Electricity Bills Push Households to Cut Grocery Spending

19 percent of U.S. adults have cut grocery spending, switched to cheaper food, or looked into doing so to cover an electricity bill, Consumer Reports found. The nationally representative survey of 2,003 U.S. adults, fielded April 27 to May 19, 2026 and released October 21, puts that squeeze on households that cannot change electric companies the way they change supermarkets.

NORC at the University of Chicago ran the interviews on its AmeriSpeak panel, online and by phone, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.84 percentage points. Consumer Reports folded the results into a new Power Smarter campaign and a Bill Decoder tool. The political calendar did the rest: the figures landed 13 days before Election Day on November 3.

The Grocery Aisle Is Where the Power Bill Lands

The grocery question was not a yes-or-no on hunger. Interviewers asked which steps people had taken or looked into, in the past two years, to help pay an electricity bill. Food was one item on a longer list, and several answers could be chosen at once.

THE TRADEOFFS IN THE SURVEY

Another 18 percent looked up utility rebate or discount programs. Nine percent applied for government help such as SNAP or HEAP, 9 percent borrowed from family or friends, and 3 percent delayed rent or a mortgage. The power bill is rewriting the grocery list for a minority of households, and it is doing so beside smaller cuts that never make a headline.

Among adults who have lived in the same home for at least three years, 81 percent said their electricity bills had gone up in that time. Rebased to everyone in the sample, 28 percent reported a rise of 20 to 49 percent, 26 percent reported a rise under 20 percent, and 6 percent reported a rise of 50 percent or more.

Of those whose bills rose, 73 percent said the increase strained household finances, including 23 percent who said it strained them a lot. People with household incomes below $85,000 were more than twice as likely as higher-income respondents to report that heavier strain. Sara Enright, senior director of safety and energy at Consumer Reports, said the organization keeps hearing from people who do not know what they can do to afford rising rates.

That tradeoff already had a public voice before this poll. At a June rally in Durham, N.C., Darrion Smith, a state psychiatric-hospital worker and member of UE Local 150, described a Duke Energy rate fight in kitchen terms: for him, the extra charge is the difference between buying groceries and living in the dark.

How Much U.S. Home Electricity Costs Now

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly put the average residential price in July 2026 at 18.31 cents per kilowatt-hour, 4.9 percent above 17.45 cents in July 2025. Homes paid far more per unit than factories: industrial customers averaged 9.77 cents that month.

THE OFFICIAL PRICE PATH

• July 2026 rate: Residential power averaged 18.31 cents a kilowatt-hour, up 4.9 percent from July 2025, according to EIA.
• Annual forecast: EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook, issued October 6, puts the 2026 residential average at 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, after 17.3 cents in 2025 and 16.5 cents in 2024, with 18.7 cents projected for 2027.
• Utility profits: The Energy and Policy Institute, reading filings from 110 investor-owned electric utilities, tallied $186 billion in profits from 2021 to 2024, about 13 cents of every dollar collected, with preliminary 2025 figures closer to 15 cents.
• Unpaid bills: The National Energy Assistance Directors Association said that coming into 2026, roughly 1 in 6 U.S. households were behind on utility bills, and that Americans could owe a combined $25 billion by year end.

Those government and watchdog figures sit beside a self-reported poll, and they do not move in lockstep. A 4.9 percent year-over-year rate rise is smaller than the 20 to 49 percent three-year jump 28 percent of adults described. Bills also move with weather, household size, and how much power a home actually used, so a rate and a total due are not the same number.

Gasoline and diesel have been climbing as well, with oil costs tied to the war in Iran, so the electric bill is not the only line on the statement. The survey still isolated electricity as the reason for the grocery step, because that is how the question was asked.

Households Blame Utility Profits First

When interviewers offered theories, besides ordinary inflation, for what affects home electricity costs, utility company profits led the list at 45 percent. Increased demand from data centers and artificial intelligence systems came next at 38 percent, then frequent changes in fossil fuel prices at 37 percent, and the cost of updating and repairing plants and lines at 36 percent. Thirty-three percent named extreme weather and wildfires. Twenty-eight percent named international factors such as trade policy, sanctions, and military conflicts.

The profit answer matches what households can see on a statement and what they cannot see in a rate case. Investor-owned utilities are legal monopolies in most of the country. Customers do not pick a competitor if the return looks high. The Energy and Policy Institute’s 13-cent finding is an accounting share of revenue, not a verdict that every extra dollar on a bill is profit, and the survey did not test whether respondents could separate fuel costs, storm rebuilds, and authorized returns.

Trust in the people who are supposed to make that separation is thin. State regulators, often called public utility commissions, set prices and sign off on big investments. In the poll, 44 percent trusted those regulators only a little and 34 percent did not trust them at all, or 78 percent with little or no trust. Six percent trusted them a lot. Fifteen percent were unsure. 1 percent trusted them completely.

About 38 percent of people who actually read their bills said those bills are somewhat or very hard to understand. A monopoly price, a statement that is hard to parse, and a regulator almost no one fully trusts are the same system. The grocery cut is what that system looks like at checkout.

