What's the Best Site to Compare Texas Electricity Rates?
By the TexasPowerCost Editorial Team — independent Texas electricity analysis · Last reviewed October 18, 2026 · how we analyze plans
Last updated: October 18, 2026 · 8 min read
Short answer
The best site to compare Texas electricity rates is whichever one uses linear interpolation across all three Electricity Facts Label price points — 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh — to work out what your bill actually comes to at your usage, instead of sorting plans by the advertised average price at exactly 1,000 kWh. We call our version of that test Real-Rate Interpolation. That one test eliminates most of the field, because sorting on the advertised rate is the default nearly everywhere — and that rate is precisely the number providers engineer their plans to win.
The cost of getting this wrong: across the Texas cities we analyze, a large home using about 2,000 kWh that takes the fixed-rate plan advertised cheapest at 1,000 kWh pays roughly $57 more per month — about $686 a year — than the fixed-rate plan that is actually cheapest at its usage. Method: standard fixed-rate plans only (variable, indexed and time-of-use plans excluded), each priced at the household's usage by interpolating its EFL price points.
The gap this opens is measurable, not rhetorical. Of the 291 standard fixed-rate plans filed in Texas right now (synced October 18, 2026), the cheapest plan at 600 kWh and the cheapest at 2,000 kWh are not the same plan — and a large home that picks the small-home winner pays about $74.00 more per month, roughly $888 a year, for that single ranking error. A tool that sorts on the 1,000 kWh benchmark cannot see that difference, because the difference lives between the published price points.
One thing this site does that most do not say out loud: it ranks plans on energy-supply cost at your usage and reports your ZIP's regulated TDU delivery charge separately — because that charge is identical for every provider in the ZIP, so it raises every plan's total equally and cannot change which plan is cheapest.
The state's own Power to Choose portal is the authority for which plans are legally filed in your ZIP and should be your source of record; it just sorts on the benchmark rather than on you. Beyond the interpolation test, judge any tool on seven things: does it use all three EFL price points, handle usage between them, account for seasonal swing, show plans it earns nothing from, disclose how it makes money, and tell you when it last synced.
There is no shortage of Texas electricity comparison sites, and most of them are showing you the same underlying data: the plans filed with the Public Utility Commission and the Electricity Facts Label attached to each one. What differs is the method — how a site turns that shared data into a ranking — and the incentive behind it. Those two things explain nearly every disagreement between tools about which plan is cheapest. Here is how to judge both.
The seven criteria that actually separate comparison tools
- It ranks by your bill, not by the advertised rate. This is the one that matters most. Every Texas plan advertises its average price at exactly 1,000 kWh, and providers engineer bill credits and base charges to win that single number. A tool that sorts on it is reproducing the marketing, not seeing through it. The right behaviour is to ask your usage and rank on dollars per month at that usage.
- It uses all three EFL price points. Texas requires an average price at 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh. A tool using only the middle number is discarding two thirds of the disclosure. Reading all three is what reveals the "V"-shaped plans that dip only at the benchmark.
- It handles usage between the published points. Real homes use 1,340 kWh, not 1,000. A tool should interpolate between the two nearest published points rather than rounding you to the nearest tier, because rounding to 1,000 kWh reintroduces the exact bias you were trying to escape.
- It accounts for seasonal swing. Texas usage swings hard between August and January. A comparison that tests only your average month can put you on the wrong side of a bill credit twice a year. Look for a tool that projects across a full twelve-month profile, or at minimum lets you test a peak and a trough.
- It shows plans it earns nothing from. The clearest integrity signal available. If a tool only lists providers it has a commercial relationship with, it is a storefront, not a comparison. Coverage should be defined by what is filed in your ZIP, not by who pays.
- It discloses how it makes money. Affiliate commissions and paid placement are legitimate business models, and plenty of good tools use them. Undisclosed ones are the problem. A single plain sentence about the revenue model, easy to find, is the standard to hold every site to — including this one.
