its own schedule. They are the part most people never read.

Here is the current stack for a residential customer, read from the APS tariff sheets published on the rates, schedules and adjustors page (opens in a new tab).

View the numbers as a table

APS residential adjustors, cents per kWh — full dataset

Adjustor	Value (¢)
PSA-1	1.698¢
REAC-1	0.621¢
TCA-1	0.536¢
LFCR	0.246¢
CRS-1	0.148¢
DSMAC-1	0.075¢

Source: APS residential adjustor tariff sheets, A.C.C. filings, read August 2026. TEAM omitted (currently $0.000).

Added up before the REAC cap applies, the adjustors come to 3.32 cents per kWh. On 1,050 kWh, which is what APS uses as a typical residential month, that is roughly $33 before you have paid for a single kilowatt-hour of base energy.

The largest one by a wide margin is PSA-1, the power supply adjustment. It recovers the difference between what fuel and purchased power actually cost and what the base rates assumed they would cost, with no markup. When gas prices move or the utility buys more power on the market than it planned to, PSA-1 is where that shows up.

Why is my APS bill higher than last year?

Because the price per kWh rose and the adjustors reset. Arizona’s average residential rate went from 14.02 cents in 2023 to 14.91 cents in 2024 to a preliminary 15.32 cents in 2025, and several APS adjustors reset upward during 2026. Usage also swings with summer temperature, which is the larger month-to-month driver.

The temperature effect is easy to underestimate. Arizona’s residential sales actually fell 3.4 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, from 40,435 GWh to 39,062 GWh, according to EIA retail sales data. A single mild or brutal summer moves a household’s annual total more than a rate case does.

Arizona’s power demand is growing, but not evenly

A figure circulated widely in early 2026 claimed Arizona’s electricity use grew about 8 percent in 2025, roughly four times the national rate. EIA data does not support it.

Arizona’s total retail electricity sales across all sectors went from 90,843 GWh in 2024 to 91,552 GWh in 2025, a rise of 0.78 percent. National sales rose 2.08 percent over the same period. Arizona grew more slowly than the country, not four times faster.

The year that resembles the claim is 2024, when Arizona grew 5.73 percent against a national 2.61 percent. The growth is real, and it is concentrated by sector:

Commercial load, which is where data centers sit in the reporting, is the segment that grew. Residential shrank. That split is the whole basis of the fairness argument playing out at the Corporation Commission.

The data-center boom and how it reaches your bill

Metro Phoenix has roughly 904 MW of operating data-center capacity with 1,307 MW under construction and about 4,154 MW planned, per JLL’s midyear 2025 North America data center report. On existing inventory that places Phoenix around seventh among North American markets, well behind Northern Virginia at 5,574 MW and Dallas-Fort Worth at 1,539 MW. On the forward pipeline, Phoenix is second nationally at roughly 5 GW.

The pipeline is the number that matters for rates. In sworn testimony filed in the pending APS rate case (opens in a new tab), APS witness Jessica Hobbick stated that APS is contractually committed to about 3,296 MW of data-center load and is engaged with prospects representing a further 16,908 MW of potential load, a figure she notes exceeds Arizona’s entire system peak of roughly 8,200 MW.

Serving even a fraction of that means new generation and new transmission, and utilities recover that spending through rate cases. That is the chain: pipeline drives investment, investment drives rate filings, rate filings land on your bill.

The pending APS rate case, in specifics

APS filed for a general rate increase on June 13, 2025 in Docket No. E-01345A-25-0105. The request is a base-rate revenue increase of $662.44 million, or 15.99 percent, against a test year ending December 31, 2024.

The requested increase is not spread evenly:

The XHLF class is the one APS points to when it says data centers will pay more. It already exists, created in 2017, and is currently optional for customers with monthly maximum demand at or above 5,000 kW and a load factor at or above 92 percent. APS has proposed making it mandatory for data-center customers taking service after January 2024.

Solar customers have a separate stake. APS has proposed raising the Grid Access Charge, which is billed per kW-DC of installed solar nameplate:

For a 10 kW-DC system on R-TOU-E, that is a move from about $2.42 a month to about $5.87.

The evidentiary hearing ran from May 18 to July 7, 2026, across 31 hearing days with roughly three dozen intervenors. As of August 2026 the case is in post-hearing briefing. Per the ACC’s own case update (opens in a new tab), the Administrative Law Judge’s Recommended Opinion and Order is expected in late November 2026, the Commission must vote by December 31, 2026, and new rates are expected in early 2027.

Nothing above is in effect yet. It is a request under review. For rates you are actually being billed today, see APS rate plans explained and the running summary at the APS rate increase page.

Are Arizona homeowners subsidizing data centers?

