How to Compute Your Electric Bill (Philippines)

Your Meralco bill comes down to one multiplication: how many kWh you used, times the rate per kWh. Everything else on the bill is that same arithmetic broken into line items. Once you have the formula and the current rate, you can compute your bill from your usage, or work backward from a peso amount to figure out your usage.

The formula, both directions

Pesos owed = kWh used x rate per kWh.

Flip it around and you get the reverse:

kWh used = pesos owed / rate per kWh.

That’s the whole method. Everything below is just this formula applied to real numbers.

What rate do I use?

Meralco’s all-in residential rate for August 2026 was ₱14.7833/kWh, according to its own advisory. That figure is not fixed. It moved from ₱14.8261/kWh in July, and it has shifted almost every month in 2026 with fuel costs, currency swings, and pass-through charges like transmission and taxes. See Meralco rate for August 2026 for what moved that month, and the Meralco electricity rate history for the full month-by-month record. Always check the current rate before running this math. A rate that’s a year old can be off by a peso or more per kWh, which adds up fast once you multiply by a few hundred kWh.

Worked example: kWh to pesos

Say your meter shows you used 452 kWh this billing period.

452 kWh x ₱14.7833/kWh = ₱6,682.05

That’s the arithmetic your bill is built on. Your actual printed total might land a few pesos off this figure, because Meralco computes generation, transmission, distribution, system loss, and taxes as separate line items that each round independently before being summed, rather than applying one blended rate to your whole usage in a single step. For what those line items actually are, see how to read your Meralco bill. The all-in rate used here is close enough for budgeting and for sizing solar, just not exact to the centavo.

Worked example: pesos to kWh

Now the reverse. Say you only have the peso total, no kWh figure in front of you, maybe from a text alert or a photo of last month’s total due: ₱7,850.

₱7,850 / ₱14.7833/kWh = 531 kWh (531.0, rounded to the nearest whole kWh since that’s how meters read)

That’s roughly how much energy you used, without needing to dig up the printed kWh line. It won’t be exact if your bill also carries adjustments, credits, or a different rate than the current month’s, but it’s a solid estimate for a household budgeting or checking whether a bill looks unusually high.

A second pair of examples, so the pattern is clear

Same two formulas, different numbers. Once you’ve done it once, it’s a 30-second phone calculator job for any bill you’re holding.

Why bother computing it yourself?

A few practical reasons:

• Catching billing errors. If your computed estimate is wildly off from what Meralco actually charged, that’s worth a second look, though expect a small gap from the line-item rounding described above, not an exact match.
• Budgeting before the bill arrives. If you know roughly how many kWh your household used this month, you can estimate the bill before it’s printed.
• Sizing solar off your real usage. Once you have a reliable monthly kWh figure, what size solar system for my bill walks through turning that number into a system size, using the same kind of straightforward division this page uses for pesos and kWh.

What this arithmetic can’t tell you

The all-in rate is an average across the whole bill, not a single tariff that applies uniformly to every peso you pay. It’s useful for estimating and for solar sizing, but it doesn’t replace reading the actual line items on your bill if you want to know exactly what you’re paying for generation versus distribution versus taxes. For that level of detail, see how to read your Meralco bill and Meralco rate per kWh, which breaks down what makes up the all-in figure.

And if you’re doing this math because you’re sizing solar: a well-designed system realistically cuts a bill by roughly 90% or more for power you use as it’s generated, not to zero. Exported power under net metering is credited at generation cost only, roughly ₱5-7/kWh, well below the ₱14.7833/kWh retail rate, so the savings math favors using power during the day over exporting it. See net metering for how that credit works.