Electric bills for Indiana households went up by $2.71 on average as of this July, or about 1.5% — a dramatic slowdown compared to increases last year, according to an FPI News analysis of state and federal data.
Three of the state’s investor-owned electric utilities had modest increases in bills for households using 1,000 kWh of power, according to a newly released annual survey from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission that compares year-over-year bills as of July 1. Two investor-owned northern Indiana utilities — NIPSCO and Indiana Michigan Power Company — had slight dips in their bills.
That’s because of declines in what’s referred to as “bill trackers.” Those include fees that change more often than base rates, such as an adjustment for fuel costs. NIPSCO remains the highest-cost investor-owned utility in the state.
Duke Energy Indiana bills went up by $6.72. Duke is by far the largest electric utility, serving about 1 in 4 households in Indiana, according to federal data.
Gov. Mike Braun, who has made energy affordability one of his top priorities, praised the survey data.
“I have made it clear that Hoosiers deserve affordable utility rates. It’s encouraging to see these improvements and we look forward to continued progress," Braun said in a statement. "Our work to improve affordability must continue.”
Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition, said he doesn't see the survey results as evidence that bills have stabilized. Bills will continue to rise and fall, he wrote in an email, because power companies rely on natural gas, which has volatile prices.
At the same time, “the utilities are in a state of significant capital investment right now, building out the grid and their generation fleets primarily to serve the looming significant load growth promised by the proliferation of AI data centers. Much of those costs are yet to be reflected on customer bills,” Olson wrote.
FPI News used federal data on the number of customers each utility serves to calculate the statewide impact.
Bills still remain far higher than they were two years ago. The FPI News analysis found that last year bills went up by 17.6% for households using 1,000 kWh of electricity. That works out to $26.62.
Average bills in 2026 were about $57 higher than in 2017, an increase of nearly 47%, according to the FPI News analysis.
This article first appeared on FPI News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
