The first big electric bill of the summer has a way of sending North Texans plan shopping. You type your ZIP code into a comparison site, a plan near the top advertises a rate that looks almost too good, and your finger hovers over the sign-up button. Before you click, there is one document worth five minutes of your evening: the Electricity Facts Label.
Most of Dallas-Fort Worth sits in the deregulated part of the Texas grid, which means you pick the company that sells you electricity even though the same wires deliver it. Every plan those retailers offer comes with a standardized fact sheet, and learning to read it is the single best defense against a plan that looks cheap on the screen and lands expensive in your mailbox. Here is what to look for, line by line.
What the Electricity Facts Label is
The Electricity Facts Label, or EFL, is a disclosure the Public Utility Commission of Texas requires for retail electric plans, and you will find one attached to every offer listed on Power to Choose, the PUCT’s own free comparison site. Think of it as the nutrition label for an electricity plan: the same information, in the same order, for every product, so you can compare a plan from a big-name retailer against one from a company you have never heard of.
The label spells out the pricing, the contract term, the fees, and how much of the plan’s power comes from renewable sources. If a retailer’s website makes a plan sound simple but the EFL is full of conditions, believe the EFL. You can see the standard format in a sample label posted by the PUCT.
The three numbers that matter most
At the top of every EFL you will see the average price per kilowatt-hour at three monthly usage levels: 500 kWh, 1,000 kWh and 2,000 kWh. Those are the same three columns you see when plans are listed side by side on Power to Choose. The averages fold in the energy charge, any monthly base fee, and the delivery charges from the utility that owns the wires, which for most of DFW is Oncor.
Here is the part that trips people up: those three numbers are often not the same, and the gap can be huge. A plan might average 10 cents at 2,000 kWh and 16 cents at 500 kWh. That is not a typo. It is the plan’s fixed fees and credits doing their work at different usage levels.
Why the cheapest-looking plan can cost more
Many plans carry a bill credit that only kicks in if you use at least a set amount of electricity in a month, or a minimum-usage fee if you come in under it. Those features are designed to make the 1,000 kWh average look terrific, because 1,000 kWh is the default sort on most comparison tools. If your usage lands just below the credit threshold in a mild month, the credit vanishes and your average price jumps.
That is why the smartest first step happens before you shop: pull your last twelve months of bills and find your actual usage, month by month. A small apartment that runs 600 kWh most of the year should be judging plans by the 500 kWh column. A four-bedroom house in Frisco running two air conditioners in August should look hard at the 2,000 kWh number. Match the column to your real life, not to the default.
Check the contract terms before you sign
Below the pricing table, the EFL answers four questions that decide how much freedom you keep:
Is the rate fixed or variable? A fixed-rate plan locks its pricing formula for the whole term. A variable or indexed plan can move month to month, which is a risk worth understanding before a hot summer.
How long is the term? Twelve, 24 and 36-month terms are common, and the label states yours plainly.
What does it cost to leave early? The EFL must disclose the early-termination fee. One useful Texas rule of thumb: if you are moving to a new address, retailers generally cannot hold you to that fee, but confirm the moving exception in the plan’s terms of service before you count on it.
How green is it? The label lists the percentage of the plan’s power that comes from renewable sources, so a “green” marketing name has to back itself up in print.
How to shop it in one evening
Start at powertochoose.org, enter your ZIP code, and filter for your contract length and rate type. Open the EFL for the two or three finalists and read the fine print under the pricing chart, where the base charges, usage credits and delivery fees are itemized. Then check the companion Terms of Service and Your Rights as a Customer documents, which every plan must also post.
If something goes wrong after you switch, you are not on your own. The Public Utility Commission of Texas takes consumer complaints against retail electric providers and publishes shopping guidance for households in the deregulated market.
One last bit of neighborly advice: set a calendar reminder for a month before your contract ends. Retailers are required to notify you as expiration approaches, but plans that roll over without a decision from you often land on month-to-month pricing that is worse than anything you would have picked on purpose. Fifteen minutes with the fact label, once a year, is one of the better hourly rates in North Texas.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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