Electricity Rates by Utility in the Philippines (2026)

Philippine electricity is not one price. It is a dozen or more prices, set utility by utility and reset most months, and the gap between the cheapest and the priciest franchise area is wide enough to change whether a rooftop solar system pays for itself in six years or nine.

The table above is what the twelve distribution utilities we track were charging residential customers in July 2026, wherever the utility publishes it — with the month each figure applies to, what kind of source it came from, and the date we last checked it against that source. One of the twelve publishes no all-in rate at all, and that row says so instead of carrying a guess. What follows is how to read it.

Why the rate matters more than the sun

Solar savings are a multiplication: the rate you avoid paying, times the kilowatt-hours you generate and use yourself. The sun sets the second term. Your utility sets the first.

That is why the two do not always point the same way. General Santos gets more peak sun-hours than Metro Manila, but SOCOTECO II’s July 2026 all-in rate of ₱11.1634/kWh is well under Meralco’s ₱14.8261/kWh. Divide one by the other and every self-consumed kWh is worth about 33% more on a Meralco bill than on a SOCOTECO II bill. On a payback calculation, that difference swamps the extra sunshine. Our solar payback period guide walks through the arithmetic, and how much solar can save on your electric bill does the monthly-savings side of it.

The practical version: if you are on a high-rate utility, solar is an easier decision than the national averages suggest. If you are on a low-rate one, the system still works, it just takes longer to pay for itself, and self-consumption matters even more because exported energy is credited at a lower rate than imported energy costs.

All-in rate or generation charge — the distinction that breaks the math

Two different ₱/kWh numbers circulate about every Philippine utility, and mixing them up is the single most common error in solar payback estimates.

The all-in rate is everything on your bill divided by the kWh you used: generation, transmission, system loss, distribution, supply, metering, lifeline subsidy, universal charges, FIT-All and VAT. It is what you stop paying for every kWh you generate and consume yourself.

The generation charge is one line inside that — the cost of the electricity itself, before it is moved, delivered and taxed. It is roughly 55 to 65% of the all-in rate, and it is the basis on which net-metered exports are credited.

ZAMCELCO’s July 2026 rate card shows both in one document: generation ₱7.5725, transmission ₱0.9206, distribution and supply and metering and RFSC ₱1.1866, system loss ₱0.9390, subsidies and taxes ₱1.5796, for an all-in ₱12.1983. Generation is 62% of the total. Feed ₱12.1983 into a payback model as if it were the export credit rate and you overstate the value of every exported kWh by around 60%; feed ₱7.5725 in as if it were the retail rate and you understate your savings by a third.

The second table above lists the generation charges for the six utilities that publish one separately, kept in its own table for exactly this reason. If you are working out what net metering is worth, how net metering works explains why the import and export sides of the meter are valued differently.

What each figure is worth as evidence

Not all eleven published rates are equally solid, and the table says so per row rather than presenting them as one uniform set.

Five come from the utility’s own rate card, billing-rate PDF, or rate database — SOCOTECO II, BATELEC II, ZAMCELCO, BENECO and MECO. Most of these carry a full component breakdown, which is how we can confirm the figure is an all-in rate and not a generation charge wearing its clothes. These are the strongest rows here.

One comes from the utility’s own newsroom — VECO’s ₱14.90/kWh, published in its own post about the ERC approval that held the rate down.

Four come from news reports quoting the utility’s own advisory — Meralco, Davao Light, MORE Power and Negros Power. None of these four puts an all-in figure anywhere we can reach on its own site: Meralco blocks automated access to its advisory pages, Davao Light and MORE Power announce through media, and Negros Power’s own rates page carries the generation charge only. Each figure is corroborated by more than one outlet and is consistent with the prior month, so we publish it with the source link — but a news write-up is not a rate card, and the table labels it accordingly.

One is weak enough to name outright. CEPALCO’s ₱11.96/kWh rests on a single regional radio report. CEPALCO publishes its generation charge (₱6.7614/kWh for July 2026, straight from its own ERC filing, and in the second table above) but no all-in residential rate at all. Treat the CEPALCO row as indicative, and if you are in Cagayan de Oro, work your own rate off your bill rather than off that number.

The gap we are not filling

Angeles Electric publishes no all-in residential rate. Not on its home page, its generation-charges page, its advisories, its read-your-bill page, its service-application page or its disclosures. Only generation-charge PDFs exist. Its blended generation rate for July 2026 is ₱7.9934/kWh, up ₱0.8384 from ₱7.1550 in June, and that figure is solid — it is in the second table above.

