Editorial Policy

Sourcing

Default figures come only from primary federal statistics: the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s electricity, natural gas, heating-fuel and residential-consumption surveys. We do not copy numbers from other calculators, news articles or aggregators, and we do not publish a figure we could not trace to a table we downloaded ourselves. Where EIA withholds or does not publish a value — a price listed as “NA”, a survey estimate marked “Q” for unreliable, or a state the heating-fuel survey does not cover — the site says so and asks for your figure instead of filling the gap.

Derived numbers are limited to transparent arithmetic on EIA columns (for example, revenue ÷ kWh for price, or deliveries ÷ customers for gas use). Each derivation is written out on the methodology page, and the electricity method is checked against EIA’s own published annual averages before every release.

Verification and refresh cadence

• EIA-861M monthly sales, revenue and customers (residential) — current vintage: August 2025 – July 2026 (preliminary); next EIA update: late October 2026 (August 2026 data).
• EIA natural gas residential prices, deliveries, consumers and heat content — current vintage: 2025 annual prices (2024 where EIA lists 2025 as not available); 2024 deliveries per customer; next EIA update: 2026-10-30 (Natural Gas Monthly).
• EIA State Heating Oil and Propane Program (SHOPP) residential prices — current vintage: week of March 30, 2026 (last week of the 2025–26 heating season); next EIA update: 2026-10-07 (first week of the 2026–27 season).
• EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) 2020 — current vintage: 2020 survey year (final, released 2023); next EIA update: spring 2027 (2024 RECS consumption tables).

Each refresh re-downloads the raw files, rebuilds the data snapshot with automated consistency checks, and updates the visible “verified” date on every page whose figures changed. A page’s verified date is never moved forward without a re-check. Each dataset also has a hard staleness date; after it, the calculator stops pre-filling that figure.

Corrections

Anyone can report a wrong figure, an outdated rule, a broken source or a bug through the corrections form. Reports are stored with the page they concern and reviewed against the cited source. If we got something wrong, we fix the data or text, rebuild, and note significant corrections on the affected page. We do not publish the names or addresses of people who report errors.

Automation and AI disclosure

This site is built with software automation and AI assistance. Scripts download the EIA files, verify them and compute the data snapshot. Each state page’s narrative was written individually, with the help of an AI model, from that state’s EIA tables — the State Electricity Profile, the household energy survey and the natural gas series — and every fixed figure in it (a 2024 market share, a 2020 survey average) was checked against the extracted table. Figures that change monthly, such as prices, usage and bills, are inserted by code from the snapshot so they cannot drift from the calculator, and automated tests check the arithmetic for every state. People set the rules, choose the sources and review corrections. If a sentence is wrong or misleading for your state, please report it.

Independence

There is no advertising, affiliate revenue or sponsorship. No energy supplier, utility or agency reviews or pays for content.