States Where Electricity Prices Are Surging Most

Anxiety is spreading across the US that electricity rates will rise quickly and relentlessly — sometimes with little warning. And there are real reasons behind these concerns.

The first, and probably most significant, is data centers. According to Pew, “U.S. data centers consumed 183 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2024, according to IEA estimates. That works out to more than 4% of the country’s total electricity consumption last year – and is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity demand of the entire nation of Pakistan.” That figure is expected to rise by 133% by 2030. Capital expenditures on data centers by America’s largest tech companies are likely to approach $1 trillion this year alone. Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya recently wrote, “Overall, we now see 2026 hyperscaler capex at over $860 billion (+80% year over year) and see a path toward about $1.2 trillion (+38% year over year) capex by 2027.”

Less visible, but just as important, is the growing use of air conditioning in an age of rising global temperatures. There are approximately 374 million air conditioning units in the US — more than one per person. As Ohio University reports, “Summer air conditioning usage is by far the largest contributor to higher electricity bills. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that air conditioning accounts for more than 50% of summer electricity usage in some areas—effectively doubling electricity bills in places like Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.”

A strict supply-and-demand analysis doesn’t tell the whole story, though, because it leaves out infrastructure. Someone has to pay to upgrade an aging electrical grid — in some parts of the country, over half a century old. Joshua D. Rhodes, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute, recently estimated the scale of the problem: “By my analysis, the current (depreciated) value of the U.S. electric grid, comprising power plants, wires, transformers and poles, is roughly US$1.5 to $2 trillion. To replace it would cost almost $5 trillion.”

That leaves one central question: who pays the bill for America’s electricity? A few solutions have been proposed, but most are unacceptable to the parties involved. One suggestion is that companies building data centers should pay enough into the system to keep electricity prices flat for other businesses and residential customers, regardless of how high overall costs climb. Data center owners have largely rejected that idea.

Almost no one who uses electricity has escaped rate increases, though some have been hit harder than others. On average, US electricity bills are up 32% since 2014.

Any state-by-state estimate of rate increases has to be treated as approximate, since grids and power sources are built and maintained by utilities, not states — and many states are served by more than one utility. PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. power market, covers 13 states and Washington, DC. According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “Traditional wholesale electricity markets exist primarily in the Southeast, Southwest and Northwest where utilities are responsible for system operations and management, and, typically, for providing power to retail consumers.” PJM wholesale prices have surged by double digits this year, and several of the states below are served by PJM.

The following are the top 10 states ranked by year-over-year increases in residential electricity prices, based on March 2026 data from the EIA and the MIT/Heatmap Electricity Price Hub. (The Hub also breaks out data by congressional district, county, and zip code, in addition to state and utility.) Both the EIA and the Hub start with utility-level data and aggregate it up to the state level.

Rank	State	YoY Price Increase (Mar 2026)
1	District of Columbia	22.5%
2	New Jersey	18.2%
3	New Hampshire	18.0%
4	Maryland	17.2%
5	Ohio	16.6%
6	Virginia	14.5%
7	Washington	14.1%
8	Pennsylvania	13.6%
9	Montana	13.0%
10	Tennessee	12.8%

U.S. average for comparison: 10.2%.

This list holds up well against the Hub’s own reporting. CleanEcon and Heatmap have separately flagged DC (driven by Pepco’s generation costs), New Jersey (PSE&G/ACE, tied to PJM capacity price surges), New Hampshire (up across all four major utilities), Maryland (Pepco MD), and Virginia (Dominion’s base rate increase) as standout states in their monthly write-ups drawing on the MIT Hub. So while this particular table comes from a Visual Capitalist analysis of EIA data rather than a Hub-published top-10 list, it draws on the same underlying source and points to the same outlier states — making it a reliable proxy.

One methodological caveat: Ohio and Montana haven’t appeared by name in the Hub’s own monthly narrative summaries, which tend to spotlight only a handful of states per update. Their exact rankings should be treated with somewhat more uncertainty than the top six, which are corroborated by both sources.