Electricity rates in Los Angeles (2026): what LADWP and SCE actually charge

Those two numbers are not the same kind of number, and that difference is the whole subject of this page. 26.408¢ is a tariff price — an exact figure LADWP publishes for a specific tier, in a specific quarter, that every R-1A customer is charged. 34.4¢ is a regulatory average rate — SCE's authorised bundled residential revenue requirement divided by its forecast bundled residential sales, calculated by the CPUC Public Advocates Office. It excludes the California Climate Credit, which the Public Advocates Office says lowers the figure by roughly 2–3¢, and it excludes the accounts that buy generation from a community choice aggregator. Comparing one directly against the other tells you almost nothing.

So this page does four things in order: helps you work out which utility serves you, gives the exact published LADWP prices and the exact published SCE plan prices, then prices the same 500 kWh month on four plans with the fixed charges, credits and city tax that headline rates leave out. At the end there is a five-minute method for checking your own effective rate and for finding the levers that actually move it.

Service boundaries do not follow city limits or neighborhood labels cleanly. If you have a bill, the fastest method is the least clever one: read the utility name printed at the top of it. If you do not — you are moving, buying, or comparing two addresses — use the utility's own address lookup: LADWP and SCE both check whether an address is in their territory when you start service, and SCE's Index of Communities lists every community it serves.

Two rules of thumb that hold up: inside the City of Los Angeles you are on LADWP, and that includes places people often assume are separate, like Venice, San Pedro, Woodland Hills and Sylmar. Cities that are not the City of Los Angeles are usually not on LADWP — Santa Monica, Culver City, Torrance and West Hollywood are SCE territory even though they sit inside or against the city's footprint. Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Azusa and Vernon run their own utilities entirely. Where a boundary genuinely splits a neighborhood, only the address settles it.

LADWP's standard residential rate is R-1A, and it is tiered: the more you use in a billing period, the higher the price of the last kilowatt-hour. Three things set your price — your zone (which changes how much fits in each tier, not the price), the season (high season is June through September; low season is October through May) and the quarter, because LADWP republishes its adjustment factors in January, April, July and October.

June is its own row for a reason. June is high season, so Tier 3 pricing kicks in — but June still sits inside the April–June adjustment quarter, so it carries the lower set of factors. A June Tier 3 kilowatt-hour costs 38.922¢; the same kilowatt-hour in July costs 40.968¢. Rate summaries that jump straight from "April–May" to "July–September" skip a month in which a lot of air conditioning runs.

If your usage regularly averages 3,000 kWh a month or more, LADWP requires service on its time-of-use rate rather than R-1A. That rate, R-1B, is also optional for anyone else, and its shape is unusual: the high-peak window is weekday afternoons, not evenings.

LADWP publishes the finished price, and it also publishes the ingredients — which is worth looking at, because it explains why the bill moves when no rate increase was announced. The price is a base energy charge set by City rate ordinance, plus seven pass-through adjustment factors that LADWP republishes every quarter. The base energy charge has not changed since July 1, 2019, so every cent of the 2026 increase arrived through the adjustment factors.

Because the base is fixed, the whole year-over-year change sits in the factors. Summing them for each quarter and comparing with the same quarter of 2025:

• January–March: 15.154¢ → 17.629¢, an increase of 2.475¢ per kWh
• April–June: 15.623¢ → 17.220¢, an increase of 1.597¢ per kWh
• July–September: 17.164¢ → 19.266¢, an increase of 2.102¢ per kWh

Those deltas match the change in LADWP's own published totals exactly — Tier 1 went 22.296¢ → 24.771¢, 22.765¢ → 24.362¢ and 24.306¢ → 26.408¢. The single largest mover was the IRCA, the incremental reliability cost adjustment, which rose from 0.05505 to 0.06934 dollars per kWh between the second and third quarters of 2026. In July–September 2026, adjustment factors make up 19.266¢ of the 26.408¢ Tier 1 price — about 73% of what a Tier 1 customer pays per kilowatt-hour is pass-through, not base rate.

SCE puts most homes on a time-of-use plan, where the price depends on when the electricity is used. Summer is June through September; winter is October through May. In summer, weekends are priced differently from weekdays — the same evening window becomes a cheaper mid-peak instead of on-peak. In winter, weekdays and weekends are priced the same. These are SCE's published plan prices, shown rounded to the cent as SCE displays them; the filed tariff sheets carry more decimal places.

A price per kilowatt-hour is not a bill. Fixed charges, baseline credits and city taxes can move the effective rate by several cents, and they move it differently on each plan. Below, the identical month — 500 kWh in July 2026, with 100 kWh of it falling in the weekday 4–9 p.m. window — is priced on LADWP's standard rate and SCE's three main residential plans, using the published prices above.

A tariff tells you the price of the next kilowatt-hour. An average tells you what a whole customer base ended up paying per kilowatt-hour once fixed charges, taxes, tiers and seasons washed through. The most recent figures that report LADWP and SCE on the same definition come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's annual utility survey, for data year 2024.

For SCE there is a more current official figure. The CPUC Public Advocates Office tracks a residential average rate for each investor-owned utility and put SCE at 34.4¢ per kWh in June 2026. Two limits come with it: it is a bundled figure, so it does not describe accounts whose generation comes from a community choice aggregator, and it excludes the California Climate Credit, which the Public Advocates Office says lowers the rate by roughly 2–3¢. On that basis SCE's residential rate is up 4% over three years, 56% over five and 101% over ten. LADWP has no equivalent, because as a city-owned utility it is not under CPUC rate jurisdiction; its rates are set by City ordinance.

