SCE Rate Increase 2026: What Changed and What Comes Next

On October 1, 2025, a typical Southern California Edison household using 500 kWh a month went from paying $171.17 to $193.23. That is a 13% jump in a single billing cycle, and it did not come from anyone using more electricity. If you have been trying to work out what happened to your bill, and whether it is going to happen again, here is the short version. The October 2025 increase was mostly wildfire cost recovery, meaning money SCE already spent in prior years and was later authorized to collect from customers. 2026 has been comparatively quiet. Increases for 2027 and 2028 are already approved and sitting on the calendar. The average SCE residential rate is now somewhere around 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Why did my Edison bill jump in October 2025? Two things landed at once. The larger piece was wildfire cost recovery. In June 2025, regulators approved roughly $536 million in recovery for wildfire mitigation and restoration costs SCE had already incurred between 2022 and 2023. That spending was done years ago. The collection shows up now, spread across customer bills. The second piece was a true-up. Utilities are authorized to collect a certain amount of revenue over a year. When they collect less than authorized early in the year, the gap gets made up later. October is when that correction hit. Neither of those is about your usage. You could have run the exact same appliances for the exact same hours and still seen the increase. What is wildfire cost recovery, actually? California lets investor-owned utilities recover certain wildfire-related costs from ratepayers, subject to regulatory review. That covers hardening the grid, undergrounding and insulating lines, vegetation management, and restoration after events. The part that catches people off guard is the timing. Costs incurred in 2022 can appear on a 2025 bill. So a quiet year on your statement does not mean the spending stopped. It means the collection has not caught up yet. This is also why "rates went up because of wildfires" is not a one-time explanation. There is a pipeline of already-spent money still working its way toward customers. Did rates go up again in 2026? Not really, and that surprises people who expected another jump. 2026 has been close to flat. There was a small decrease on June 1, 2026, and the year has not produced anything like the October 2025 move. The average residential rate has been sitting near 34 to 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. One structural change is worth knowing about. In November 2025, a Base Services Charge appeared on the delivery side of the bill. Alongside it, the per-kilowatt-hour price dropped by roughly 10%. The total did not fall by 10%. Some of what used to be charged per unit of electricity is now charged as a flat monthly amount instead. That matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it. What is already approved for 2027 and 2028? This is the part most homeowners have not heard. SCE's 2025 General Rate Case decision includes authorized increases of roughly 2.6% to 2.7% per year for 2027 and 2028. Those are not projections from a solar company. They are already decided, sitting in a regulatory decision, waiting for the calendar. Step back further and the trend is steeper than two modest years suggests. According to the CPUC's own data, SCE residential rates rose about 85% between January 2015 and February 2025. Measured from January 2016 to mid-2026, they more than doubled. Ten years, double the rate. That is the number worth holding on to. Which half of my bill went up, delivery or generation? Your statement has two sides, and they move independently. Delivery is SCE. Poles, wires, meters, maintenance, and the wildfire costs described above. This is the half that has been doing the climbing. Generation is the electricity itself. Depending on where you live, that comes from SCE or from a Community Choice Aggregator, which is a city or county program that buys power on residents' behalf. CCAs typically reset their rates once a year based on what power is projected to cost. If you are in a CCA city, you have two organizations setting prices on one statement, on two unrelated schedules. Most people never look closely enough to notice, which is fair, because the bill does not exactly invite it. What this means if you are thinking about solar A few honest observations, including the inconvenient one. Rising rates do change solar economics, because the value of the power your roof makes is tied to what you would otherwise have paid for it. A higher utility rate means each kilowatt-hour you produce and use is worth more. But that Base Services Charge cuts the other way. A fixed monthly charge is not reduced by producing your own power. Solar can offset the per-kilowatt-hour portion of your bill. It cannot offset a flat fee. Anyone showing you a projection where the bill goes to zero is not modeling your actual statement. Under net billing, exported power is credited well below retail, so what your household uses as it is produced matters more than what it sends back. That is the reason batteries come up in so many California quotes now, and also the reason a battery does not automatically pencil out for every home. Also worth being clear about: the federal Residential Clean Energy Credit expired at the end of 2025. If you bought a system before that date, you may still claim it on your 2025 return. Talk to a tax professional about your own situation. For leases and power purchase agreements, the company that owns the system can claim the commercial credit through the end of 2027 and factor that into how it prices your rate, which is part of why those structures look different now than they did two years ago. What to actually do about it Pull your last twelve months of usage from your utility account, not your last one month. Seasonal swing is large in Southern California, and a single summer bill will oversize a system while a single February bill will undersize one. Check whether your city runs a CCA, because your generation rate may not be what you assume. Find your rate plan. A household on a time-of-use plan with heavy evening consumption has very different economics from one that runs most of its load midday. Then get more than one quote. Pricing for the same roof varies more than most people expect, and the only way to see that spread is to have several numbers side by side. Solar does not make sense for every house. A roof with a few years left on it usually wants replacing first, and a home with low usage may not have enough bill to work with. But if your bill went up 13% in a month for reasons that had nothing to do with you, it is a reasonable time to find out where you stand. 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