Electricity price per kWh: what's normal around the world

The typical household electricity price worldwide is about $0.149 per kWh (14.9¢), the median of the 134 countries we track. Half of all countries pay between $0.076 and $0.232, so below roughly 7.6¢ counts as cheap and above roughly 23.2¢ as expensive. Prices run from $0.006 in Ethiopia to $0.464 in Bermuda. For a household using 300 kWh a month, that is the difference between $1.80 and $139, with $45 at the global midpoint.

These figures are average residential and business tariffs in US dollars from GlobalPetrolPrices, retrieved 2026-10-13. They include taxes and typical charges per unit but not every fixed monthly fee, and many countries use tiered or time-of-use tariffs, so your own rate can differ from the national average.

What counts as cheap, normal and expensive

A kilowatt-hour is the energy a 1,000-watt appliance uses in an hour: roughly an hour of a small electric heater, or about one cycle of a washing machine. Sorting the 134 countries into bands gives a practical yardstick:

• Very cheap, under 5¢: 19 countries, mostly with state subsidies, cheap domestic gas or oil, or large hydro systems.
• Cheap, 5¢ to 7.6¢: 15 more countries, completing the bottom quarter.
• Normal, 7.6¢ to 23.2¢: the middle half of the table, which includes the United States.
• Expensive, 23.2¢ to 30¢: 18 countries.
• Very expensive, over 30¢: 16 countries, made up mostly of European countries and island states.

The dearest country charges about 77 times as much per kWh as the cheapest. Gaps that wide survive because electricity is hard to move across borders, so each country’s price is set by its own fuel mix, grid costs, taxes and subsidies rather than by a world market.

The cheapest and most expensive electricity

The cheap end is a mix of hydro-rich grids and heavily subsidised ones, where the tariff covers only part of what power costs to produce and the state absorbs the rest. A very low price there often comes with rationing or unreliable supply. The expensive end is shaped by import dependence and policy: island grids that burn imported diesel, and European countries where network charges, taxes and levies are added on top of the wholesale price. More detail is in our guides to the cheapest and most expensive electricity, and electricity prices in Europe.

Major economies compared

For the large economies most readers compare against, here is the household rate, the business rate and the cost of a 300 kWh month, cheapest first. The rank is out of 134, from cheapest.

Among these 12, households in Germany pay about 5.4 times as much per kWh as those in China. Bear in mind that consumption differs as much as price: a home with electric heating or heavy air-conditioning can use several times our 300 kWh benchmark, while a small flat with gas cooking and heating may use less. For running costs of an electric car, see how much it costs to charge an EV.

Price per kWh vs what people earn

A cheap tariff is not the same as an affordable bill. Setting the 300 kWh month against average income (World Bank GNI per capita) for the 50 countries where we have both, the bill is lightest in Qatar, at 0.2% of a month’s income, and heaviest in Honduras, at 26%. Pakistan shows the trap: at $0.063 per kWh its price is below the global median, yet the same month takes 15% of average income. Low prices in poorer countries are often low precisely because governments know households could not afford more.

Household vs business rates

You might expect businesses, which buy in bulk, always to pay less. They do in 67 of the 134 countries, but in 65 businesses pay more per kWh than households. The global median business rate is $0.151, slightly above the household median. Where business power is dearer, it is usually by design: governments hold household tariffs down and recover the cost from commercial users. The widest such gap in our data is in Oman, where businesses pay $0.187 against $0.031 for homes.

How prices have moved recently

Since our first electricity snapshot on 2026-08-09, 67 countries’ household rates have risen in dollar terms and 15 have fallen; 132 of 134 moved by 5% or less. Electricity tariffs are mostly set by regulators and change only a few times a year, so many of these small shifts reflect currency moves rather than new tariffs. The largest rise was in Sudan ($0.017 to $0.019, +12%); the largest fall was in Malaysia ($0.050 to $0.049, −2.0%). The live table for every country is on the electricity prices page.