CenterPoint Files Again to Raise Houston Delivery Charges — What the DCRF Increase Means

What Was Filed

CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric is the transmission and distribution utility (TDU) for the Houston metro area. It owns the poles, wires and meters; it does not sell you a plan. Every retail electric provider (REP) operating in its territory — from the big brands to the discount ones — pays CenterPoint the same regulated delivery charges and passes them on to you.

The retail-market trade publication EnergyChoiceMatters reported on July 17, 2026 that CenterPoint “applied at the Texas PUC for an increase in its Distribution Cost Recovery Factor (DCRF) which is charged to retail electric providers.” That report did not publish the requested dollar amount, and we have not been able to independently confirm whether the July filing is a fresh application or a further step in the DCRF proceeding already pending. We are flagging it as reported and will update this page when the PUCT docket detail is public.

What is fully documented is the request CenterPoint filed on February 27, 2026, tracked at the PUCT as Docket No. 59424. According to the Texas Coalition of Cities for Utility Issues, whose analyst R.A. Dyer reviewed the filing, CenterPoint asked to collect an additional $108.1 million from Texas customers — a 60.7% increase in its distribution-related revenue requirement, bringing it to $286.2 million. The company based the request on distribution capital it says it invested between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2025, and cited system growth, resiliency and reliability upgrades, and interconnection investment. It was the third DCRF filing since CenterPoint's last comprehensive rate case in 2024 (Docket No. 56211).

The DCRF Request at a Glance

Sources: EnergyChoiceMatters (July 17, 2026) for the latest filing; the Texas Coalition of Cities for Utility Issues (R.A. Dyer, March 3, 2026) summarising PUCT Docket No. 59424 for the documented figures. Amounts are what CenterPoint requested. Municipal intervenors, including the Gulf Coast Coalition of Cities, were expected to contest the case, and Texas delivery-rate requests are routinely reduced through settlement — Oncor's 2025 request, for example, ended up roughly a third smaller than filed.

What a DCRF Actually Is

A full rate case is slow and expensive, so Texas gives utilities an interim mechanism between them. In CenterPoint's own description from a prior DCRF application, it is “an interim rate adjustment that, if approved, permits an electric utility to implement new rates to account for changes in distribution-invested capital since its last rate case,” and the customer impact is “billed to the consumer's Retail Electric Provider.”

Three things follow from that, and they are the reason DCRF changes catch people out:

• It arrives without you doing anything. You do not switch plans, sign anything or get a renewal notice. It shows up inside the TDU delivery line on a bill from a provider you already have.
• It is charged per kilowatt-hour, so it scales with usage. A big air-conditioned summer month costs you more DCRF than a mild April.
• It stacks. The DCRF is one rider among several, and CenterPoint's residential delivery rates already update on a March 1 / September 1 cycle. A DCRF change lands on top of whatever else has moved.

If you have never worked out which part of your bill is delivery and which part is energy, our guide on how to read your Texas electricity bill walks through the line items, and how TDU delivery charges work explains why that half is the same no matter whose name is on the bill.

What It Would Cost You — and Why It Doesn't Reorder Your Plan Options

Take the documented request at face value and the arithmetic is simple. Going from about $0.0032 per kWh to $0.005053 per kWh is a difference of roughly $0.00185 per kWh. Applied to real households:

Our arithmetic, applying the per-kWh rates reported in Docket No. 59424 to flat usage levels. This is the DCRF component only, not your whole delivery charge, and the PUCT has not approved the requested figure.

So it is real money, but it is not the big number on your bill. Here is the part worth internalising: every retail provider in CenterPoint's territory pays the identical DCRF. An increase lifts every plan's total by the same amount. It cannot make a bad plan good or a good plan bad, and it does not reorder the rankings.

The number that does reorder them is the energy charge — and that gap is far larger than $1.85. Because Texas providers advertise the price at exactly 1,000 kWh, a plan tuned to win at that single point can quietly lose badly at 700 or 1,900 kWh, which is where most Houston homes actually live in July. We call it the 1,000 kWh illusion, and across Texas cities it costs a large home an average of roughly $43 a month — more than twenty times the DCRF difference above.

What Houston Customers Should Do

First, confirm the utility actually serves you. If you are in the Houston metro, your TDU is CenterPoint and this applies. Dallas–Fort Worth is Oncor — different utility, different proceeding (see our note on Oncor's June 1, 2026 delivery increase). Much of south and west Texas is AEP Texas.

Second, pull a recent bill and find your actual kilowatt-hours — not your dollars, your kWh. Then run those numbers rather than a guess. Our free bill checkup re-ranks the full plan set at your real usage and tells you plainly whether to switch, wait or verify, and the bill estimator projects a summer month if you want to stress-test August before it arrives.

Third, if you are in a contract, check the early termination fee before you move — a better rate that costs $150 to reach is not always better. And if you want to see how we calculate a true effective rate at any usage level instead of parroting the advertised headline, that is documented in our methodology.

Related Texas Electricity Resources