If your bill went up and you went looking for why, you probably found a page telling you the number. This is where that number is supposed to come from.
What the Commission approved
In August 2025 the Public Service Commission approved a three-year delivery rate plan for National Grid’s upstate New York territory. It approved considerably less than the company asked for. The Commission reduced the electric delivery revenue request by more than $340 million, about 67 percent of what was sought, and the gas delivery request by nearly $100 million, about 63 percent.
What it did approve was levelized across three rate years: electric delivery revenue increases of 3.4 percent, then 5.6 percent, then 4.6 percent. Those rate years begin September 1.
That is the whole of what the regulator published. It did not publish a typical household bill impact for each year, which matters, because most of the figures circulating for “what this costs you per month” are somebody’s arithmetic on top of the filing rather than the filing itself.
What we will not tell you
There is a widely repeated figure for the April 2026 delivery increase. We read the underlying reporting four separate times and got four different answers, including two different percentages attached to the same dollar amount. It may well be correct. We could not confirm it, so it is not on this site.
That is worth saying out loud because the same figure appears as fact on competing pages, and you have no way to tell from looking which numbers on a solar company’s website were checked.
The two numbers we can stand behind
National Grid publishes its own residential service rates, and for upstate residential service, rate SC-1, two of them are printed plainly:
- A basic service charge of $19.00 per month
- A delivery charge of 10.013 cents per kilowatt hour
We read both off National Grid’s own page on 17 September 2026. Every other line on that page, and there are fourteen of them, National Grid itself marks as varying monthly or annually. Any page that prints all fourteen as fixed numbers is a photograph of one moment, not a reference.
Why the fixed charge is the one to understand
The $19.00 does not move. It is not priced per kilowatt hour, so it does not fall when you use less, and it does not fall when a roof full of panels covers everything the house uses. It is the charge for being connected.
That single fact is why an honest solar conversation never promises a zero bill, and it is the thing worth checking before you sign anything.
If you want the rest of the statement broken down the same way, the charge by charge walkthrough marks every line on a National Grid bill as one solar removes, one it shrinks, or one it never touches.