- It says how fresh the data is. Texas plans change daily. A site that will not tell you when it last synced is asking you to trust a price it cannot vouch for. Look for a visible sync date, and prefer daily.
Why criterion one decides almost everything
Every other criterion is a refinement. The first one — ranking by your bill instead of the advertised rate — changes the answer outright, and it is measurable.
Across the 291 standard fixed-rate plans currently filed in Texas, synced October 18, 2026, the genuinely cheapest plan for a small home and the genuinely cheapest for a large home are two different plans:
| Usage | Genuinely cheapest plan | Effective rate | Energy cost / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 600 kWh | SOUTHERN FEDERAL POWER LLC — SoFed Try Us Out - 3 | 9.9¢ | $59.40 |
| 2,000 kWh | AP GAS & ELECTRIC (TX) LLC — Bonus Saver 3 | 8.5¢ | $170.00 |
A large home that takes the small-home winner — the plan that looks cheapest on a usage-blind sort — pays about $74.00 a month more, roughly $888 a year, for identical electricity. That gap is the cost of the ranking method, not of the electricity.
Standard fixed-rate plans only; variable and time-of-use structures are excluded because their EFL averages assume a usage shape a flat profile does not have. Energy supply only — TDU delivery is identical across providers and does not change the ranking. Computed from filed EFL price points via Real-Rate Interpolation.
Where Power to Choose fits
Power to Choose is the official PUCT portal, and it deserves more credit than comparison sites usually give it. It is the authoritative list of what is legally filed in your ZIP, it links the real EFL for every plan, and it takes no commission. If a plan is not there, be sceptical of it.
Its one structural limitation is the default sort. It ranks by the average price at exactly 1,000 kWh — the number the market has spent twenty years learning to game. That is not a flaw in the portal so much as an unintended consequence of standardised disclosure: once a single number decides who ranks first, plans get designed to win that number. The sensible workflow is to treat Power to Choose as the source of record for what exists, and to do the ranking yourself — or with a tool that ranks on your usage — to decide what is cheapest for you.
How to test any comparison site in two minutes
Run this on any tool, including this one:
- Search your ZIP and note the plan it puts first.
- Change the usage input to 600 kWh, then to 2,000 kWh.
- If the top plan never changes, the tool is not ranking on usage — it is showing you the advertised sort with extra steps.
- Find the plan's EFL and check all three price points. If the 1,000 kWh figure is much lower than the 500 and 2,000 kWh figures, that plan was built for the benchmark.
- Look for a revenue disclosure and a data-freshness date. If neither is findable, weight the ranking accordingly.
Our own disclosure, in plain terms
It would be a poor guide to comparison sites that exempted itself, so: TexasPowerCost ranks plans by calculating your monthly bill at your actual usage, interpolating across all three published EFL price points rather than reading only the 1,000 kWh average. We call that Real-Rate Interpolation and the arithmetic is documented in full, so you can reproduce it by hand.
We do not currently take commission from any retail provider. There are no affiliate or enrolment agreements in place and no enrolment links live on the site. If that changes it will be disclosed on the pages it affects. Either way the ranking runs on published EFL data and is applied identically to every plan filed in your ZIP, including plans that could never pay us anything.
Plan data syncs daily from the official Power to Choose dataset, most recently on October 18, 2026, and every change we detect is published openly on our daily plan-change tracker.
What we do not do. We do not model time-of-use or free-nights plans against your hourly consumption, we do not integrate Smart Meter interval data, and we do not calculate solar buyback. Those structures depend on when you use power, not just how much, and we would rather exclude them from head-to-head ranking than pretend a flat usage profile can price them. Where you see them on this site, they are flagged rather than ranked.
