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The difference between two meter readings, or the figure on your bill.
Off your own bill. Rates differ by country, supplier and tariff.
UK domestic energy is VAT-rated at 5%; US utility taxes vary by state and city.
$112.98
$3.77 a day
The fixed charge is the line people forget, and it is the one that does not care what you do. Britain bills it daily and calls it a standing charge; most American utilities bill it once a month as a customer or service charge. On this period it is $18.00, which is 16% of the bill — turning every appliance off for the whole period would not remove it.
A flat unit rate is an assumption. Time-of-use, economy-7 and tiered tariffs charge different amounts for the same kilowatt-hour depending on the hour or on how much you have already used, and some tariffs add a demand charge based on your highest half-hour. Standby draw is excluded here too — the source calls these phantom loads, a few watt-hours each and continuous.
A bill has two halves. One is the electricity: kilowatt-hours off the meter times whatever your tariff charges for a unit. The other is a fixed charge that arrives whether you used anything or not — billed daily in Britain as the standing charge, usually monthly in the United States as a customer or service charge. People remember the first half and are surprised by the second, which is why the basis is a choice here rather than an assumption.
No tariff is built in. Rates differ by country, supplier, tariff and season, and a number hard-coded into this page would be wrong for nearly everyone reading it. Both the unit rate and the fixed charge come off your own bill.
Three hundred and twenty units at $0.28 each is $89.60. A standing charge of $0.60 a day across 30 days adds $18.00, making $107.60, and tax at 5% brings it to $112.98 — about $3.77 a day. The effective price is $0.353 a unit, a full quarter above the headline rate, because the fixed charge is spread across the units you happened to use.
That spreading is what makes light users angry. Same tariff, a month where only 40 units are used — an empty flat, a holiday, a second home. The electricity costs $11.20 and the standing charge still costs $18.00, so the bill is $30.66 and the fixed part is 59% of it. The effective rate is $0.767 a unit, more than double the tariff, and turning everything off at the wall would not have moved the larger number.
With no meter reading, the second mode estimates the load instead: wattage times hours per day, divided by 1,000, across the days in the period. A worked example over 30 days — fridge, tumble dryer, dishwasher, television, laptop — comes to 290.4 kWh, of which the fridge alone is 174, or 60%. On the tariff above that is a $104.28 bill.
The fridge figure hides a trap the source is explicit about. A refrigerator is plugged in for all 24 hours but cycles on and off, so the published guidance is to divide the hours it is connected by three: eight hours a day at 725 W, not twenty-four. Enter 24 and you get 522 kWh from the fridge alone, which is wrong by a factor of three.
The wattages offered come from a published table — Virginia Cooperative Extension publication 2901-9014, from the Department of Energy’s Energy Saver series — and are nameplate figures rather than measurements. Many are ranges: a dishwasher is listed at 1,200 to 2,400 W. All are editable, because the plate on the back of your own appliance beats any table.
This assumes one price for every unit. Time-of-use and economy-7 tariffs charge different amounts by the hour; tiered tariffs charge more past a threshold; some add a demand charge based on your single highest half-hour. None of those are modelled. If your tariff has bands, run the calculation once per band and add the results.
Standby draw is also outside the total. The source calls these phantom loads — a few watt-hours each, drawn continuously by anything with a clock, a standby light or a charger left plugged in. Individually invisible, collectively a real line on a yearly bill.
Both are printed on the bill, usually in the tariff summary rather than on the front page, and both appear in the annual statement your supplier is required to send. Take them from there rather than from a comparison site, which quotes an average.
Because the fixed charge is divided across whatever you used. At 320 units the standing charge adds about six cents to every unit; at 40 units it adds forty-five. The fewer units you buy, the more each one carries of a charge that never changes.
No — that is what makes it fixed. It covers metering, network costs and supplier overheads and is charged for every day you are connected. Reducing consumption reduces the other half of the bill only, which is why very light users sometimes look at zero-standing-charge tariffs.
Good enough to rank appliances against each other, not to predict a bill. Nameplate wattage is the maximum draw; motors, heaters and anything thermostatic cycle rather than run flat out, so a build-up reads high unless you allow for it.