Wholesale Price vs Retail Electricity Bill
A wholesale electricity price is what generators are paid for energy delivered to the grid at a particular time. A retail bill is what a household pays for electricity delivered to a socket, and it includes the cost of the wires, the taxes, the policy levies, the meter and the supplier’s own costs. The two are different numbers measuring different things, and a wholesale figure is never what a household pays. If you want to know your own price, the number to look for is on your bill or from your national regulator, not from a market report.
What is in the bill
The details vary by country, but almost every household bill is built from the same five blocks.
Wholesale energy. The cost of buying the electricity itself, usually bought ahead over months or years rather than at today’s price. In ordinary conditions this is often somewhere between a third and a half of a typical bill, though it has swung far outside that range during price crises.
Network charges. The cost of the transmission towers, the distribution poles and cables, the substations and the people who maintain them. These are regulated monopoly charges, set for several years at a time, and they do not move with the market. They are a large block, commonly a quarter or more of the bill, and larger in countries with long distances or heavy grid investment.
Taxes and levies. Value added tax or sales tax, plus policy charges: support for renewable generation, energy efficiency and social programmes, and in some countries capacity payments. These are political choices, and they are the reason two countries with almost identical wholesale prices can have very different household bills.
Metering and supply costs. Billing, customer service, meter reading, bad debt, and the supplier’s margin.
Standing charges. Many countries split the bill into a fixed daily or monthly amount plus a rate per kilowatt hour. A household that uses very little electricity can find the fixed part dominates, which makes a simple price per kWh a poor description of its actual cost.
Why the bill lags the market
Suppliers almost never buy electricity on the day they sell it. They hedge, buying blocks of power months or years ahead, so that they can offer a stable price. That is the whole point of a retail tariff: it converts a volatile market price into something a household can budget for.
The consequence is a delay in both directions. When wholesale prices spike, regulated or fixed retail prices rise slowly and often months later. When wholesale prices collapse, bills also fall slowly, which feels unfair and is the same mechanism working the other way.
Some countries add a regulatory layer on top. Britain’s regulator sets a cap on the unit rate and standing charge for default tariffs, recalculated at intervals from a formula that includes an assessment of wholesale costs over an earlier window. That is one more reason the cap changes long after the market did.
Why a wholesale number cannot be converted into a bill
People reasonably try to translate a headline wholesale price into pence or cents per kilowatt hour. It does not work, for several reasons at once.
Wholesale prices change every hour or half hour, and a household’s consumption is spread unevenly across those hours, weighted towards mornings and evenings when prices are usually higher. A simple average of the day understates what supplying a household actually costs.
Losses mean more electricity has to be generated than arrives. A few percent disappears between the power station and the socket, and the bill pays for all of it.
Wholesale markets in different countries also quote different products, and the currency, the unit and whether tax is included all vary. Comparing a raw wholesale figure across borders without adjusting for those things produces nonsense.
Where to find the real retail numbers
This site publishes generation, demand and emissions statistics. It is not a source of retail tariffs, and no figure on it should be read as the price a household pays.
For the United States, the federal energy statistics agency publishes average retail electricity prices by state and by customer class. Their figures put the average residential price across all states at about 17.3 cents per kilowatt hour in 2025, with wide variation between states. State level generation and retail price data is on our US electricity pages, and the underlying series is published at eia.gov.
For Great Britain, the energy regulator publishes the price cap for default tariffs and explains what each part of the bill covers, at ofgem.gov.uk. The generation mix behind those bills is on our United Kingdom page.
For anywhere else, look for the national energy regulator or the national statistics office. Most publish average household prices at least annually, usually broken down into energy, network and tax components, which is far more useful than any single headline number.
The useful way to think about it
Wholesale prices tell you about the electricity system: which plants are running, how tight supply is, what fuel is setting the price, whether renewables are pushing prices down at midday. That is genuinely interesting and it is what wholesale markets exist to reveal.
Retail bills tell you about a country’s choices: how much grid it has built, how it funds energy policy, how it taxes energy, and how it regulates suppliers. A country can have low wholesale prices and expensive bills, or the reverse.
When a news story says electricity prices have halved, the first question is which price. Very often it is the wholesale one, and the household answer is much smaller, much later, or both.