What is an EFL?
The Electricity Facts Label — the EFL — is a standardized disclosure the Public Utility Commission of Texas requires every retail electric provider to publish for every plan they sell. Think of it as the nutrition label on the back of a cereal box. The marketing on the front of the box can say almost anything. The label on the back has to tell the truth in a fixed format.
Because the format is fixed, an EFL is the only apples-to-apples way to compare two offers. Two providers can both advertise "9.8¢ electricity" and deliver wildly different bills, because the advertised number is usually the average price at one specific usage level with a usage credit baked in. The EFL is where that gets exposed.
Every EFL has four sections: pricing, other key terms and questions, disclosure chart, and the fine print about your provider. Ninety percent of the money lives in the first section.
The four numbers that actually matter
1. The energy charge (base rate)
This is the price per kilowatt-hour you pay for the electricity itself, before delivery charges and before any credits. It is the only number on the page that does not move around with your usage. If you are comparing two fixed-rate plans for a facility with steady load, this is your primary signal.
2, 3, and 4. Average price at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh
Right below the base rate you will find three average prices, one for each usage tier. This is where plans reveal their personality. A plan that looks cheap at 1,000 kWh and expensive at 500 kWh has a usage credit or a minimum-usage fee attached — you only get the advertised price if you land in the sweet spot that month.
The test is simple: find your actual average monthly usage on your last twelve bills, then read the average price at the tier closest to it. If your usage swings seasonally — most Texas buildings do — compare the average price across all three tiers and look at the spread. A tight spread means a predictable bill. A wide spread means the plan is engineered around one usage number, and you will pay for every month you miss it.
A quick example. Plan A shows 11.9¢ at 500 kWh, 10.1¢ at 1,000 kWh, and 9.8¢ at 2,000 kWh. Plan B shows 16.4¢, 10.0¢, and 12.1¢. Plan B wins the advertising war at exactly 1,000 kWh and loses badly everywhere else. For a small office that uses 600 kWh in spring and 2,400 kWh in August, Plan A is meaningfully cheaper across the year even though its headline number is worse.
The hidden fees most people miss
The biggest line item nobody shops is the TDU delivery charge. Your transmission and distribution utility — Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, TNMP — owns the poles and wires and charges a regulated fee to move power to your meter. It is typically a fixed monthly charge plus a per-kWh charge, and it is not negotiable by anyone, including us.
What is negotiable is how it is presented. Watch for these three patterns:
- All-in vs. energy-only pricing. Some EFLs quote average prices that already include TDU charges; others quote energy-only. Comparing an all-in EFL to an energy-only EFL makes the energy-only plan look 4–5¢ cheaper when it is not.
- Pass-through language. Look for "TDU charges are passed through without markup." If that sentence is missing, the provider may be adding a margin to a regulated fee.
- Base charges and minimum-usage fees. A $9.95 monthly base charge is invisible at 2,000 kWh and brutal at 400 kWh. A $9.95 minimum-usage fee that triggers below 1,000 kWh is worse.
Two more items live in the "other key terms" box and deserve thirty seconds each: the early termination fee and the contract end date. Commercial contracts often use a liquidated-damages formula tied to market price, which can be far larger than a flat fee. And the end date matters because rolling off a contract into a month-to-month variable rate is the single most expensive thing that happens to Texas electricity customers. Put the date in your calendar the day you sign.
What a good rate looks like in 2026
Rates move weekly with the wholesale market, so treat any specific number as a snapshot rather than a promise. Going into 2026, the honest framing is this: fixed-rate offers for creditworthy commercial accounts in ERCOT have been clustering in a fairly narrow band, and the difference between a good deal and a bad deal is usually less about the headline rate and more about term structure, usage-credit games, and timing.
A good offer generally has these characteristics:
- A tight spread between the 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh average prices.
- No minimum-usage fee and no usage credit propping up the advertised price.
- TDU charges passed through at cost, stated explicitly.
- A term length that matches your outlook — longer terms buy certainty, not always savings.
- An end date that does not land in July or August, when re-shopping is most expensive.
That last point is underrated. If your contract expires in mid-summer, you are shopping at the moment demand and forward pricing peak. Signing a 13-month or 25-month term instead of 12 or 24 can move your renewal into a shoulder month and quietly save you more than a tenth of a cent ever will.
Finally: the EFL tells you what a plan costs, not whether it fits. A restaurant with heavy evening load, a warehouse with a demand spike every morning, and a multifamily property with common-area metering all need different structures. That is the part a label cannot do for you.