Statewide and national benchmarks, for context: California's average residential price was 33.25¢ per kWh in May 2026 and the U.S. average was 18.44¢. EIA labels these monthly figures preliminary and revises them in later releases.

1. Find the utility name and plan code at the top of your bill. LADWP shows R-1A or R-1B; SCE shows a plan such as TOU-D-4-9PM. If a second supplier is listed, an aggregator provides your generation.
2. Divide the total amount due by the kilowatt-hours the bill covers. Include every fixed charge, credit and tax. Multiply by 100 for cents per kWh. That is your effective rate — the only number that describes what you actually pay.
3. Compare it to the right benchmark. LADWP customers: 23.84¢ was the 2024 utility-wide average, and the 2026 tariff runs 24.4–41.0¢ depending on tier and period, so an effective rate in the high twenties to low thirties is unremarkable once the Power Access Charge and the 10% city tax are in. SCE customers: the CPUC Public Advocates Office put the June 2026 bundled residential average rate at 34.4¢, before the California Climate Credit, which is worth about 2–3¢ — so an effective rate a few cents below it is expected, and if an aggregator supplies your generation this benchmark does not describe your bill.
4. If your effective rate is well above the benchmark, check the three usual causes in order: how much usage reached Tier 3 or the evening peak; whether your Power Access Charge is stuck at a tier you no longer use; and whether your plan matches when you actually use electricity.
5. Check the inputs you can change. LADWP customers can look up their zone; SCE customers can look up their baseline region and allowance, which sets the size of the baseline credit.

Three levers, in rough order of size. First, on LADWP, the Power Access Charge is the one fixed cost you can actually lower: keeping your highest month below the Tier 3 threshold moves it from $22.70 to $7.90, worth $14.80 a month — about $16.28 with the City's 10% tax — and LADWP re-scores it every October 1. Second, on SCE, moving load out of the weekday evening window is worth the gap between on-peak and off-peak: at the published summer prices that is 24¢ per kWh on TOU-D-4-9PM and 40¢ on TOU-D-5-8PM, so shifting an EV charge, a laundry load or a pool pump out of those hours is the single highest-value change. Summer weekends are already cheaper — mid-peak rather than on-peak — so weekend afternoon load costs less than the same load on a Tuesday. Third, on both utilities, the plan itself: LADWP's expensive hours are weekday early afternoons and SCE's are weekday evenings, which are opposite shapes, so a household's daily rhythm can favour one structure strongly. Your utility is the authority on plan eligibility and any lock-in period.

If you want to model a change rather than read your current bill, the LADWP rate guide includes a calculator that estimates and compares an LADWP and an SCE bill from your own usage.

Being explicit about the limits, because several of them matter:

• It is not a bill estimate. The 500 kWh comparison is arithmetic from published prices and stated assumptions. Your peak split, zone, baseline region, tier history and taxes will all move it.
• LADWP's October–December 2026 prices are not knowable yet. LADWP had not published Q4 adjustment factors as of August 12, 2026.
• CARE and FERA change the numbers and are not modelled here beyond the fixed charges. Those are discounted programs with their own eligibility rules.
• SCE's published plan prices are rounded to the cent on its rate-plan pages. Filed tariff sheets carry more decimals, and generation prices differ for community choice aggregation customers.
• The EIA-861 averages are 2024, and the EIA monthly state figures are preliminary. They are the most recent official data of their kind, but both utilities' prices have moved since.
• Nothing here is advice about your rate plan. Switching plans has eligibility rules and lock-in periods; your utility is the authority on both.

Every figure on this page is either published by the source named beside it, or calculated from published figures with the arithmetic shown. LADWP publishes both the finished R-1A and R-1B total consumption charges and the base rates and adjustment factors they are made of; this page reproduces the build-up so a reader can check the addition, and it reconciles to LADWP's published totals to five decimal places for all three tiers across all three published 2026 quarters. Averages are labelled with their population and their exclusions. Rates and program terms change — LADWP revises adjustment factors in January, April, July and October, and SCE changes rates by advice letter — and each source was verified August 12, 2026.

1. LADWP — Residential rates (R-1A and R-1B base rates and total consumption charges, 2026 and 2025; Power Access Charge; minimum charge)
2. LADWP — Residential electric rates (tiers by zone, seasons, TOU schedule hours, billing frequency)
3. LADWP — Residential adjustment billing factors (2026 and 2025 quarterly tables)
4. LADWP — Electric rates ordinance and Final incremental electric rate ordinance 4-15-16 (base energy charges; last step effective July 1, 2019)
5. SCE — Time-of-use residential rate plans (weekday, weekend and winter periods; baseline credit)
6. SCE — Base Services Charge (AB 205 restructure, November 2025)
7. CPUC Public Advocates Office — Q2 2026 Electric Rates Report (PDF, published July 27, 2026)
8. U.S. EIA — Form EIA-861 detailed data files (Sales_Ult_Cust_2024.xlsx, utilities 11208 and 17609)
9. U.S. EIA — Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A (May 2026 average residential price by state, preliminary)
10. U.S. BLS — Average energy prices, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim (December 2024 data; includes the notice discontinuing metro-area electricity price series)
11. Los Angeles Municipal Code §21.1.4 — Electricity users tax and §21.1.12 — Exemptions
12. Clean Power Alliance — FAQs and SCE — Community choice aggregation
13. California Energy Commission — Electric load-serving entities and SCE — Index of Communities