Costs & tariffs · What your electricity costs
Electricity (1/5): How your electricity price is made up
In tariff year 2026 the same kilowatt-hour costs 9,64 centimes in Zwischbergen VS and 43,61 in Kestenholz SO — 4,52 times as much, in the same country. And you cannot switch: the price comes with the address. Part of the explanation is a hundred years old.
You cannot negotiate, and you cannot switch
As a private household you are in basic supply. The responsible party is the grid operator whose lines run to your house, and only that one. Free procurement is open to end customers from 100’000 kWh a year; ElCom’s four household profiles lie between 2’500 and 13’000 kWh.
That removes the question every other bill starts with. There is no provider comparison, no notice date, no switching bonus. What remains is the question of what the price is made of, and which part of it you can influence yourself.
A thousand utilities in a small country
Switzerland electrified from the bottom up. In 1900 the country counted 140 electricity works, in 1905 there were 490, by 1910 already 780, and in 1913 the number passed a thousand for the first time. They were built by municipalities and by cooperatives formed in the villages. The Heavy Current Act of 1902 granted municipal utilities a monopoly position and thereby entrenched what had arisen anyway.
That is where today’s structure comes from: hundreds of small supply areas, each with its own grid, its own procurement and its own tariff. How high the tariff turns out in an individual case depends on the utility’s procurement strategy, on the grid structure in the supply area and on local levies. ElCom names differences in energy procurement as one of the main reasons for the large tariff differences.
The number of utilities has fallen for as long as the statistics exist
Counted from the tariff filings themselves: for tariff year 2011, 712 grid operators reported a household tariff; for 2027 there are 535. That is 177 fewer in sixteen years, a quarter of the total. The number of municipalities in the same statistics fell from 2’604 to 2’108.
The decline is often attributed to the electricity market opening of 2009. The Swiss Federal Office of Energy names a different reason first: municipal mergers above all. Both series above support this — the number of municipalities falls at the same pace as the number of utilities.
Fifty years of electricity prices
In nominal terms electricity for a Swiss household has become 2,7 times as expensive since 1975: from 11,2 to 29,9 centimes/kWh in 2025. Take out inflation and a different figure remains. In 2020 prices the kilowatt-hour cost 22,8 centimes in 1975 and 28,0 in 2025 — a rise of 22,8 per cent over half a century.
The path in between is more interesting than the start and end points. In real terms electricity became cheaper for two decades; the low point is 2007 at 16,6 centimes, 27,2 per cent below the 1975 value. Between 1995 and 2007 alone it fell by 23,9 per cent. After that it rose slowly, reaching 21,2 centimes by 2022.
Then came the break. In 2023 the real price jumped to 26,2 centimes, in 2024 to 30,6. That is the highest value since the series begins — with one exception: 1960, the first year, was higher still at 31,6 centimes. Since then it has been falling again, to 28,0 in 2025.
In real terms electricity was cheaper in 2007 than in 1975. The three years from 2023 have used up that lead.
Five components, and three of them are local
The tariff consists of five parts. For tariff year 2026, as a median across 2’123 municipalities and for profile H4 with 4’500 kWh annual consumption:
- Energy 12,112 centimes/kWh. What the utility spends on procurement. Its own hydropower pushes this item down, expensive purchases push it up. Depends on where you live. 340 different values across 2’123 municipalities, from 0,650 to 25,500. Each utility sets it anew every year.
- Grid usage 10,963 centimes/kWh. Transport to the house, including the cost of the winter reserve. A city spreads its grid costs over many connections per kilometre of line, a side valley over few. Depends on where you live. 411 different values, from 0,460 to 20,677. The grid operator sets it, ElCom reviews it under Art. 14 of the Electricity Supply Act and can order a reduction.
- Federal grid surcharge 2,300 centimes/kWh. The only item that is the same everywhere. 99,7 per cent of municipalities carry the same value, and in tariff year 2027 all of them do. Art. 35 of the Energy Act caps it at 2,3 centimes/kWh, and the Federal Council sets it below that as needed. It finances feed-in tariffs for renewable electricity, investment contributions for photovoltaics, the market premium for large hydropower, geothermal guarantees and watercourse rehabilitation.
- Metering tariff 1,653 centimes/kWh. Meter and reading, to be shown separately since 1 January 2026 under Art. 17a of the Electricity Supply Act. Depends on where you live. 98 different values, up to 4,000 centimes/kWh. The grid operator sets it and may not exceed the eligible metering costs.
