Electricity prices around the world, by country

Originally published September 30, 2013. Updated September 25, 2026.

Households pay anywhere from a fraction of a cent per kWh in Iran 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 it was the cheap outlier in most global comparisons, because its prices have 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 2025.

Source: GlobalPetrolPrices, household electricity prices averaged over 2023 to 2025, read September 25, 2026.

On that basis, a German household pays about 2.2 times what an American household pays for the same kilowatt-hour. A Japanese household pays about a quarter more than an American one, and a Chinese household pays about 40% of the US rate.

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 US average has risen by about half since 2013. The Energy Information Administration puts it at about 12 cents per kWh in 2013 and 16 cents in 2023, and the July 2026 figure of 18.31 cents was 4.9% higher than a year earlier.

For a household using the 10,791 kWh a year that EIA reports for the average US home, 18.31 cents works out to about $1,976 a year, or roughly $165 a month. The same amount of power at the German price in the table would cost about $4,360 a year.

In 2013, a widely shared comparison by Lindsay Wilson of Shrink That Footprint showed the US as one of the cheapest wealthy countries for household power, with Germany and Denmark at the expensive end. The US still sits below every European country in the table above. Americans now pay noticeably more per kilowatt-hour than they did then, though, while German prices have come off their peak.

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. Prices then climbed further. Clean Energy Wire, which tracks a typical German household using 3,500 kWh a year, found the price rose from 32.8 euro cents per kWh in 2021 to a peak of 47 cents in 2023, after Europe’s energy crisis, before easing to 39.6 cents in 2025. Eurostat’s figure for the second half of 2025, €0.3869 per kWh, lands close to that estimate.

For that reference household, the drop from the 2023 peak to the 2025 price is worth about 260 euros a year. Germany is still the second most expensive place to buy household power in the EU, behind Ireland.

A high price per kilowatt-hour doesn’t automatically mean a high bill, because a typical German home uses a lot less power than an average American one. Clean Energy Wire’s typical German household uses 3,500 kWh a year, about a third of the 10,791 kWh EIA reports for the average US home. At the $0.404 German price in the table, 3,500 kWh comes to about $1,414 a year, less than the roughly $1,976 the average American home pays. It’s a rough comparison, since it mixes a multi-year price average with a single-year usage figure, but the direction is clear.

The highest rate anywhere in the GlobalPetrolPrices data belongs to Bermuda, at $0.467 per kWh in the fourth quarter of 2025. That’s more than 2.5 times the US average.

The cheapest places to buy electricity

The global household average was about $0.17 per kWh in the fourth quarter of 2025, and the US sits only a little above it. China’s 2023 to 2025 average of about 7.6 cents sits well below that quarterly world figure, though the two numbers cover different time windows.

Subsidies push some countries far lower. Iran’s heavily subsidized household rate works out to about $0.003 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.

The spread inside the US

The US average covers a huge 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. A household that moved from North Dakota to Hawaii and used exactly the same amount of power would see the energy part of its bill rise almost fivefold. At the EIA average of 10,791 kWh a year, that’s roughly $856 in North Dakota against about $4,100 in Hawaii. Most states fall somewhere between those two, and EIA publishes every state’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 would change the ranking

Prices on both sides of the Atlantic are moving. The US residential average rose 4.9% in the year to July 2026, while German prices have fallen from their 2023 peak. If both trends continue, the gap between them keeps narrowing. EIA publishes a new national figure every month, which makes the US side easy to track.

The table’s three-year average also includes Germany’s 2023 spike, so single-year figures from national sources won’t match it exactly. Currency moves matter too. Because the table converts every country to dollars, a stronger or weaker dollar can shift a country’s position without any change in what its households pay in their own currency.

The per-kWh price also isn’t the whole bill. In Britain, Ofgem sets the price cap for three months at a time, and for October through December 2025 it capped the unit rate at 26.35 pence per kWh, with a typical household on the cap paying £1,755 a year for electricity and gas together. What a household pays in a year depends on that rate and on how much power it uses, which is why a country with expensive electricity can still have ordinary-looking bills.