Electricity Prices on Average Rose 6.9% Last Year. Your Budget Escalator Probably Didn't.

Goldman Sachs Research documented commercial electricity prices rising 6.9% in 2025. For context, that is more than double the headline CPI rate, and it is happening on top of the 8-12% increases that characterized 2022 and 2023.

Most commercial organizations budget for utility escalation using a modest annual assumption — typically 2-4%. The actual trajectory has diverged significantly from that model. The result is budget pressure that compounds every year.

Here is the underappreciated implication: when prices rise sharply, billing errors become more expensive. A tariff classification error that added $2,000 per month to your bill in 2020 now costs $2,600 per month. The error rate has not changed. The cost has.

The structural driver — AI data center load growth driving wholesale capacity prices —among other constraints is not going away. The EIA projects commercial electricity prices to continue rising through at least 2027. In this environment, billing accuracy is not a nice-to-have. It is a budget management imperative. That projection has held up. EIA data now show commercial electricity prices averaging roughly 14.4 cents per kWh in early 2026, more than 10% higher than a year earlier, with the agency's Short-Term Energy Outlook pointing to continued increases into 2027 as data-center-driven demand growth pushes wholesale prices higher across nearly every regional grid.