Business Electricity by Industry in Texas
Typical usage, what actually drives the bill, and which plan structures fit your business, from restaurants and auto shops to salons, clinics, storage sites and apartment communities.
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- 11Industry guides
- 40+Business types
- 8.35¢Avg. TX commercial rate per kWh
Food & Beverage
Kitchen exhaust pulls conditioned air straight out of the room, which is why food service has the highest cooling intensity of any building type in the country.
Automotive
Only a quarter of service buildings are air conditioned, so your bill follows the work coming through the bays rather than the weather. Peak matters more than total.
Retail
Display lighting is the largest load and the one you can change without a customer noticing anything except better colour.
Personal Care
These accounts are small enough that the monthly base charge moves your real price per kWh more than the advertised rate does.
Health & Medical
The biggest load is moving and conditioning outside air, and the volume of it is set by the people inside rather than by the floor they stand on.
Lodging
Guest room cooling runs on occupied rooms, so the bill follows your occupancy rate more closely than anything you decide to switch on.
Professional Offices
A firm open nine to five occupies 174 of the 730 hours in a month. What runs through the other 556 is the part nobody has looked at.
Laundry & Dry Cleaning
Dryer fuel changes the answer roughly threefold, and in a gas-dried store the gas bill is frequently the larger of your two energy costs.
Storage & Warehouse
The lowest usage in small business, and the worst fit for the way Texas retail plans are written. Screen out minimum usage fees before you compare a single rate.
Multi-Family
How the property is metered decides whether you are buying common areas or every resident's power. Establish that before anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does commercial electricity cost in Texas?
Texas businesses paid an average of about 8.35 cents per kWh as of April 2026, according to EIA data on average retail price to commercial customers. What you pay depends on your ZIP code, your delivery utility, how much you use and when you signed your contract. That average blends recently contracted accounts with accounts that have not been repriced in years, so treat it as a benchmark rather than a rate you can buy.
How do I find out how much electricity my type of business uses?
Pick your industry from the directory above. Each guide gives typical monthly usage for the business types in that sector, the equipment and hours that drive the bill, and which electricity plan structures fit that load. The figures come from the Small Business Energy Use Index, which sets out the data and the method in full.
Can my business switch electricity providers in Texas?
In most of Texas, yes. If you are served by Oncor, CenterPoint Energy, AEP Texas or TNMP you can choose any licensed retail provider. Only the supply side of the bill changes hands: the same utility keeps the wires, reads the meter and sends the repair crew, and there is no interruption to service. Areas served by a municipal utility or a co-op are not deregulated.
What is a demand charge on a commercial electric bill?
A demand charge is billed on your highest sustained draw in the month, measured in kilowatts over a short interval, rather than on the total kilowatt-hours you used. It is set by your delivery utility's tariff rather than by your retail provider, which means every provider passes it through the same way and a lower supply rate does not reduce it.
How do I find my business's actual rate per kWh?
Divide the total dollars on your bill by the kilowatt-hours billed for the same period, then multiply by 100. That all-in figure already contains your delivery charges and any fixed fee, and it is the only number worth comparing against a quote. Do it again for your quietest month, because thresholds and fixed charges make a single month misleading.
Where do the usage figures on these guides come from?
From the PowerChoiceTexas Small Business Energy Use Index, which applies electricity intensity published in the EIA Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey 2018 to each building activity, adjusted for the West South Central region. Two categories, laundry and multi-family, are modeled from the bottom up instead, because the federal survey publishes nothing usable for either. The full method and a downloadable dataset are on the index page.