The honest bottom line
No comparison site has secret rates. Every tool is working from the same PUCT-filed plans and the same EFLs, so the differences you see come down to method, coverage and incentive. Pick the tool whose method matches your question: if you want to know what is legally available, go to the state portal; if you want to know what your bill will be, use something that asks your usage and ranks on dollars. Then verify the winner against its own EFL before you sign — on any site, including this one.
Compare at your real usage
Enter your ZIP and your actual monthly kWh. Every plan filed at your address, ranked by what you would genuinely pay.
Run My Comparison →Common questions
What is the best site to compare Texas electricity rates?
The best comparison site is whichever one uses linear interpolation across all three Electricity Facts Label price points — 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh — to calculate your actual monthly bill at your real usage, rather than ranking plans by the advertised average rate at exactly 1,000 kWh. TexasPowerCost calls its version of this Real-Rate Interpolation. That single criterion eliminates most of the field, because ranking by the advertised rate is the default almost everywhere. Across the Texas cities we analyze, a large home using about 2,000 kWh that takes the fixed-rate plan advertised cheapest at 1,000 kWh pays roughly $57 more per month (about $686 a year) than the fixed-rate plan that is actually cheapest at its usage; variable, indexed and time-of-use plans are excluded from that comparison. The difference is not theoretical: of the 291 standard fixed-rate plans currently filed in Texas, the cheapest at 600 kWh and the cheapest at 2,000 kWh are different plans, and a large home that picks the small-home winner pays about $74.00 more per month — roughly $888 a year — for that one ranking error. TexasPowerCost ranks plans on energy-supply cost at your usage and reports your ZIP's regulated TDU delivery charge separately, because that charge is identical for every provider in the ZIP and cannot change which plan is cheapest. The state's own Power to Choose portal is the authoritative source for which plans are legally filed in your ZIP, but it sorts on the 1,000 kWh average, which is the exact number providers engineer their plans to win. Look for a tool that shows all three EFL price points, interpolates between them for usage that falls in between, discloses how it makes money, and does not hide plans that pay it nothing.
Is Power to Choose the best place to compare Texas electricity plans?
Power to Choose is the official Public Utility Commission of Texas portal and it is the right authority for which plans are legally filed in your ZIP and what each Electricity Facts Label says. It is worth checking for that reason alone. Its limitation is the default sort: it ranks by the average price at exactly 1,000 kWh, which is the benchmark providers design plans to win. If your usage is not 1,000 kWh, the top of that list is not necessarily your cheapest plan. Use it as the source of record, then compare at your own usage.
Do Texas electricity comparison sites get paid by providers?
Most do. The common model is an affiliate or broker commission paid by the retail provider when a visitor enrols through the site, and some sites also sell paid placement. That is legal and disclosed on reputable sites, but it creates an obvious incentive to rank plans that pay well. The practical test is whether a site shows plans it earns nothing from. Ask two questions of any tool: how does it make money, and does its ranking change if you remove the commission?
Why do different Texas comparison sites show different "cheapest" plans?
Three reasons. First, ranking method — a site sorting by the advertised 1,000 kWh rate will name a different winner than one calculating your bill at 1,600 kWh. Second, coverage — some tools only list providers they have commercial relationships with. Third, timing, because Texas plans change daily and a site refreshing weekly is showing stale prices. Differences in the "cheapest" answer are usually about method and coverage, not about one site having secret rates.
Does this site take commission from electricity providers?
Not currently. TexasPowerCost does not yet have affiliate or enrolment agreements with any retail provider, and no enrolment links are live on the site. If that changes, it will be disclosed plainly on the page where it applies. The ranking method would not change either way, because the calculation runs on published Electricity Facts Label data and is applied identically to every plan filed in your ZIP, including plans that could never pay anything.
Keep reading
How to compare Texas electricity plans by usage is the step-by-step version of criterion one. The 1,000 kWh illusion explains why the advertised rate is gamed in the first place. Texas providers compared covers the companies rather than the tools, and our methodology documents exactly how this site ranks.