How this site works

Texas providers know exactly which three numbers you see when you shop. PowerToChoose.org shows every plan’s price at exactly 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh a month — so plans are engineered to look cheap at those three points and cost more everywhere else.

The favorite trick is the bill credit. A plan advertises 9.8¢ per kWh — but that rate depends on a $100 credit you only get above 1,000 kWh. Use 999 in a mild month and the credit vanishes: that month you’re really paying about 20¢. A few mild months a year can make the “cheapest” plan one of the most expensive.

We read each plan’s Electricity Facts Label — the legal document where the real pricing lives — and compute what every plan would cost at your usage, month by month, for a full year. Plans are ranked by true annual cost, lowest first, with the gap between the advertised rate and your real rate shown beside each one. If your usage sits near a plan’s credit cliff, we warn you which months are at risk.

Every plan shown here has passed a check against the provider’s own advertised rates — our math must match theirs within 0.2¢ at all three comparison points. A plan that fails is not shown — period. Some plans are missing for exactly that reason: their advertised rates and their own documents disagree. We’d rather show you fewer plans than a number we can’t stand behind. Pricing is refreshed daily, and every total includes your local utility’s delivery charges — complete bills, not teasers.

Enter your last twelve months of bills and we use them directly. Enter less, or just pick a household size, and we shape the year to the real Texas pattern — built from five years of federal usage data: a big summer AC peak, a small January bump, and the lightest months in spring and late fall. That shape matters: a flat every-month average sits exactly where bill-credit plans hide.

Time-of-use, variable-rate, and prepaid plans — none can be honestly ranked by one annual number, so we don’t pretend to. Where a plan’s credits have conditions like autopay or paperless billing, our costs assume you earn them, and we flag every one so you know what can be taken away.