Utility companies shut off Americans’ power 13.4 million times and gas 1.7 million times in 2024, a federal report said last week — a newly collected number that consumer advocates say signals a surprisingly high rate of extreme financial distress among U.S. households.
About half of U.S. states do not require utilities to publicly tally how often they cut off customers’ electricity or gas, which usually comes as a last step after customers fail to pay their bills. Until Congress passed a 2023 measure to collect the data, there was no way of knowing how often power companies were disconnecting customers, leaving households without heat, light or refrigeration. Last week’s publication was the first under the new federal rule.
“The numbers are far worse than we had estimated, given the rate of shutoffs we had known from our previous data,” said Jean Su, a researcher at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group that lobbied Congress to ask companies for the information. Su had projected a total of 9 million electricity shutoffs in 2024, based on the states with publicly available information — far below the real 13 million total.
The new data comes just after the Trump administration proposed, for a sixth time, eliminating the $4 billion LIHEAP program that helps low-income Americans pay for electricity and natural gas, arguing that consumer protections already exist to prevent people from being cut off from the fuel they need to heat and cool their homes. Congress has previously refused to cut the popular program.
The report found that disconnections were most frequent in the South. Oklahoma had the highest rate, at three shutoffs for every 10 customers (though some customers may have been disconnected more than once, meaning fewer than 30 percent of households lost power). Texas, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas followed in highest burden of shutoffs, according to a Washington Post analysis of the data.
Most of those states do not require companies to disclose disconnections, which meant the high numbers came as a surprise to some experts.
“The rate of shutoffs in those states are particularly egregious, much worse than the rest of the country,” Su said.
Experts said the region suffers from a combination of risk factors: high poverty rates and low incomes; significant recent hikes in energy prices; long, hot summers that call for heavy use of air conditioning; and few consumer protections that block companies from shutting off residents’ power.
Energy prices have soared further since the time period captured in this data. Electricity costs across the country rose more than 11 percent over the course of 2025, far above the rate of inflation. Some states have seen much sharper increases.
An earlier Washington Post analysis of utility companies in 11 states found that disconnections were on the rise in at least eight of them from 2024 to 2025.
“If we don’t like these numbers from 2024, I think the grim prognosis is that right now, the situation is worse,” said John Howat, an energy analyst at the National Consumer Law Center.
He said his organization had been trying to get national data like this “for decades.”
“We know the ramifications of loss of service. They’re severe. People maintain unhealthy indoor temperatures and they forgo other necessities,” he said.
Some consumer advocates responded to the disconnection data by calling for checks on utility rate hikes, utility companies’ profits or companies’ legal right to shut off power.
“The whole system needs a careful consideration of taking consumer affordability into account,” said Jonathan Kim, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute.
He pointed to legislation passed this year in Maryland that would limit the amount of CEOs’ pay that can be passed on to ratepayers. Kim published research last week showing that the top 10 utility company CEOs were each paid more than $16 million in 2025.
Brian Reil, a spokesman for the trade group for all for-profit electricity companies Edison Electric Institute, said in an email that states shouldn’t rush to consumer protection rules that don’t account for the wide range of circumstances under which a company might cut power. “There are multiple reasons a customer may face a service interruption, which is why electric companies offer programs to address individual circumstances and work closely with our customers to help them manage monthly bills,” he said.
Nadia Hasan, 36, has had her power disconnected at least three times in Detroit, for at least a week each time, usually until a relative could pay the bill. Hasan was born with cerebral palsy and has been mostly confined to her bed for a decade, since an accident in which she fell off a lift in her wheelchair, breaking her spine. Her grandfather was her caregiver for most of her life, until his death last year.
While she receives disability benefits and works as a counselor on a crisis text line, and her partner works in a salon, the couple struggled to pay their bills after her grandfather’s death.
When the power is shut off, she said: “It limits everything. I go to school online. I work my job online. I’m not able to do any of those things if the electricity is off. … You can’t charge your devices. Phones die quickly. If you don’t have electricity, your food’s going to go bad.”
Hasan and her partner are now living in temporary state-supported housing, with a $1,035 unpaid electric bill hanging over them. Many of the housing listings that she sees online mention that new tenants must not have any unpaid electric bills.
The federal report said that utilities sent “final notices” to electric customers with unpaid bills almost 95 million times in 2024, and 27 million times to residential natural gas customers. While in most cases the customers managed to pay their bills to avoid disconnection, the number of final notices underscores the level of insecurity among the 143 million U.S. households that got electricity in 2024 and the 74 million that got natural gas.
“The numbers are big and they are bigger than even we expected them to be,” Kim said.
The report found that disconnections were most common in October, probably because some states ban utilities from shutting off customers’ electricity during the hottest months of the summer, when customers need power to run air conditioners. In states that do not impose summertime disconnection bans, disconnections were often highest during the summer months.
Many states ban gas disconnections during the winter, so people can heat their homes.
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