About RateWatchdog
RateWatchdog is an independent watchdog for residential electricity customers across five PJM states — Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia. We track every electricity rate case at the state utility commissions, explain in plain language what each one means for your bill, and give you a free, private tool to check whether your supplier is charging more than your utility's standard rate (in the four states with retail choice; in Virginia, which has none, we focus on rate-case tracking).
How we stay independent
- • We take zero supplier commissions. There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site.
- • We never enroll or switch anyone. We inform; you decide and act.
- • We are not a government agency, a utility, or an electricity supplier.
- • The bill audit runs entirely in your browser. Your numbers never reach our servers.
Where our data comes from
Rate and rate-case data is drawn from public filings at each state's utility commission — the Pennsylvania PUC, Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, Maryland Public Service Commission, and Virginia State Corporation Commission — plus official utility default-service disclosures (Price to Compare, Standard Service Offer, Basic Generation Service, Standard Offer Service).
Our electricity price and demand trends come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Inflation-adjusted ("real") figures use the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U. The data-center and grid-cost context is sourced to PJM (and its Independent Market Monitor) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory / U.S. DOE data-center report. Every figure we publish carries a source and a verified-on date, is reviewed by a person before it's published, and each page shows when it was last updated.
Which utilities we cover
We track the major investor-owned electric utilities in each state we serve: Pennsylvania (7), Ohio (6), New Jersey (4), Maryland (4), and Virginia (2). We generally don't cover municipal utilities or member-owned cooperatives (such as Maryland's SMECO and Choptank, or Virginia's Old Dominion Power), which set rates through their own boards rather than standard commission rate cases. Each state page lists exactly who we cover and who we don't.
What we don't do
We don't sell your data, run intrusive trackers, send you to suppliers for a referral fee, or use countdown timers and other pressure tactics. If a number on this site is ever wrong or out of date, that's a bug — tell us and we'll fix it.