The answer depends on your state and on which kind of customer you are. States that added the most demand have seen better price outcomes than states that added the least. Look yours up.
U.S. Energy Information Administration data, 2019–2025, inflation-adjusted (BLS CPI-U).
The honest read
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Whether households win or lose comes down to one decision: cost allocation. Large-load tariffs that make big users pay their own way are what protect other ratepayers.
How to read this. Each dot is a state. Right means more electricity demand was added statewide from 2019 to 2025; down means retail prices fell after adjusting for inflation over the same period for the customer class you selected. The downward trend line is the core finding, and it appears in every class, most strongly for commercial customers and least strongly for households.
Customer classes. "All customers" is the average price across every kilowatt-hour sold in the state. That average moves for two reasons: what each class pays, and how much each class buys. When a state adds a lot of large-customer load at lower per-kWh rates, the average falls even if nobody's rate changes. The "at 2019 customer mix" figure removes that effect by re-weighting 2025 class prices to 2019 sales shares. Residential, commercial and industrial follow the classification each utility reports to EIA; data centers are generally reported as commercial, and some utilities report them as industrial. Transportation (under 0.3% of U.S. sales) is included in the all-customer average and has no view of its own.
Method. Load growth = percent change in total retail electricity sales by state, 2019 to 2025, and is the horizontal axis in every view. Inflation-adjusted price change (economists call this the real price change) = percent change in the average retail price for the selected class, deflated by BLS CPI-U (about 25.9% cumulative inflation over the window; the 2025 average uses the 11 months BLS published, because October 2025 was not collected). Each figure is also shown as billed: the raw change in cents per kWh, before any inflation adjustment. The outlined points mark PJM-footprint states, where higher capacity-auction prices began reaching bills in mid-2025. Correlation is not causation, and the relationship holds where low-cost supply is available and tariffs assign costs to the loads that cause them.
What this tool explains. The state notes are generated from the EIA figures: how prices and sales moved for each class, how that compares with the national figure, and how much of the all-customer change is a shift in customer mix. They describe what happened. The causes behind a given state's prices (fuel costs, rate cases, storm and wildfire recovery, capacity markets, grid investment) sit outside this dataset.
Sources. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Electric Power Industry Report (Form EIA-861), Historical State Data, final 2025 data released October 7, 2026; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U. Pattern corroborated by Wiser et al., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and The Brattle Group, “Retail Electricity Price Trends and Drivers” (2026).