Electricity Price Trends: 2026 Update to the Lawrence Berkeley/Brattle Study

In 2025, Brattle experts contributed to a Berkeley Lab study assessing the drivers behind recent trends in retail electricity prices across the United States. The report, “Recent Retail Electricity Price Trends: What Do We Know… or Think We Know?”, documented historical pricing changes at the national and state levels, identified the key drivers of those changes, and shared several state-specific case studies to further illustrate the findings.

We have recently contributed to an update of the research and report, entitled “Retail Electricity Price Trends and Drivers: Data Update−2026 Edition”. The new work can be found here.

The key findings remain largely aligned with last year’s analysis, but this update extends the dataset through 2025. We have also broadened the analysis by incorporating additional data sources and examining new areas of interest, including:

• Price changes from 2024 to 2025, alongside the longer 2019–2025 trend
• Expanded discussion of the mixed and uncertain relationship between load growth and prices
• Household electricity burden data, broken out by income level and region
• Regional transmission and distribution costs and their influence on retail prices
• Capacity market outcomes and associated retail price impacts
• Utility rate increase filings and PUC approval rates

The full report is available below.