guide8 min read

ComEd's Delivery Charge Is 6.333¢/kWh Now — The Full 2026 Breakdown, and the Part Solar Can't Touch

Ryan Cook•September 2, 2026

If you've been staring at the delivery section of a ComEd bill trying to figure out what the per-kWh number actually is, here it is: 6.333 cents per kilowatt-hour for a single-family home without electric heat, on bills issued since April 2026. Add a $15.50 customer charge and a $3.87 metering charge every month whether you use power or not.

That's a different number than most rate guides show. CUB's January 2026 power-bill guide, which is the reference most people find, lists 6.228¢ and $15.26. Those were correct in January. ComEd's adjustment factors reset with April bills, and its own delivery charge guide now shows the higher figures. I sell solar in Illinois and I read these tariff sheets so my customers don't have to, and I hadn't seen anyone lay the current numbers out in plain English yet. Here they are.

Every line in the delivery section

ComEd publishes an instructional sheet showing how each delivery charge is built: a base charge, then a stack of adjustment factors, then the resulting number that lands on your bill. For the most common residential class, single-family without electric space heat, the April 2026 results are:

Delivery line item	2026 charge	How it's billed
Customer Charge	$15.50	Flat, every month
Standard Metering Service Charge	$3.87	Flat, every month
Distribution Facilities Charge	6.333¢/kWh	Per kilowatt-hour
IL Electricity Distribution Tax Charge	0.128¢/kWh	Per kilowatt-hour

Other households pay different rates for the same lines. Multi-family units without electric heat pay an $11.69 customer charge and about 4.872¢/kWh for distribution. Single-family homes with electric space heat pay an $18.45 customer charge but only about 3.215¢/kWh, because the utility spreads its fixed wire costs across the much larger winter usage those homes have.

The fixed pieces add up to $19.37 a month before your first kilowatt-hour. That's your floor. No efficiency upgrade, no supplier switch, and no solar array gets you under it while you're connected to the grid.

What that means on a real bill

Take a typical Chicagoland household using 750 kWh in a month. The delivery math runs:

Customer charge: $15.50
Metering: $3.87
Distribution, 750 kWh x 6.333¢: $47.50
Distribution tax, 750 kWh x 0.128¢: $0.96

Delivery total: about $67.83. The supply section for the same 750 kWh, at the summer price of 10.399¢ through September 30, comes to about $77.99. Delivery is roughly 46% of those two sections put together. Bump usage to 1,000 kWh and delivery rises to about $84 against $104 of supply. Taxes, the franchise cost, and a handful of small riders sit on top of both.

I point this out because people fixate on the supply price. ComEd's summer rate of 10.399¢ got the headlines in June, and it deserved them. But the poles-and-wires half of the bill quietly sits right behind it, and unlike supply, it doesn't drop on October 1.

Why delivery keeps climbing

Supply prices bounce with wholesale markets and capacity auctions. Delivery prices move by regulatory order, and in Illinois those orders have run one direction.

The Illinois Commerce Commission approved ComEd's multi-year delivery plan covering 2024 through 2027, worth approximately $606 million in increases across the four years. Then in December 2025 it granted a separate reconciliation increase of about $243 million, which regulators estimated adds roughly $3.10 a month to a typical residential bill starting in January 2026. The April reset of ComEd's adjustment factors added the last tenth of a cent, taking the Distribution Facilities Charge from 6.228¢ to 6.333¢.

None of this is hidden. It's just spread across enough filings and PDFs that nobody outside the industry tracks it. My take: the reconciliation cases are the part worth watching, because they let the utility come back for over-budget spending every year on top of the plan that was already approved.

And there's another filing pending. In May 2026 ComEd asked to recover approximately $234.3 million in 2025 costs through its annual reconciliation. ComEd's own framing is that, netted against a separate $128 million refund, the filing would lower the average residential bill by about $1.22 a month in 2027. CUB will argue the number, a ruling is expected late this year, and any change lands on January 2027 bills. The bigger item is the $15.3 billion grid plan ComEd filed in January 2026 for the years after 2027, because that one sets the next stretch of delivery rates. The current numbers for both halves of the bill live on the ComEd rates page.

A note on ComEd's time-of-use delivery option

ComEd started offering residential customers a time-of-day version of the Distribution Facilities Charge in February 2026, and beginning with June 2026 bills it added a combined supply-and-delivery time-of-day rate (Rate BEST). Instead of one flat 6.333¢, delivery varies by block. For a single-family home without electric heat, CUB's August 2026 rundown lists the overnight block (9 p.m. to 6 a.m.) at about 3.3¢/kWh, morning (6 a.m. to 1 p.m.) at about 4.5¢, evening (7 p.m. to 9 p.m.) at about 4.2¢, and the mid-day peak (1 p.m. to 7 p.m.) at about 11.9¢/kWh.

Two things to know before anyone pitches you on it. It's a real discount only if you can push laundry, dishwashing, and EV charging out of that 1-to-7 window. And legacy net metering customers, meaning solar connected before 2025 with no DG rebate taken, aren't eligible for the time-of-day rates, so if you kept the old full-retail net metering class, this option isn't on the table for you.

What solar does and doesn't do to delivery

Here's where I have to be careful, because a lot of solar pitches gloss over this. Panels produce electricity. Electricity is the supply half of your bill. The wires are still ComEd's.

