Short answer: you don't have to guess. Ask the seller or listing agent for the last 12 months of utility bills. It's a completely normal, completely reasonable request — sellers pull utility usage history from their account portals in about five minutes — and some listings already hand it to you upfront because they know it's a selling point. A national "average electric bill" number is a fine fallback if that data doesn't exist, but it tells you almost nothing about the specific 1,700-square-foot money pit or dream house you're about to sign for.

This is one of the most underused pieces of due diligence in home shopping. Buyers will spend hours agonizing over granite versus quartz and then commit to a 30-year mortgage without knowing whether the house costs $180 or $420 a month to keep habitable. That gap is bigger than a lot of line items people do stress about, and unlike PITI (principal, interest, taxes, insurance), it's almost never disclosed to you unless you ask.

Ask for the actual bills — this is a normal thing to request

Twelve months matters, not one or two — utility costs swing hard by season, and a July bill tells you nothing about February heating costs (or vice versa, depending on climate). Ask your agent to request:

  • The last 12 months of electric bills (or a usage summary — most utilities let account holders download this as a PDF in one click)
  • The last 12 months of gas bills, if the home uses gas
  • Water/sewer bills or the municipal account history
  • Trash/recycling costs, if not bundled into property taxes or HOA dues

Some sellers proactively include this in the listing packet, especially in markets where energy costs are a known pain point (older homes, extreme climates, all-electric houses in cold states). If it's not offered, ask anyway — a seller who balks at a reasonable utility history request while asking you to spend half a million dollars on their house is itself useful information.

If the sellers genuinely don't have it (renters just moved out, they never looked), that's when you fall back to national averages — more on that below.

Why two "identical" houses can have wildly different bills

Two 2,000-square-foot colonials on the same block can have utility bills that differ by hundreds of dollars a month. The drivers:

  • Insulation quality and age. A home insulated to 1985 code standards loses heat and cooled air far faster than one updated in the last decade. This alone can be a $50–$150/month swing.
  • Windows. Single-pane or original-to-the-house windows versus newer double- or triple-pane, low-E windows meaningfully change heating and cooling load.
  • HVAC system age and efficiency. A 20-year-old furnace or AC unit run at a fraction of the efficiency of a modern system, and older units also break down more, which is its own cost separate from the monthly bill.
  • Square footage and ceiling height. More volume to heat and cool costs more, obviously — but layout matters too (open floor plans and high ceilings cost more to condition than the same square footage chopped into smaller rooms).
  • Local climate and utility rates. A house in Phoenix and a house in Minneapolis are fighting opposite battles, and utility rates themselves vary enormously by state and even by utility provider within a state.
  • Gas vs. all-electric. All-electric homes (electric resistance heat especially) tend to run more expensive to heat than gas homes in colder climates, though heat pumps have narrowed that gap significantly in newer or upgraded systems.

This is also exactly why a HVAC inspection and a general sense of the home's insulation/window age (ask when they were last replaced) are worth asking about during your walkthrough, not just at inspection — they're a direct preview of your future utility bills.

National averages, if seller data isn't available

If you truly can't get home-specific numbers, here's a baseline for what a typical household is paying nationally right now, by utility type. Treat these as a sanity check, not a substitute for real data on the actual house.

  • Electricity: around $163/month nationally, as of August 2026, per ElectricChoice — up roughly 5.2% year-over-year. This varies enormously by state and season (a house with central AC in a hot climate can blow well past this in summer).
  • Natural gas: around $72/month nationally, as of August 2026, per ElectricChoice, for homes with gas service — colder climates and older furnaces skew higher, especially in winter.
  • Water: around $49/month nationally, typically landing in a $40–$60/month range, as of an October 2025 update from HomeGuide.
  • Sewer: typically $60–$90/month, often billed alongside or combined with water — per HomeGuide [figures last confirmed by the source in March 2024 — treat as directionally useful but confirm current local rates].
  • Trash/recycling: roughly $20–$60/month nationally as of March 2026, per The Cost Breakdown, though this is sometimes bundled into property taxes or HOA fees depending on the municipality — worth checking which is true for a given house before double-counting it.

Add those up and you're commonly looking at somewhere in the $300–$500+/month range for a typical single-family home nationally — before you've adjusted for any of the home-specific factors above. That's a real number that changes your actual monthly cost of ownership, and it's not in your Loan Estimate.

The bottom line

PITI is the number your lender quotes you. It is not the number you'll actually pay every month to live in the house. Utility costs are one of the few remaining pieces of due diligence that's genuinely easy to get right — a polite ask to the listing agent, a PDF download from a utility portal — and most buyers skip it entirely. Don't be most buyers.

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