What Energy Has Actually Cost

Every year since 1998

Almost every argument about energy prices turns on a comparison with the past, and almost none of them cite one. The official figures exist: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has published the average annual domestic bill every year since 2002 for electricity and 1998 for gas.

They are below, in both the money of the day and today’s money, with the two things that make them easy to misread marked rather than smoothed over.

Why two columns, and which one to read

An electricity bill of £284 in 2002 and one of £982 in 2025 are not three and a half times apart in any sense a household would recognise, because everything else cost less in 2002 too. Restated at today’s prices, that 2002 bill is about £516 — so electricity has risen by roughly ninety per cent in real terms, not by two hundred and fifty.

Gas separates the two columns even more sharply. In cash it has gone from £296 to £752, which looks like a similar story. In today’s money it has gone from £540 to £752 — a rise of under forty per cent across twenty-four years — 2001 to 2025 — and less than gas cost in real terms in every single year from 2008 to 2016.

Read the cash column to remember what the bill said. Read the today’s-money column for anything else — whether prices really rose, by how much, and when. DESNZ publishes the two side by side in the same table, which is exactly how the two get mixed up.

What these numbers are not

They are not a price cap. The cap arrived in 2019 and applies to standard variable tariffs; these figures run for decades before it and cover every tariff.

They are not what you were quoted. They are averages across payment methods, so a prepayment household paid more than the line shows and a household on a keen fixed deal usually paid less. If you want that split, the regional series behind the price cap page breaks it out by payment method for your own area, back to 2010.

And they are not a fixed unit of electricity. The bill is the unit price multiplied by what an average household used, and average consumption has fallen a long way — electricity from about 4,400 kWh a year in the late 2000s to roughly 3,000 kWh now. Some of the flatness in the middle of the table is homes using less, not energy getting cheaper.

The 2022 step, in context

The largest single-year move in either series is 2022, and it survives being adjusted for inflation. In today’s money the average gas bill rose seventy-two per cent in that one year, from £626 to £1,076. Electricity rose twenty-nine per cent. Nothing else in twenty-eight years of these tables comes close to the gas figure.

Where the two fuels have ended up is not the same story, and this is the part that gets lost. In real terms electricity is now at its highest in the whole series apart from the crisis years themselves — £982, against a pre-2022 record of £883. Gas is not: at £752 it is below every year from 2008 to 2016, when it sat between £786 and £1,069.

Nor is the combined bill unprecedented — with one caveat that belongs on the figure and not in a footnote. Adding the two columns adds a United Kingdom electricity bill to a Great Britain gas one, because that is how DESNZ publishes them and it publishes no combined series; the total is therefore ours rather than official, and it is not a figure for either country. On that basis, in today’s money, 2022 and 2023 were the two most expensive years at about £2,220 and £2,190 — but 2013 comes third at roughly £1,910, higher than the £1,730 of 2025. The crisis was real and so is the recovery; what the long series shows is that expensive energy is not new, and that the recent rise is mostly an electricity story.

For where the money in a current bill actually goes, and how much of it is wholesale energy rather than networks, policy and margin, see the price cap breakdown.

How much of a household budget that is

A bill is only half the question. The other half is what else the money had to cover, and DESNZ publishes that too — total household spending on energy against total household spending on everything, every year back to 1970. It is the longest series on this page by some margin, and it disagrees with the one above.

Bills are close to their record; the share of a household budget they take is not. Energy took 5.4% of household spending at its peak in 1982 and 1.9% at its lowest in 2003. The crisis pushed it back up to about 3.2% — the highest since 1991, and still well under the 1982 figure. It has since fallen to 2.5%.

That is not an argument that the crisis was mild. The share rose by nearly a quarter in a single year, and it lands hardest on households whose energy use cannot fall much — which is why energy debt and arrears kept climbing after prices had begun to fall, and why the help available is worth checking. What it does contradict is the claim that energy has never taken so much of what a household spends. It plainly has: the 1970s were about half again as demanding as the crisis peak, and 1982 was two-thirds again.

One caution on the weekly figures beneath the table. They are per consuming household — the electricity figure is averaged over households that use electricity and the gas figure over households that use gas — so the two do not add up to the total beside them, and were never meant to.