Electricity gets pricier for new customers – default supply costs 40 cents

Anyone signing a new electricity contract in Germany has to pay more again. According to the comparison portal StromAuskunft.de, the cheapest tariff for new customers on Oct. 25, 2026, was 31.13 euro cents per kilowatt hour for a model household using 3,500 kilowatt hours a year, or about €1,090 a year. That is 12.06% more than a month earlier and 15.43% more than a year ago, the portal said. Default supply, where customers without their own contract end up, costs 40.39 cents, or €1,413.71 a year; switching to the cheapest tariff saves a calculated €324.17.

The Strom-Report portal (as of Oct. 25, 2026) arrives at similar figures: new customers currently pay 31.2 cents, 30.8 cents on average in October, while existing customers using 4,000 kilowatt hours pay 34.4 cents on average, based on data from Verivox and Check24. In the Federal Statistical Office's consumer price index, however, electricity was still 5.5% cheaper in September 2026 than a year earlier. Strom-Report cites wholesale prices as the driver: futures for 2027 recently traded at around €130 to €135 per megawatt hour, driven partly by gas and carbon costs.

Opposing effects are emerging for 2027. Transmission grid fees are set to rise from 2.86 to 3.54 cents per kilowatt hour because the federal subsidy falls from €6.5 billion to €5.525 billion, according to Strom-Report; for distribution grids, Verivox expects an increase of about 0.24 cents, roughly €10 a year for a household using 4,000 kilowatt hours. At the same time, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced plans to cut the electricity tax for everyone to the EU minimum, from 2.05 to 0.1 cents per kilowatt hour for households; no start date has been set yet, Strom-Report said. The portals' figures are model calculations, and regional prices differ by up to 14.26 cents, according to StromAuskunft.