What changed on your FirstEnergy bill in 2026 (and why it matters)

If you live in a FirstEnergy territory — Ohio Edison, The Illuminating Company (CEI), or Toledo Edison — your electric bill has moved twice this year, once on March 1 and once on June 1, and a rider that hasn't been written about much quietly disappeared in between. None of that was on a billboard. Most people just see "the bill went up" and shrug. This post unpacks each piece.

TL;DR

• March 1, 2026 — Distribution charges jumped roughly 17% for residential customers on all three FirstEnergy Ohio utilities. PUCO approved the new rates in Case No. 24-0468-EL-AIR.
• June 1, 2026 — The Price to Compare (PTC) reset to the new SSO auction result. Ohio Edison is 10.83¢/kWh, CEI is 11.11¢/kWh, and Toledo Edison is 9.52¢/kWh. Two went up, one went down.
• Sometime earlier in 2026 — The Distribution Modernization Rider (DMR) came off the tariff entirely, ending an eight-year saga that started with PUCO approval and ended with the HB 6 bribery scandal.
• Net effect: A typical CEI customer using 1,000 kWh/month now pays roughly $15/month more than they did in 2025, with most of that coming from the distribution-side rate case rather than from generation.

1. The March 2026 distribution rate case

PUCO Case No. 24-0468-EL-AIR is the formal name for what most people would call "the FirstEnergy rate case." FirstEnergy filed it in May 2024 asking for about $190 million in additional annual revenue across the three Ohio utilities. PUCO approved a smaller increase — about $151 million when you net out subsequent settlement adjustments — effective March 1, 2026.

The rate case touches the distribution side of the bill, not generation. Distribution is the cost of the wires from a substation to your house — the local infrastructure FirstEnergy actually owns. That portion of your bill shows up under headings like "Distribution Related Component" and "Cost Recovery Charges."

For an Illuminating Company customer using around 800 kWh in a month, the new effective distribution rate works out to about 5.69¢/kWh, up from roughly 4.84¢/kWh under the prior tariff. The exact split between base distribution and the Delivery Capital Recovery (DCR) rider has shifted, but the bottom-line number is what matters: distribution went up.

This part of your bill is not avoidable by shopping. Switching to a competitive supplier only replaces the generation portion of your bill. You pay distribution to FirstEnergy regardless.

2. The June 2026 PTC reset

The Price to Compare resets every few months when FirstEnergy clears its Standard Service Offer (SSO) auction. The June 2026 prices took effect on June 1:

| Utility | Apr–May 2026 PTC | June 2026 PTC | Direction | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Ohio Edison | 9.70¢/kWh | 10.83¢/kWh | ↑ 12% | | Illuminating Company | 9.88¢/kWh | 11.11¢/kWh | ↑ 12% | | Toledo Edison | 9.99¢/kWh | 9.52¢/kWh | ↓ 5% |

Why did two go up and one go down? Because the SSO is the result of an auction — wholesale suppliers bid to provide power to default-service customers, and the winning bid sets the per-kWh price. Different utility territories run separate auctions with different bidders and different load characteristics. There's no rule that says all three FirstEnergy companies have to move in lockstep, and this June they didn't.

If you've been on the default rate (no third-party supplier), your generation charge moved automatically when this took effect. You didn't get a notice, and the bill arrived looking different than the month before.

3. The DMR is gone

The Distribution Modernization Rider has a long story. PUCO originally approved it in 2017 as part of FirstEnergy's Electric Security Plan — about $204 million per year that FirstEnergy could collect from Ohio customers ostensibly to fund grid modernization. The Ohio Supreme Court struck it down as unlawful in 2019. PUCO ordered the company to stop collecting it but allowed a separate version to keep running while audits proceeded.

Then HB 6 happened. The 2020 federal bribery indictments revealed that FirstEnergy had paid over $60 million to Ohio officials, including then-House Speaker Larry Householder, to secure passage of HB 6's nuclear plant subsidies — and DMR funds had been part of the company's financial machinery during that period. PUCO reopened the case (20-1052-EL-RDR), audited the collections, and eventually settled for $275 million in restitution to Ohio customers.

By the time the March 2026 rate case took effect, the DMR was no longer in the active tariff. The settlement credits are being applied to bills through 2026, but as a distinct one-time return rather than as a per-kWh line item.

Our internal data had been modeling the DMR as a roughly 2.35¢/kWh customer credit under the settlement terms. That turned out to be wrong: there is no such credit on the current tariff. The rate case rolled the resolution into the base distribution rates instead.

What this means for shopping

Before this year, the effective utility rate on FirstEnergy — the PTC plus the bypassable riders that you stop paying when you switch — was around 12.6¢/kWh. After the June reset, it's about 14.7¢/kWh for CEI customers (PTC 11.11¢ + bypassable riders ≈ 3.1¢/kWh from NMB, RER2, GCR, AER, and NDU). That's a 17% jump in what "doing nothing" actually costs you.

It also means the gap between the utility default and a competitive supplier offer is wider. A supplier rate of 9¢/kWh used to save you about 3.6¢/kWh; the same rate now saves about 5.7¢/kWh. The shopping math got more attractive even though raw electricity prices didn't move much.

A few things to check:

• Are you on NOPEC or another community aggregation? If yes, the bypassable riders are already gone from your bill — you'll see only the non-bypassable delivery side, around $77 at 800 kWh for CEI. Good place to be.
• Are you on the default SSO? Your effective rate is now ~14.7¢/kWh. Pull up the compare tool and see whether any supplier offers beat that. (Watch for teaser rates that roll over to a higher variable rate after a few months — the "true rate" view filters those out.)
• Are you on a fixed-rate supplier contract from 2024 or 2025? Check the expiration date. With the PTC bouncing this much, it's worth re-shopping rather than letting the contract auto-roll to a month-to-month variable rate.

Where this data lives

For the people who actually want to follow the receipts: the figures in this post come from the PUCO No. 13 Schedule of Rates for CEI (the authoritative Cleveland Electric Illuminating tariff), the Energy Choice Ohio apples-to-apples comparison (the source for the monthly PTC), and a residential bill at 814 kWh reconciled line-by-line against our internal rider data. Our app's bill math now matches an actual June 2026 CEI delivery bill within $0.23.

We're keeping a per-rider history file inside the app so that, when riders shift again, the previous values are preserved and you can compare. The underlying numbers — and any updates as PUCO files new quarterly rider filings — will keep landing in the compare, optimize, and history pages.