Texas Heat Wave 2026: Can Your Electricity Be Shut Off for Non-Payment?

Why this matters right now

Across a Texas summer, triple-digit afternoons and heat-index readings near 110°F push air conditioners — and electricity bills — to their yearly peak. When the heat climbs, ACs run harder, summer bills jump, and more households risk falling behind — which is exactly when the question of "can they shut off my power?" becomes urgent.

The good news for existing customers: Texas has built disconnection protections directly into its rules, and they switch on automatically during dangerous heat. The catch is that almost nobody knows the details until they need them — and the protection is narrower than many people assume. Here is what the rules actually say.

The heat moratorium: how the Heat Advisory rule works

Under the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) consumer-protection rules — Substantive Rule §25.483, which governs disconnection of service — a retail electric provider may not disconnect your service for non-payment during an extreme weather emergency. For heat, the trigger is specific: it is a day on which the National Weather Service has issued a Heat Advisory for the county where you live, and that protection extends through the following two calendar days (PUCT rules; the agency reiterates this in its summer consumer-protection guidance each year).

Three things are worth underlining:

• It is automatic. You do not have to call, apply, or prove anything. If an advisory is in effect for your county, the moratorium applies.
• It is county-by-county and day-by-day. The trigger is the NWS Heat Advisory itself — which is based on the heat index (temperature plus humidity), not a single fixed temperature — so protection can switch on and off as advisories come and go. You can check active alerts for your area at weather.gov.
• There is a two-day grace period. If an advisory was issued on either of the previous two calendar days, you are still protected even after the heat eases.

One important boundary: these are PUCT rules, so they cover providers in the competitive, deregulated market that most Texans shop in (the Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas and TNMP service areas). Municipally owned utilities and electric cooperatives — the reason Austin Energy and CPS Energy customers can't switch providers — set their own disconnection policies, which may differ.

Prepaid, medical needs, and payment plans: the other protections

The heat moratorium is not the only safeguard. A few others can matter just as much:

These rules have teeth. In June 2024, the PUCT fined the parent company of a prepaid provider $300,000 for disconnecting more than 1,800 customers during extreme-weather periods between 2020 and 2022 — a reminder that providers are expected to follow the moratorium, and that you can file a complaint with the PUCT (1-888-782-8477) if yours doesn't.

What the moratorium does not do

This is where expectations and reality often part ways. The extreme-weather rule is a pause, not a pardon:

• It doesn't erase the debt. Once the advisory and the two-day grace period end, the balance is still due, and disconnection can resume if you haven't paid or arranged a plan.
• It only covers non-payment. It does not block disconnection for safety hazards, meter tampering, or theft of service.
• It isn't a grid guarantee. It has nothing to do with ERCOT-ordered emergency outages; the moratorium governs billing disconnects, not grid-wide reliability events.
• It isn't a blanket summer ban. Consumer advocates including AARP Texas and the Texas Consumer Association have repeatedly petitioned the PUCT to suspend all non-payment disconnections through the hottest months; the commission has so far kept the narrower, advisory-by-advisory trigger described above rather than a season-long moratorium (KXAN; KVUE).

In other words: the rule can keep your lights on during the worst of a heat wave, but it can't keep your bill from growing. That is why the most reliable protection is the one you set up before the heat — a bill you can actually afford.

The durable fix: don't overpay in the first place

Disconnection protections are a safety net for a bad month. The way to avoid needing the net is to stop overpaying every month — and in the deregulated Texas market, your single biggest lever is the plan you're on.

Here's the trap that quietly inflates summer bills: providers advertise the price at exactly 1,000 kWh, but a Texas home running air conditioning through a 100°F afternoon often uses far more — 1,500, 2,000 kWh or beyond. Because of how plans are priced, the plan that looks cheapest at 1,000 kWh can be one of the most expensive at your real summer usage. We call this the 1,000 kWh illusion, and it is exactly why a plan ranking should be built around your usage, not a marketing number.

Plan structure matters too. During heat waves, wholesale power prices spike, and those spikes flow straight through to variable-rate and wholesale-indexed plans — the kind of mid-summer bill shock that pushes households toward the disconnection cliff in the first place. A fixed-rate plan locks your energy charge so a brutal August doesn't rewrite your budget.

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