Submit Your Energy Bill to CR's Bill Decoder and Find Ways to Save
The data will help CR experts track trends in rising energy costs and fight for fairer rates, while giving you tips to trim your electric bill
Electricity rates are through the roof. The average U.S. electric bill has risen by a third in just the last five years, according to analysis from the climate and energy publication Heatmap. With this big jump, it’s no surprise that about half of Americans now report that their household finances are strained by increasing electricity costs, according to a nationally representative survey of 2,003 U.S. adults conducted by CR in the spring of 2026.
These increasingly high bills can be hard to understand, as they’re often riddled with multiple usage rates and fees, as well as hard-to-decipher small print.
To tackle the problem, Consumer Reports recently launched the free Bill Decoder tool. By submitting a recent electricity bill, anyone can access information to help make sense of their complex monthly charges and get advice on trimming costs.
Graphic: Consumer Reports Graphic: Consumer Reports
CR will collect August 2026 bills through the end of the year. Beginning in 2027, CR will then ask for participants’ most recent electric bills. You don’t need to be a paying CR member to participate, but you will need to log in with a CR account, which you can create for free, and be a U.S. resident. (The tool offers additional help locating and uploading the correct month’s bill, as well as information on our data privacy policies.)
By participating in this effort, you can help CR’s experts identify trends in rising energy costs across the country and gather the evidence needed to advocate for more affordable energy.
Armed with real-world data, CR’s energy experts hope to more clearly see where rates are rising the fastest, by how much, and why. The data can also help answer critical questions about how much of a typical bill reflects household energy use and how much comes from fixed fees and other charges that customers pay, regardless of their efforts to conserve energy.
CR’s experts will also look for evidence of unfair practices that harm customers, such as utilities charging late fees to people already struggling to pay off an existing balance.
Over the long term, CR advocates say these data-backed insights will help them fight for fairer energy policies, whether that’s backing legislation that requires data centers to truly pay their own way or opposing unnecessary rate hikes during rate-case hearings.
“With the data thousands of consumers are donating to CR, we can focus our advocacy on the levers that make the most difference,” says Alan Smith, who led development of the Bill Decoder tool as CR’s associate director of Community and Research.
The tool will also point participants toward actions they can take to shape what happens in their own communities.
Across the country, decisions are being made about a wide variety of energy investments and policies–from the buildout of new transmission lines to the approval of hyperscale data centers–that affect everyone’s rates. “We want to see the interests of everyday households prioritized when these decisions are made,” Enright says.
The Bill Decoder tool is part of a broader Power Smarter with Consumer Reports initiative, which aims to empower readers with expert-backed data and advice that can help reduce energy costs and advocate for fairer, more affordable energy policy. The initiative receives financial support from the U.S. Energy Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
