ISSUE 012
What Missouri Businesses Pay For Electricity
A six-person shop I know got a bill that jumped and could not work out whether that was the weather, the rate, or them. I could not work it out either, so I went and read what Missouri businesses actually pay. The short version is that Missouri is cheap compared with the country, much less cheap than it looks if you are an industrial customer, and that the difference between two Missouri utilities is bigger than the difference between Missouri and America.
An idea worth thinking about
Your rate is decided in a proceeding you are allowed to speak in
If you buy power from Ameren Missouri, Evergy Missouri Metro, Evergy Missouri West or Liberty's Empire District, your price is not set by a market. It is set by the Missouri Public Service Commission in a formal rate case, and the Commission's own description of the job is precise: rates give the utility an opportunity, but not a guarantee, to earn a reasonable return on its investment after recovering prudently incurred operating costs.
Three things follow from that sentence, and they are worth sitting with. Your rate is a legal determination, not a quote. The utility's building programme is in it, because return is earned on investment. And the proceeding is public, with a comment process open to any customer, a filing system you can search by case number or by date, and a consumer hotline on 1-800-392-4211.
Almost no small business files a comment. Residential customers do, in numbers, at the local public hearings. I have not found a count of how many comments in a Missouri electric rate case come from businesses under twenty employees, and I am not going to guess at one. What I can say is that the commercial class is where small businesses sit, that the commercial class is the one with the largest gap to the national average in the data below, and that nobody is in the room arguing for it on your behalf unless somebody turns up.
If you are not a regulated-utility customer — if you buy from a municipal utility or a rural electric cooperative — none of this applies to you. Your rate is set by a city council or by a board you can vote for, which is a different process and, depending on your temperament, either better or worse.
A tool I disappeared into
Every Missouri utility's average commercial price, in one spreadsheet
EIA publishes seventeen tables of sales, revenue and average price from Form EIA-861, and tables 6 through 10 break it down by individual utility within each state. Table 7 is the commercial class. Download the spreadsheet, filter to MO, and you have the average price paid by commercial customers at every utility operating in Missouri, with customer counts beside it.
The 2024 spread is the thing. At the low end, City Utilities of Springfield at 9.39 cents a kilowatt-hour and Union Electric — Ameren Missouri — at 9.73, serving 165,295 commercial customers. Evergy Missouri West 9.57, Evergy Metro 10.37. Then it climbs: City of Columbia 11.38, Empire District 12.85, City of Independence 14.95, and at the top SEMO Electric Cooperative at 17.22, serving 5,473 commercial customers in rural southeast Missouri. That is a 1.8-fold spread inside one state.
Before anyone concludes a co-op is gouging them: a cooperative with long distribution lines and few customers per mile has a genuinely different cost structure from a utility serving a dense commercial district, and this table cannot distinguish that from anything else. What it tells you is what the bills came to, not why.
Two limits that matter. These are 2024 figures, a year behind the statewide numbers below, and EIA has marked this product discontinued, with the underlying data moving to the EIA-861 files. More importantly, average price here means total revenue divided by total kilowatt-hours for the class. It blends demand charges, fuel adjustments and every rate schedule together. It is not a tariff and it is not a quote — it is useful for comparing territories, and useless for predicting your own bill.
Learn something
A free engineering assessment, with a floor that will exclude most of us
Start with the disqualifier, because it is the honest way round. The Department of Energy's Industrial Training and Assessment Centers will do a no-cost on-site energy assessment for a US manufacturer whose annual energy bills run between $100,000 and $3,500,000, with revenue under $250 million, within 150 miles of a centre. If your power bill is under a hundred thousand a year — and for a six-person shop it almost certainly is — you are below the floor.
For the manufacturers who do clear it, this is an unusually good deal, and Missouri has a centre. The University of Missouri-Columbia hosts one, which puts most of the state inside the 150-mile radius. A university team visits, assesses energy use, productivity and waste, and leaves a written report naming the improvement opportunities and the rebates and incentives that apply to them. The programme reports an average of roughly $144,582 in recommended annual savings per assessment — and note the word recommended. Those are projected savings from recommendations, not measured results from implemented ones, and the programme says so.
The eligibility rules can be waived in special cases and each centre chooses its own clients, so a borderline manufacturer is worth a phone call rather than a self-rejection.
The reason it is here even though most readers cannot use it: the programme has run since 1976 and publishes what it found, which makes it one of the few places you can read what an engineer actually recommended to a plant like yours rather than what a vendor wishes you would buy.
What we’re seeing
Missouri businesses pay 10.46 cents a kilowatt-hour. The national average is 13.37.
EIA's Electric Power Annual, Table 2.10, gives the average price of electricity to end users by state and sector. For 2025, Missouri's commercial rate was 10.46 cents per kilowatt-hour against a US average of 13.37. That is 22 percent below the country, and for a business whose power bill is a real line item it is the single largest structural cost advantage Missouri has.
Then look one row down. Missouri industrial customers paid 8.25 cents against a US average of 8.51 — a gap of three percent, near enough to nothing. Missouri's cheap power is a commercial-class phenomenon. If you are large enough to be classified industrial, you are paying roughly what you would pay anywhere, and the siting argument that Missouri electricity is cheap stops applying to you almost exactly at the point you get big enough for it to matter.
Residential sits at 13.30 against 17.23 nationally, and all sectors combined at 11.41 against 13.56. Every Missouri class is below its national counterpart; it is only the size of the discount that collapses as you move up the classes.
The direction is up, modestly. Commercial rates went from 10.26 cents in 2024 to 10.46 in 2025, about 1.9 percent. Industrial went 7.87 to 8.25, about 4.8 percent. Residential 12.91 to 13.30. The national averages rose over the same year too, so Missouri's relative position held. I looked for a verified figure on the rate increases currently pending before the Public Service Commission and could not open a source for one I was willing to print, so this entry makes no claim about what is in front of the Commission right now. If that matters to your budget, the case search described in slot two is the place to look rather than a news summary.
The number that should actually change your behaviour is not in this table. It is in the one above it. Missouri's commercial spread runs from 9.39 cents to 17.22 cents depending on which utility's territory your building sits in — a wider range than the gap between Missouri and the national average. Which means that for a business choosing between two buildings, or two towns, or two sides of a county line, the territory question is a larger lever than the state question. Nobody puts the utility territory on the listing.
A caution before anyone reprices anything. Those are average revenue figures, not tariffs, and your own bill is driven by your demand peak and your rate schedule as much as by your energy use. The cheap version of acting on this is to pull twelve months of bills, divide total dollars by total kilowatt-hours, and compare the result to your utility's line in the table. If you are well above it, the conversation to have is about your rate schedule and your demand charge, not about your light bulbs.
One question
What did you pay per kilowatt-hour last month?
Total dollars divided by total kilowatt-hours, off the bill. Reply with that number and your utility — I would like to see how far the real bills sit from the published averages.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
Sources link to the original publisher, never to a summary.