2025 was a turning point for your electricity bill and it’s just getting more expensive from here. It’s not just data centers

Last year increasingly looks like a turning point for American electricity bills. Retail electricity prices rose 7% in 2025 alone, part of a nearly 40% climb since 2021 that has made this decade the fastest period of electricity price growth on record. Wholesale costs are now 6.1% higher than a year prior — almost double the overall inflation rate — and Americans have grown louder in blaming the most visible new culprit: power-hungry data centers.

The real picture of Americans’ surging electricity costs is more nuanced, and yet the worst may still lie ahead. In the first three months of 2026 alone, utility companies requested state commissions to approve rate increases worth $9.4 billion, according to a report published Tuesday by PowerLines, a nonprofit focusing on utility regulation. That followed a record-breaking 2025, when utilities requested $31 billion in rate hikes for the full year — more than double the $15 billion sought in 2024. Critically, nearly half of those 2025 requests had not yet been approved as of early 2026, meaning a significant wave of increases is still working its way to consumers’ bills.

Americans spent on average $110 more on electricity last year than in 2024, according to a March report by Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee — and that was before the backlog of pending rate cases began clearing. Rising power bills have become a political flashpoint for state politicians, who accuse utilities of chasing profits, while electricity costs have featured prominently in local opposition against data center construction that has swelled in communities nationwide.

But the AI infrastructure boom is not the only reason prices are soaring. A look at where in the country prices are projected to rise fastest suggests data centers might have taken the brunt of blame when a slew of other forces are also responsible, including weather damage and the costs of upgrading an aging grid. It’s worked out handily for utilities — most of which are billion-dollar public companies — that have registered record profits in recent........

© Fortune