Your electric bill has a lot in common with a bad relationship: it keeps going up, nobody explains why, and the other party seems to be doing great.
Here’s the scorecard. Electricity prices rose about 40% between 2021 and 2025, according to the nonprofit PowerLines. Utilities asked regulators for a record $31 billion in rate increases in 2025, more than double the year before, covering 81 million Americans. And the requests haven’t slowed down. As of early October, PowerLines counted $23 billion in pending asks across 28 states, with $4.5 billion filed in the third quarter alone, the biggest Q3 in at least a decade.
Now the part that gets me. The Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group, found that profits at 110 investor-owned utilities climbed from about $39 billion in 2021 to over $52 billion in 2024. Average margins were 12.8% of revenue that year, and the preliminary 2025 number is 14.6%. Fortune also reported that 51 utility CEOs collected a combined $626 million in 2025, nearly $100 million more than the year before.
Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I don’t care that these companies make money. I don’t care that the CEO of a giant company gets paid like one. That’s capitalism working as designed, and I’ve said so about plenty of other industries. Pay the guy. Fine.
But a utility isn’t Netflix. You can’t cancel your power company and switch to a competitor because the service got worse. The monopoly is the whole deal. The state hands out a protected territory, and in exchange a regulator is supposed to make sure the rates are fair. When profits and pay both set records while the bill keeps climbing, somebody’s half of that bargain isn’t getting enforced.
I’m happy to pay for real shared stuff. Poles, wires, the guy who drives out at 2 a.m. after a storm. I wrote about utilities pocketing record profit and then asking for more back in August, and about Wisconsin utilities lobbying for a higher guaranteed profit in September. Same movie, different state.
The industry’s defense is that it has $1.4 trillion in capital spending planned through 2030, and somebody has to pay for it. Fair enough. Grids need upgrades, and data centers are hungry. But if the investment is that big, the question for a rate case is simple: what exactly are customers getting for it, and why does the shareholder return only ever go one direction?
This is where regulation should earn its keep, and where it usually turns into theater. A commissioner who rubber-stamps a rate hike and then holds a press conference about “affordability” hasn’t solved anything. I’d rather see public utility commissions demand real numbers, publish them in plain English, and say no more often. Not a new tax on anybody. Just a referee who actually blows the whistle.
Midterms are days away, and every candidate will promise to lower your power bill. Ask them one thing: will they appoint the people who approve the rate cases? That’s where the money moves, and almost nobody votes on it.
My two cents: if a monopoly’s profits and CEO pay hit records while your bill does the same, the regulator isn’t doing its job.