That question is genuinely unsettled and is being decided at the Corporation Commission. An independent analysis found residential customers paid 14.6 times more per unit of new load than commercial customers between 2022 and 2025. APS says the metric is not relevant to how rates are set.

The analysis is the work of Abhay Padgaonkar, an independent energy data analyst, and was reported by 12News on May 27, 2026. Its stated findings: for every 1 GWh of new load the residential sector added, it paid 14.6 times more than the commercial sector did; the commercial sector accounted for over 100 percent of consumption growth while paying about 60 percent of the additional revenue APS collected; and residential customers used 5.5 percent less electricity in 2025 than in 2022 while paying 23 percent more per kWh.

An APS spokesperson responded that the “disparity premium” metric “lacks clear relevance to how APS customer rates are set or how costs are allocated.”

The venue is the ACC, which opened Docket No. E-00000A-25-0069 into rate classifications and data centers and held a large-load workshop on April 16, 2026. That workshop produced no order. It set scope. The full treatment of both sides is in are data centers raising Arizona electric bills.

The one cost you can control

You cannot vote out the data centers or freeze the next rate case. You can change how many kilowatt-hours you buy from the utility, and that is the variable the bill is most sensitive to.

Two things follow from the numbers above. First, because Arizona’s problem is consumption rather than unit price, anything that cuts kWh has outsized leverage here compared with a lower-usage state. Second, because APS on-peak pricing runs 4pm to 7pm on weekdays year round, when those kWh are consumed matters nearly as much as how many.

On the generation side, the federal picture changed. The residential clean energy credit under IRC Section 25D was repealed by Public Law 119-21, Section 70506, and no longer applies to expenditures made after December 31, 2025. The Arizona state credit under A.R.S. 43-1083, worth 25 percent of cost up to $1,000, remains in force. The current list is in Arizona solar incentives and tax credits, and the payback arithmetic is in is solar worth it in Arizona.

Common questions

Why does my APS or SRP bill keep going up?

Rates rose and usage is high. Arizona’s average residential price went from 12.54 cents in 2021 to a preliminary 15.32 cents in 2025. Arizona homes also use about 1,075 kWh a month against a national average of 863, so the same rate produces a larger bill here.

Underneath that, utilities are spending heavily on new generation and transmission to meet load growth, and they recover that spending through rate cases at the Corporation Commission. APS has one pending now. SRP, which is a public power district governed by its own elected board rather than by the ACC, sets its price plans separately.

How much have Arizona electricity rates actually risen?

Arizona’s average residential rate rose from 12.13 cents per kWh in 2015 to a preliminary 15.32 cents in 2025, an increase of 26.3 percent. The US average rose 36.8 percent over the same period, from 12.65 cents to 17.30 cents.

Arizona has therefore risen more slowly than the country and remains cheaper per kilowatt-hour. The increase was also not steady: prices were essentially flat from 2015 through 2021, then rose in every year since 2022.

How many data centers are in metro Phoenix?

Metro Phoenix had about 904 MW of operating data-center capacity as of JLL’s midyear 2025 report, with 1,307 MW under construction and roughly 4,154 MW planned. That places Phoenix around seventh in North America on existing inventory and second on the forward pipeline.

An older and widely repeated figure of 707 MW came from JLL’s H1 2024 report, and the claim that Phoenix ranks second only to Dallas has not held up against more recent inventory tables.

Are the data centers why my specific bill went up?

That is the part being fought out right now. The independent analysis reported by 12News found residential customers paid 14.6 times more per unit of new load than commercial customers between 2022 and 2025. APS disputes the relevance of that metric and points to its proposed 47.03 percent increase for the Extra High Load Factor class.

What is not in dispute: commercial load grew 4.0 percent in Arizona in 2025 while residential fell 3.4 percent, the grid needs large investment, and that investment flows through rate cases.

What can I actually do about a rising electric bill?

Reduce the kilowatt-hours you buy, and shift the ones you cannot avoid out of the 4pm to 7pm on-peak window. Because Arizona’s bill problem is consumption rather than unit price, usage reduction has more leverage here than in most states.

Beyond that, check which rate plan you are on. Plan selection changes what the same kilowatt-hours cost, and the difference between plans is often larger than a year’s rate increase.

Related reading

• APS rate plans explained covers which plan fits which usage pattern, and what the on-peak window actually costs.
• The APS rate increase page tracks the pending case as it moves.
• Arizona grid peak demand explained shows the real hourly load shape and why the 4pm to 7pm window is priced the way it is.
• Is solar worth it in Arizona? runs the payback math against these rates.

Rate and consumption figures in this article were verified against EIA publications and APS tariff sheets on August 10, 2026. Adjustors reset on individual schedules through the year and the pending rate case has not been decided, so confirm current figures against the linked sources.

• Rate Cases
• APS
• SRP
• Arizona