At Least One in Three 1 in 3 Households Struggle to Pay Energy Bills

Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

A pandemic success story

The survey asks respondents whether, in the prior 12 months, they received a disconnection notice threatening to terminate their home’s electricity, gas or other fuel service because they hadn’t paid the bills. It also asks whether any of those services were in fact disconnected; whether they bought less food or skipped taking medication to be able to afford their energy bills; or whether they left their home at an unhealthy temperature because running or repairing the heating or cooling equipment would be too expensive.

The result is a portrait of a significant swath of the population that has a hard time affording housing and energy, and who adopt various coping strategies to get through.

A closer look at the data over time reveals that more Americans live with energy insecurity now than in years past. In 2024, 43.6 million American households – 32.9% of all homes – reported experiencing some form of energy insecurity. In 2015, that figure was 31.3%, and in 2020 it was 27.2%.

The lower rate in 2020 confirms that pandemic-era government policies, including cash relief payments and bans on utility shutoffs, were effective, though they were too short-lived to last through the 2024 survey data.

Recent surge hits new households

Middle-income households, those earning between $60,000 and $200,000 a year, were hit hardest by post-pandemic inflation of housing costs, food prices and interest rates on loans and mortgages. The new survey data shows that energy costs added to the squeeze.

In 2020, 20.1% of households earning between $60,000 and $100,000 reported experiencing problems affording their energy. In 2024, 32.1% of those households did – a 12 percentage point increase, more than double the overall national increase of 5.7 percentage points.

There were also racial differences. Historically, Black, Hispanic and American Indian households have been disproportionately likely to have trouble affording energy bills. And between 2020 and 2024, those households’ risk grew.

But white households’ risk climbed even more steeply: In 2020, 20.1% of white households reported trouble with energy costs. By 2024, 26.4% of them did.

Working-age adults and seniors are increasingly insecure

In 2024, higher proportions of householders under 60, and of householders with children, reported struggling to meet their home energy needs than in 2020. The similarities in these increases verify that younger, working-age households are more strained.

Yet working-age adults without children, particularly moderate-income renters, don’t have as much potential support as seniors when they fall behind on utility bills. That’s because energy assistance programs direct support toward those who have historically been the most vulnerable.

Seniors have historically been among the most protected, partly by the designs of government and corporate programs to assist with energy costs and partly because wealth usually peaks in later life. Even so, the share of older Americans experiencing energy insecurity climbed to 1 in 4 in 2024 from roughly 1 in 5 in 2020 – a sign that long-standing safeguards for older Americans are no longer making as much of a difference as they used to.

Housing in good repair is no longer enough protection

An efficient home has long been considered a solution to high energy bills. But the data shows that’s not enough anymore. People who live in well-insulated homes and those with double-pane windows saw their likelihood of energy insecurity rise by a similar amount as those who live in poorly insulated homes.

People in uninsulated homes still have the highest risk of being unable to afford their energy costs, though their risk grew more slowly than those in homes with better insulation.

And people with single-pane windows, already in a tenuous position, saw their risk of being unable to afford their energy costs rise by 7 percentage points.

Where need is greatest, help is least available

Geographically, the steepest increases in energy insecurity were found in warm-weather regions. The Southwest experienced the largest increase of any climate category – 10 percentage points – followed by the Southeast and Gulf Coast, which rose from 30.1% to 35.6%.

Though rising temperatures are increasing the need for cooling in warm-weather climates, most attention and government assistance for energy costs continue to be concentrated on the need for home heating in cold-weather states.

But even in the Northeast, where federal assistance with energy costs helps large proportions of the population, higher percentages of households had trouble affording energy costs.

A problem that has outgrown its framing

The severity of energy insecurity remains highest among the most disadvantaged Americans, which includes low-income people, renters and Black, Hispanic and American Indian households.

But the trend lines show that energy insecurity is now spreading into middle-income, white, working-age families in efficient homes in warm-weather climates – families that previously had relatively little trouble meeting their household energy needs.

The 2024 RECS data indicates that the safety net designed to address energy affordability is insufficient and does not match the regions or populations where energy insecurity is actually growing.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides money to help families pay their utility bills, was created in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s. It was built to prioritize home heating assistance – not cooling – and help for people in immediate danger of having life-preserving utilities shut off. Little has changed in its focus or funding level since its inception.

Meanwhile, the economics of household energy costs have shifted dramatically and are quickly evolving.

New wars are sustaining old energy regimes, driving price volatility through the same fossil-fuel supply chains the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program was designed to buffer against half a century ago. On the domestic front, meanwhile, data centers are increasing residential electricity rates. Clean energy developments that might have shielded households from price shocks have been politicized and curtailed, harming both affordability and public health.

The 2024 data – high-quality and reliable as it is – is already behind in an escalating energy affordability crisis. Many more Americans are having trouble keeping the lights, heating and cooling on in recent years, and it’s a trend that may already be worse than what the most recent data shows.