That said, solar cuts delivery more than the "supply only" line suggests, and the mechanism matters:

Power you use the moment your panels make it never crosses the meter. No supply charge, no 6.333¢ distribution charge. On a sunny afternoon with the air conditioner running, a good chunk of your load is covered this way.
Power you import at night pays full delivery. Every imported kilowatt-hour carries the 6.333¢ plus the distribution tax, no matter how much you exported at noon.
Export credits depend on your interconnection date. Systems connected on or after January 1, 2025 fall under Illinois' supply-only net metering, so the credit for exported energy offsets supply but not delivery. Older systems under legacy full-retail net metering still get delivery credited on exports.
The $19.37 fixed floor stays. Grid-connected means you pay it. That's true for a purchased system, a leased one, and a house with no panels at all.

A home battery shifts more of your own production into the first bucket, which is why storage does more for delivery charges than most people expect. It's also why I run every projection as an estimate against your actual usage pattern rather than a flat percentage.

The honest way to size up a solar lease in ComEd territory is to compare the lease rate to the supply price you'd otherwise pay, not to your whole bill. A lease as low as $0.10 per kWh is competing with ComEd's 10.399¢ summer supply and the roughly 9.66¢ non-summer price ComEd charged through May (the October 2026 price hadn't posted when I wrote this), with a rate schedule that's predictable for the full term of the contract. The delivery section is a separate conversation, and it's the one this post is for.

What to do with this

Pull your latest bill and find the delivery section. Check the per-kWh line against 6.333¢ and the two fixed charges against $19.37. If your numbers differ, you're likely in a different delivery class, multi-family or electric heat, and the table above tells you which.

Then split your bill in two. The supply side you can shop, shift, or generate yourself. The delivery side you can shrink by importing fewer kilowatt-hours, and that's it. Knowing which dollars live on which side is the difference between a solar estimate that holds up and one that surprises you in year two.

If you're in ComEd territory and want to see what the supply side of your bill would look like with panels, run your address through the calculator. It's estimates only, built on the current 2026 rates. Or call me directly at (618) 217-2001, or send a note through the contact page. If the numbers don't pencil for your house, I'll tell you that too.

Frequently Asked Questions

For a single-family home without electric heat, ComEd's Distribution Facilities Charge is 6.333¢ per kWh on bills issued from April 2026 onward, plus a 0.128¢ per kWh Illinois Electricity Distribution Tax charge. On top of the per-kWh pieces there are two fixed monthly charges: a $15.50 customer charge and a $3.87 standard metering charge, for $19.37 a month before you use a single kilowatt-hour. Those figures come straight from ComEd's own delivery service charge guide, which lays out how each base charge plus its adjustment factors becomes the number on your bill. Multi-family homes pay less per kWh, about 4.872¢, and homes with electric space heat pay about 3.215¢ with a higher $18.45 customer charge. If you've seen 6.228¢ quoted elsewhere, that was the January 2026 figure. The April adjustment nudged it up, and most rate guides haven't caught up yet.

Two reasons stack up. First, delivery is the regulated half of the bill where ComEd is allowed to earn a profit, so it rises through rate cases rather than markets. The Illinois Commerce Commission approved a multi-year delivery plan for 2024 through 2027 worth roughly $606 million, then granted a separate $243 million reconciliation increase in December 2025 that added about $3.10 a month to a typical bill starting January 2026. Adjustment factors reset again in April, which is how the per-kWh rate moved from 6.228¢ to 6.333¢. Second, delivery charges scale with usage. A home pulling 1,000 kWh in a hot month pays about $84 in delivery alone, roughly $64 of it from the per-kWh Distribution Facilities Charge. Delivery isn't shoppable, so switching suppliers never touches it. The only ways to shrink it are using fewer grid kilowatt-hours or making some of your own.

Partly, and it depends on when your system was connected. Every kilowatt-hour your panels produce that you use in the house at that moment never crosses the meter, so it carries no Distribution Facilities Charge and no supply charge. That's real delivery savings. The grid power you still import at night or on cloudy days pays the full 6.333¢ per kWh. For systems interconnected on or after January 1, 2025, Illinois uses supply-only net metering, so the credits you earn for exporting midday power offset supply but not delivery. Older systems under legacy full-retail net metering still get delivery credited on exported energy. The $19.37 in fixed monthly charges stays for everyone, solar or not, as long as you're connected to the grid. A battery raises the share of your own production you use directly, which is the lever that cuts delivery further.

Probably, though the next step looks smaller than the last one. ComEd's ICC-approved multi-year delivery plan runs 2024 through 2027, so the plan's final step is still ahead of us. The reconciliation ComEd filed in May 2026 asks to recover about $234.3 million in 2025 costs, but paired with a separate $128 million refund, ComEd says the net effect would trim the average residential bill by roughly $1.22 a month starting in January 2027. The commission rules on these filings late in the year, the same pattern that put the December 2025 order onto January 2026 bills. The bigger money sits behind that: ComEd filed a $15.3 billion grid plan in January 2026 covering the years after 2027. Supply runs on its own track, with the 10.399¢ summer price expiring September 30 and PJM capacity costs high at least through May 2028. Delivery and supply climb separately, and I'd plan on both moving.

Supply is the electricity itself, priced per kWh and passed through from wholesale markets with no markup. Right now that's 10.399¢ per kWh through September 30, 2026, and it's the only part of the bill you can shop with an alternative supplier or offset with solar production. Delivery is what ComEd charges to move power over its poles, wires, and transformers to your house, plus the cost of billing and metering you. It's regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission and it's where the utility earns its return. In 2026 delivery means a $15.50 customer charge, a $3.87 metering charge, 6.333¢ per kWh for distribution, and 0.128¢ per kWh in distribution tax. On a 750 kWh month that's about $68 in delivery next to $78 in supply, so delivery is close to half of those two sections combined. Taxes and small riders sit on top of both.