Originally published September 30, 2013. Updated September 28, 2026.
Households pay anywhere from six-tenths of a cent per kWh in Ethiopia to about 47 cents in Bermuda, and the average American household paid 18.31 cents per kWh in July 2026. That keeps the US on the cheaper side among wealthy countries. German and British households pay about 40 cents per kWh, more than twice the US rate, while households in Canada and China pay less than Americans do. The US has lost some of its edge since 2013, when Wilson’s comparison put it among the world’s cheaper wealthy countries, and its price has climbed by about half since then.
Household electricity prices by country
Official price statistics come in different currencies and cover different time periods, so the table below uses one source for every country. GlobalPetrolPrices converts each country’s household rate to US dollars and averages it over 2023 to 2026.
| Country | Household price, US dollars per kWh |
|---|---|
| China | $0.076 |
| Canada | $0.123 |
| United States | $0.188 |
| Japan | $0.227 |
| Denmark | $0.355 |
| United Kingdom | $0.402 |
| Germany | $0.406 |
Source: GlobalPetrolPrices, household electricity prices averaged over 2023 to 2026, read September 28, 2026.
On that basis, a German household pays close to twice what an American household pays for the same kilowatt-hour. A Japanese household pays about a fifth more than an American one, and a Chinese household pays roughly two-fifths of the US rate. Whatever country you live in, your own utility bill already charges you close to one of the rates in this table, converted into your own currency.
National statistics in local currency put the European countries in the same order. Eurostat put Germany’s household price at €0.3869 per kWh in the second half of 2025, second in the European Union only to Ireland at €0.4042. Denmark came in at €0.3312 per kWh for the same period, against an EU average of €0.2896.
Where the US ranks
The Energy Information Administration puts the US average at about 12 cents per kWh in 2013 and 16 cents in 2023. By July 2026, the average reached 18.31 cents, 4.9% higher than a year earlier.
EIA reported that the average US home used 10,791 kWh in 2022. If your household uses close to that amount, paying 18.31 cents a kWh puts your bill at around $1,976 a year, or about $165 a month. The same usage at the $0.406 German price in the table would cost about $4,381 a year, more than twice as much for the same electricity. The US still sits below every European country in that price table.
The most expensive places to buy electricity
Germany has been the standard example of expensive household power for more than a decade. Wilson’s 2013 comparison, built on 2011 data, put it near the top of the list, and prices climbed further after that.
Clean Energy Wire tracks a typical German household using 3,500 kWh a year. Its price for that household rose from 32.8 euro cents per kWh in 2021 to a peak of 47 cents in 2023 after Europe’s energy crisis, then eased to 39.6 cents in 2025. Eurostat’s own figure for the second half of 2025, €0.3869 per kWh, lands close to that estimate.
For that reference household, the price drop from the 2023 peak to 2025 comes to roughly 260 euros a year, calculated from Clean Energy Wire’s per-kWh figures above. Germany is still the second most expensive place to buy household power in the EU, behind Ireland.
Clean Energy Wire’s typical German household uses 3,500 kWh a year, about a third of the 10,791 kWh EIA reported for the average US home in 2022. At the $0.406 German price in the table, that usage comes to about $1,421 a year, well under the roughly $1,976 a typical American home pays. A higher price per kWh does not automatically mean a higher bill, because your bill is the rate times how much power you use.
The highest rate anywhere in the GlobalPetrolPrices data belongs to Bermuda, averaged at $0.465 per kWh over 2023 to 2026, about 2.5 times the US average.
The cheapest places to buy electricity
The global household average was about $0.176 per kWh in the second quarter of 2026, and the US sits only a little above it. China’s 2023 to 2026 average of about $0.076 per kWh sits well below that quarterly world figure, though the two numbers cover different time windows. Your own bill still depends on how much power your home uses, whatever the rate on it.
Subsidies push some countries far lower. Ethiopia’s household rate works out to about $0.006 per kWh, a small fraction of a US cent. Inside the European Union, Hungary had the lowest household price in the second half of 2025, at €0.1082 per kWh, roughly a quarter of what Irish households paid in the same period.
Canada is the big exception close to home. In Hydro-Québec’s 2025 comparison of 21 North American cities, Montréal households paid 8.29 Canadian cents per kWh before taxes, the lowest of any city in the study. Calgary paid 22.90 Canadian cents, the highest of the Canadian cities compared, so Canada’s low national price covers a wide range between provinces.
Canada generated 60% of its electricity from hydropower in 2021, which keeps the national average low even as provincial rates vary widely. You won’t find that rate on a US bill, but it shows how much a country’s power mix shapes what a household pays.
The spread inside the US
The US average covers a wide range. Inside the US, Hawaii’s residential rate averaged 38 cents per kWh in 2024, the highest of any state, while North Dakota’s averaged 7.93 cents, the lowest.
That 30-cent gap is wider than the roughly 22-cent gap between the US and Germany in the table above. If you moved from North Dakota to Hawaii and used exactly the same amount of power, the energy part of your bill would rise almost fivefold. At the EIA average of 10,791 kWh a year, your bill would run about $856 in North Dakota against about $4,100 in Hawaii.
Every other state lands somewhere between those two extremes, and EIA publishes each one’s average on the same page. The national average is the right number for world comparisons. Your state’s rate is the one on your bill.
What actually decides your electricity bill
The per-kWh numbers above are half of what decides your bill. The other half is how many kilowatt-hours you use.
Prices keep moving too. The US residential average rose 4.9% in the year to July 2026, while German prices have fallen from their 2023 peak. A stronger or weaker dollar can also shift a country’s spot in the world rankings without any change in what households pay in their own currency, since the rankings convert every price to US dollars.
Britain shows how much usage matters. Ofgem resets its price cap every three months, and for October through December 2026 it capped the unit rate at 26.32 pence per kWh. A typical household on that cap pays £1,723 a year for electricity and gas together, a figure that already assumes a set amount of use. Your own bill moves the moment your usage does, in Britain or wherever you live.