- Levies to canton and municipality 0,880 centimes/kWh. Concession fees for the use of public ground and further levies of the local authority. Set politically, with no technical link to the delivery. Depends on where you live. 17,7 per cent of municipalities charge nothing at all, others up to 7,443 centimes/kWh. It is the only item ElCom is not allowed to review (Art. 22 para. 2 lit. b of the Electricity Supply Act).
The five medians do not add up to the median price, and that is not an arithmetic slip: medians are not additive. On top comes a fixed annual charge in francs, which Part 2 breaks down; it does not depend on consumption. Only the volume-dependent items fall when you draw less electricity from the grid.
43 centimes of every franc are electricity
Add up grid usage, metering, the grid surcharge and levies and they come to 56,6 per cent of the final price in 2026, as a median. Energy delivery accounts for 43,4 per cent. Calculated as a mean it is 56,3 against 43,7 — the order of magnitude holds in both.
Who owns this line? According to the Association of Swiss Electricity Companies, more than 90 per cent is in public hands, around 8 per cent private and 2 per cent foreign. A long-running dispute surrounds the level of grid costs: the Price Supervisor calculates roughly 400 million francs of annual overpayment, while the industry counters that with around 1,4 billion in investment and 850 to 920 million in depreciation per year there can be no question of double depreciation.
What changes in 2027
On 8 September 2026 ElCom published the tariffs for 2027. They apply from 1 January; until then you pay the 2026 tariffs, and those are what this site calculates with. The median household reaches 26,56 centimes/kWh in 2027 instead of 27,89 — 1,33 centimes less. For Switzerland as a whole ElCom reports 26,56 against 27,70; its value is aggregated across grid areas, ours across municipalities. Both stand here because they answer different questions.
Of 2’103 municipalities reporting for both years, 1’800 become cheaper, 301 more expensive, 2 stay the same. The reduction is carried by energy procurement. Grid usage moves the other way, and how far depends on which series you calculate: across municipalities it falls by 0,023 centimes, across grid areas it rises by 0,215. Anyone naming a direction names the series with it.
That changes little about the spread. In 2027 the cheapest municipality is at 10,56 centimes/kWh — Ferrera and Rongellen, both Grisons — the most expensive at 45,88 in Kestenholz SO. That is 4,34 times instead of 4,52 the year before.
The way out runs across your own roof
There is only one way past the volume-dependent items: you have to produce electricity yourself. Every kilowatt-hour from your own roof is one you do not have to buy.
What you do with it decides its value. Use it in the house at the same moment — washing machine, heat pump, car on the wallbox — and you save the working price: a median of 26,26 centimes/kWh in 2026, that is energy, grid usage, grid surcharge and levies together. The metering tariff is not included; it runs on even when the meter stands still. Feed it into the grid and you receive at least 6 centimes/kWh under Art. 12 para. 1bis of the Energy Ordinance, plus up to 3 centimes for the guarantee of origin.
A self-consumed kilowatt-hour is therefore worth close to three and up to four times as much as one fed in. That is why Parts 3 to 5 all turn on a single question: how much of your own production can you use in your own house?
What we do not know
- Why ElCom’s official Swiss figure differs from our municipal median by around 0,2 centimes we cannot resolve. It does not disclose its aggregation rule. So we do not recalculate its value; we fetch it from the same database and place it alongside ours.
- What cooperative members receive for their shares when their utility is sold does not appear in the acquirers’ announcements. Without documented purchase prices, no figure stands here.
- The procurement costs of individual utilities are not public. That makes it impossible to say which part of a high energy tariff stems from old supply contracts and which from purchases made in 2022 and 2023.
Sources: ElCom, tariff filings of the distribution grid operators, tariff years 2011 to 2027, obtained via LINDAS (cubes electricityprice and electricityprice-swiss); public view at strompreis.elcom.admin.ch. Swiss Federal Office of Energy, Swiss Overall Energy Statistics 2025, Table 37, for the series from 1960, deflated with the national consumer price index. Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, «Elektrizitätswirtschaft», for the number of utilities 1900 to 1913. Association of Swiss Electricity Companies for the ownership structure. Price Supervisor and ElCom for the dispute over grid costs. Art. 17a of the Electricity Supply Act for the separate reporting of metering costs, Art. 12 para. 1bis of the Energy Ordinance for the minimum remuneration.
Transparency: the tariff figures in this article are recalculated from static/gemeindetarife.json at every build and searched for in the text, in all four languages. Our values are medians and means across municipalities, taking the cheapest provider per municipality in the standard product; the ElCom values are quoted, not recalculated.
