Fees in the Fine Print

Every single provider has fees beyond the rate.

Not one of the contracts we read was fee free. The typical provider discloses 8 distinct fees, and the busiest disclose 15 or more. Every provider in the study charges a late payment penalty, almost always 5 percent of the past due balance.

The everyday fees almost everyone charges.

Some fees are so common that customers should simply expect them:

Getting the bad news costs money at 34 of 44 providers.

The single most striking pattern in the study: three quarters of Texas providers charge a fee for the disconnection notice itself, the letter warning a customer they may be cut off. It ranges from $9.99 at Spark Energy and Texans Choice to $30 at CleanSky, Cirro, and Discount Power, with $25 the most common price. The customer pays it before any disconnection happens, on top of the disconnect and reconnect fees if it comes to that.

Fees did not go away since 2023. They moved.

Nine fee categories from our 2023 study have essentially vanished from contracts, and almost all of them were payment channel fees: charges for paying by electronic check, paying through a live agent, or one time convenience fees. As paying a bill online became free and normal, those fees dried up. In their place, about twenty fee types appeared that we did not see in 2023, clustered somewhere new: the meter and the hardware. Meter read fees, meter test fees, meter tampering charges, device cost recovery fees, home service plan call charges, and pay station charges. The fee frontier moved from how you pay to the equipment on your wall.

No provider charges fewer fee types than in 2023.

Of the 23 providers we could score in both studies, 12 disclose more fee types today and 11 are about the same. Zero went down.

About one in three fees never states a real amount.

146 of the 464 verified fees, 31 percent, use language like “up to,” “a reasonable fee,” or leave the amount entirely to the provider’s discretion. For a customer, these may be the most important fees in the study: they are impossible to price before they hit a bill. A sampling of the actual contract language:

The fee hall of fame.

Competing brands, identical fine print.

Several sets of sister brands share fee schedules nearly line for line. TXU, Ambit, TriEagle, Express, and Veteran carry matching fee lists with matching prices, down to the same “up to $4.95” serial payment fee. Amigo, Just Energy, and Tara share one fee schedule. So do Infuse and Revolution, and Frontier and Companion. A customer comparing two of these brands is often comparing one company’s fine print to itself.

One provider runs fifteen different contracts at once.

Constellation was the only provider with genuinely different Terms of Service live for different plans at the same time, fifteen distinct versions. Across all of them it discloses 22 distinct fees, though a customer on any one contract typically faces about 7. Which contract applies depends on which plan they bought. Every other provider’s plans share a single current document.

Half the market turned over in three years.

Of the 43 providers we named in 2023, only 24 still sell plans on PowerToChoose today. Nineteen are gone from the current book, and roughly twenty new names arrived. A fee study is also a reminder of how fast retail electricity providers appear and disappear.

Who discloses the most, and the least.

Counting distinct fees in each provider’s current contract:

A low count is worth stating carefully: it means fewer distinct fee types in the contract, not that the plan is cheap.

Distinct verified fees per provider family

All 43 provider families, most to fewest. Constellation counts 22 fees across 15 contract versions, while a typical version has about 7.