As electric and gas bills rise across the country, a poll released today finds that an overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. are concerned about growing energy costs — and experiencing greater financial stress because of them.
In a nationwide survey of about 2,000 adults, conducted by the consumer education nonprofit PowerLines and the polling company Ipsos in late March, 73% of respondents reported feeling concerned about rising utility bills. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed billpayers said they have seen their gas and electric bills rise over the last year, and 63% reported feeling more stressed as a result of energy costs. The results held consistent across the political spectrum, with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike expressing similar levels of concern.
The findings arrive as the Trump administration’s continued attacks on clean energy — and its support for coal and other fossil fuels — threaten to raise utility bills even higher, according to energy experts.
“Bottom line is, American energy consumers are hurting and they’re stressed out,” Charles Hua, executive director of PowerLines, said of the survey’s findings.
Yet according to the poll, most Americans aren’t familiar with the state entities in charge of regulating energy utilities and setting those prices: public utility commissions. That’s a problem, said Hua, because a lack of public participation prevents consumer interests from being fully considered when state regulators receive and approve rate-hike requests from utilities.
In the survey, 60% of respondents said they aren’t familiar with the state or local authority that oversees gas and electric bills. Around 90% of people couldn’t name their public utility commission as the correct regulatory body.
Meanwhile, these relatively unknown regulators have approved ballooning utility cost increases in recent years. In 2022, state utility regulators collectively approved $4.4 billion in bill increases; in 2023, they approved $9.7 billion. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, gas and electric utilities requested or received rate hikes totalling about $20 billion. Residential electricity costs have grown by nearly 30% since 2021, while gas prices have risen by 40% since 2019, far outpacing inflation, according to a separate report released today by PowerLines.
Utilities have spent increasing amounts of money to replace aging infrastructure and repair or harden the grid after storms, wildfires, and other disasters made more likely by climate change. State rules guarantee investor-owned utilities a rate of return on those investments, creating a financial incentive to overspend on grid infrastructure that some researchers have estimated costs consumers billions of dollars each year. Volatility in global gas markets has also contributed to rising gas bills.