A figure of “₱13.25/kWh, up ₱1.11” circulates in search results and appears to originate from a social media post. There is no fetchable source behind it, so it is not on this page. AEC’s own net-metering explainer uses ₱11.1106/kWh as a worked example, but that document says “rates vary by month” and dates to around 30 March 2026 — it is a teaching figure, not a current rate, and publishing it as one would be the same mistake in a different direction.

If you are an AEC customer, the reliable move is to divide your own bill by its kWh. Understanding your kWh usage covers how to read that off the bill.

Why there is no ranking on this page

Every table like this one wants to become a league table, and July 2026 will not support one.

Four of the eleven published rates are lower than the underlying cost of power that month, by design:

• VECO secured ERC approval to defer part of its July generation cost. It says the rate would otherwise have been ₱17.59/kWh instead of ₱14.90. The deferred portion returns in later bills.
• Negros Power held its July generation increase to ₱0.20/kWh by spreading WESM costs over six months. The remainder is still coming.
• MORE Power deferred as well, and says the rate would have exceeded ₱15 without it.
• Davao Light was absorbing supply-cost effects from the 8 June 2026 magnitude-7.8 Southern Mindanao earthquake, which pushed WESM prices up. Its ₱13.09 covers the 11 July to 10 August billing period, so it does not even line up with the calendar month the other rows use.

Rank those against a utility with no deferment and you have measured accounting timing, not price. So the table is alphabetical, and the honest comparison is a utility against its own recent months rather than against its neighbours.

Two utilities publish enough history to do that properly today. BENECO’s all-in residential rate ran ₱7.6994, ₱8.1315, ₱8.1702, ₱9.6000, ₱9.7041, ₱11.6450 and ₱12.2900 from January to July 2026 — up about 60% in seven months. SOCOTECO II’s ran ₱10.7775, ₱9.5339, ₱10.0517, ₱9.6999, ₱9.7504, ₱9.9983 and ₱11.1634 over the same period, which is a much flatter line with a July spike. Those two trends say more about what a household will pay over a solar system’s 25-year life than any single-month ordering does. For Meralco, we keep that history on a page of its own: Meralco electricity rate history.

These are averages, not your bill

Every figure on this page is a utility-wide average or typical residential rate. Your own rate will differ:

• Lifeline customers — households on very low monthly consumption — pay a subsidised rate.
• Senior-citizen accounts under 100 kWh a month get a discount of up to 5%.
• Some charges sit outside the ₱/kWh figure entirely. BATELEC II’s July 2026 sheet, for instance, adds a ₱5.0000 per kW distribution demand charge and ₱0.6000 per customer per month of VAT on top of the ₱11.7671 grand total, and bills Tingloy separately at ₱10.7198/kWh because it is served by NPC-SPUG rather than the mainland grid.
• Rates reset most months. July 2026 was the latest published month across all twelve utilities when this page was compiled, not a stale snapshot — Meralco announces around the 10th and BENECO’s own rate table returned no data for August 2026 when queried.

The one number you can fully trust is your own: total bill divided by the kWh on it. That is your effective all-in rate, and it is the right input for any savings estimate. Our cost calculator uses Meralco’s rate by default, so if you are on another utility, scale the savings it shows by the ratio of your rate to ₱14.8261.

One reported figure we could not settle

Negros Power’s July 2026 all-in rate was reported twice, differently. On 14 July it was ₱14.04/kWh, up ₱0.20 from ₱13.84. On 21 July it was ₱14.1287/kWh, up ₱0.2870 from ₱13.8417. Both reports agree on June, so the earlier one reads as the announced figure and the later one as the final, more precise version — but Negros Power publishes no all-in rate of its own to settle it. We show ₱14.1287 and record ₱14.04 alongside it. We do not average two figures to manufacture a third that nobody published.

How this page is maintained

Rates are monthly, so a page like this decays quietly. Every row carries the date we last checked it against its source, and every source is linked so you can check it yourself. Where a utility publishes a rate archive we use the archive; where it does not, we say what we used instead. Where nobody publishes a figure, the row says so.

More on how we source and verify numbers across the site is on our methodology page. If you want to see what solar would do against your own rate, start with is solar worth it in the Philippines or find your city on the solar price pages.