City of Seattle electricity rates

It serves 459,964 residential customers, making it one of the larger utilities in Washington. Its 14.09¢ per kilowatt-hour sits 5.8% below the Washington average of 14.95¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 601 kilowatt-hours a month against 871 nationally. Dense housing, a mild climate or heating that runs on gas rather than electricity all push consumption down, and any of them can leave a household with a modest bill despite a high rate.

Owned by the city it serves and governed by a local board rather than the state commission. No shareholder return is built into the rate. That matters because a bill is not only the cost of generating electricity: it also carries the cost of the network, and who owns that network changes how it is paid for.

In 2024 the average City of Seattle customer went 324 minutes without electricity across 1.12 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is worse than typical. Overhead lines through wooded or storm-exposed terrain are the usual explanation, and the fix is vegetation management and circuit automation, both of which are recovered through rates.

City of Seattle offers time-of-use pricing to residential customers. 159 households were enrolled, about 0.1% of its residential base.

These plans are opt-in almost everywhere. They reward households that can move laundry, dishwashing, water heating or electric vehicle charging out of the late-afternoon peak, and they cost more than the standard rate for households that cannot. How to tell which group you are in.

7,560 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 55.01 megawatts. That works out to 16.4 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption is above the national median, which generally tracks the retail rate more closely than it tracks sunshine. What exports are actually worth.