Are You Really Getting a Good Deal on Your Energy?

This isn’t a hypothetical. In April 2026, the New York Public Service Commission adopted a settlement requiring nine affiliated ESCOs to return roughly $50 million in billing adjustments to about 278,000 customers over alleged overbilling. In one widely reported example, an ESCO was charging 13¢/kWh while the local utility’s rate was 5¢ for the same service.

So how do you know which side of that line you’re on? Here’s how to check.

First, understand what you’re actually paying for

Your bill has two halves: supply (the cost of the energy itself) and delivery (the cost of moving it to you over the utility’s wires or pipes, plus the fixed customer charge, demand charges, and taxes).

An ESCO can only change the supply line. Delivery, demand charges, and most surcharges stay with Con Edison no matter who supplies your energy. For many commercial accounts, supply is only about 40–55% of the total bill — so when you ask “am I getting a good deal,” you’re really asking a question about that one line.

That matters for how you read any savings pitch: a “15% discount” usually means 15% off supply, not 15% off your bill.

How to find your real supply rate

The good news is that Con Edison now does part of the math for you. On the current bill format, look in the supply section for a sentence like:

“Your total electricity supply cost for this bill is 11.86¢ per kWh.”

(Gas bills carry the equivalent line: “Your total gas supply cost for this bill is 71.00¢ per therm.”)

That figure already folds in the supply-side pass-throughs and fees, so it’s the number to compare. If you take only one thing from this post, it’s that this line exists — and what to do with it.

If you’re on an ESCO, do the math yourself. ESCO charges either appear on your Con Ed bill or arrive as a separate invoice, and ESCO invoices don’t always print a clean per-unit rate. To calculate it:

1. Find your usage for the billing period — kWh for electricity or therms for gas, listed in the meter detail or at the top of the supply section.
2. Find the total supply charges for that same period.
3. Divide the total supply charges by your usage. That’s your all-in supply rate.

Am I overpaying?

The benchmark to use is straightforward: compare your supply rate to what the utility would have charged on default supply. Con Ed prints that number on every bill, so a single-month comparison takes about thirty seconds.

But one month tells you very little. The utility’s default supply tracks the wholesale market, so in any given month it can land above or below your ESCO rate — a fixed-rate contract will look like a bargain in a high-priced month and a rip-off in a cheap one. What actually matters is the weighted average over a full year or more: total what you paid for supply across the period, total what the utility’s default would have cost over the same usage, and compare the two. A rate that beats default in a few months but loses badly across the year is not a good deal.

If your weighted-average supply rate sits above the utility’s default, you’re paying a premium. That isn’t automatically a mistake — you might be buying price certainty through a fixed rate, or paying for genuine renewable content — but you should know you’re paying for it and decide it’s worth the cost. Two things to watch for:

• Teaser rates that look great for two or three billing cycles and then reset higher.
• Variable, month-to-month rates that quietly drift upward, which is exactly where many of the overbilled customers in the 2026 settlement ended up. One note for commercial customers. New York’s 2023 Reset Order requires residential ESCO products to guarantee savings against the utility default rate. Larger commercial accounts generally don’t get that protection — so for a business, the responsibility for checking the math falls entirely on you.

What to do if you think you’re paying too much

A lot of businesses end up here and don’t know who to trust for a straight answer. The pitfall is asking a supplier whether you’re overpaying a supplier.

The better path is an independent consultant who specializes in energy and whose interests are aligned with yours — not one earning a margin on the supply they sell you. A good consultant will read your actual invoices line by line, explain exactly what you’re being charged, tell you whether you’re on a fixed or variable rate, and run a competitive process across suppliers to find the real number. Consultants charge a fee, but it’s typically small next to the savings a properly structured contract delivers.

Energy procurement is full of variables and fine print, and the “savings” in a sales pitch and the savings on your bill are often two different things. The thirty-second check above is a good start. A thorough review is how you know for sure.