What Households Want Data Centers to Pay

Half of adults said data centers should pay all costs of infrastructure built mainly to serve them, and another 39 percent said they should pay more of those costs than other customers. Support did not split along party lines in the release. Consumer Reports, citing Department of Energy estimates, has said data centers could account for up to 15.3 percent of U.S. electricity use by 2030.

THE PAY-YOUR-OWN-WAY LIST

• A separate class: 84 percent would support their local utility creating a separate rate category for large users such as data centers.
• Full freight: 50 percent said data centers should pay all costs of infrastructure built mainly for them; 39 percent said they should pay more than other customers.
• If a site goes dark: Nearly half said a data center that closes should still cover the full cost of infrastructure built for it.
• Build first, customer later: 69 percent said that if a utility builds before any data center has committed to the area, the utility should bear that cost until a center comes online.

About half of adults also said it is unacceptable for utilities to pass through any expenses beyond the costs of producing and delivering energy for homes. On October 20, a day before it published the grocery findings, Consumer Reports and Telemark Energy Consulting released a paper describing a dozen direct, indirect, and risk-based ways a large project can still raise other customers’ bills even after it pays for new wires and plants.

Chris Harto, manager for sustainability advocacy at Consumer Reports, said that even if data center projects pay for all the direct infrastructure costs for new transmission and generation, or even build their own generation on site, they can still impose costs through those indirect channels. Enright, in the same paper, set the minimum as leaving existing customers unharmed and the higher bar as leaving them better off.

Americans are being asked to foot the bill for costs they didn’t create and can’t control. This survey shows people see through that. They want the costs and risks to stay with the corporate entities that create them, not residential customers.

Sara Enright, Senior Director of Safety and Energy, Consumer Reports

A November 2025 Consumer Reports poll of 2,146 adults had already found that 78 percent were at least somewhat concerned new data centers would raise household energy bills. The April and May interviews show where that concern now lands: on the food budget, the thermostat, and a demand for a separate rate class that most people say they want and few can vote on directly.

The Pledge Has Almost No Believers

On March 4, 2026, the White House published a Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March under which leading hyperscalers and AI companies promised to build, bring, or buy the new generation they need and to pay for new power-delivery upgrades so those costs would not hit household rates. Seven companies accepted the terms that day. The pledge said they would negotiate separate rate structures and pay those rates whether they used the electricity or not.

A separate Consumer Reports survey of 2,082 adults in May 2026 found that only 4 percent were very confident the companies would follow through. Harto said trust in big tech and data center developers is very low, and that rebuilding it would take enforceable commitments and independent checks, not another round of promises.

THE 2026 COST-SHIFT CALENDAR

1. March 4, 2026: The White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge is issued; seven companies accept.
2. April 27 to May 19, 2026: NORC fields the Energy Fairness survey for Consumer Reports.
3. May 2026: A separate CR poll finds 4 percent of adults very confident the pledge will be kept.
4. September 16, 2026: The House passes H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, 417-3.
5. September 30, 2026: The Senate records 57 votes to advance the bill, short of the 60 required.
6. October 20 to 21, 2026: Consumer Reports publishes its pay-your-own-way paper, then the grocery-tradeoff survey, and launches Power Smarter.

The pledge and the poll are not opposites so much as a sequence. Companies signed a voluntary standard in March. By May, almost no one in a national sample believed it. By October, the same research house was documenting food-budget cuts and asking regulators to treat large loads as a class that pays its own way.

A 417-3 House Vote Stopped in the Senate

The House passed the House 417 to 3 on September 16, with Rep. Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, as lead sponsor and Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, as the other primary co-sponsor. The Energy and Commerce Committee had cleared the bill 52-0 in July. Evans said hardworking families should not have to subsidize the energy demands of data centers, and that the country still needs the plants and wires to compete in AI.

H.R. 9340 would require state regulators and unregulated utilities to consider standards that make large-load customers, generally 100 megawatts or more, responsible for the full incremental cost of generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades built to serve them. It would also require financial assurances before those upgrades and cost recovery if a large customer walks away. The bill does not set a national rate. It tells commissions to consider doing so.

On September 30 the Senate recorded 57 votes, 53 Republicans and 4 Democrats, per Evans’s office, and did not reach 60. The cost question went back to the same state commissions that 78 percent of adults in the Consumer Reports sample trusted little or not at all. Several of those commissions are already writing large-load tariffs on their own, including fights in Arizona, North Carolina, Missouri, and Virginia over who pays for plants and substations sized for new computing load.

That is the part of the bill the grocery number makes concrete. A household that trims the food budget to keep the lights on has no seat in a 100-megawatt contract negotiation. It has a regulator, a monopoly, and a pledge from companies that 4 percent of adults fully believe. The survey’s 84 percent support for a separate rate class is a demand aimed at those commissions, not at the supermarket.

Consumer Reports cannot make a utility commission adopt that class, and the October 21 release does not claim the grocery cuts are caused only by data centers. Fuel prices, storms, authorized profits, and old equipment all sit on the same bill. What the poll does show is who is paying at the margin, and who households think should. Until a commission or a statute moves that cost, the extra kilowatt-hours still clear through the residential rate, and the adjustment still shows up in the cart.