How AP electricity bills are calculated

The four parts of an AP electricity bill

Whatever your consumer category, an LT bill in Andhra Pradesh is assembled from the same building blocks. Understanding which block a rupee belongs to is the single most useful thing you can learn about your bill.

The energy charge is almost always the largest part of a domestic bill, which is why slab structure matters so much. Fixed and customer charges are usually small in absolute terms for a household, but they are the reason a bill is never zero even in a month when you were away.

Step 1: Establish how many units you used

A unit of electricity is one kilowatt-hour (kWh) — a 1,000-watt appliance running for one hour. Your meter counts these cumulatively, so consumption for a billing period is simply the present reading minus the previous reading.

Both readings, along with the dates they were taken, are printed on your bill. Check the dates rather than assuming a clean calendar month: reading cycles drift by a few days, and a 34-day cycle will show more units than a 27-day cycle even if your habits did not change at all. This is one of the most common reasons a bill feels unexpectedly high.

If the meter could not be read, the DISCOM may raise an average or provisional bill based on your recent history. That bill is not wrong as such, but it will be adjusted later once an actual reading is taken, so a provisional month followed by a corrective month can look alarming in isolation.

Step 2: Identify your exact tariff category

APERC does not price all electricity the same way. It defines consumer categories, each with its own rates, and your bill prints the category that has been assigned to your service. Getting this wrong is the fastest way to produce a meaningless estimate, because the rate for the same 200 units can nearly double between categories.

A common trap is assuming that a shop attached to a house is billed as domestic, or that a small workshop qualifies as cottage industry. Categories are assigned by the DISCOM based on the purpose of use and the terms of your connection, not by what seems reasonable. If you believe your category is wrong, that is a question for your section office, not something to work around in a calculator.

Step 3: Apply the slabs telescopically

Domestic and commercial LT tariffs in Andhra Pradesh are telescopic. This means your units are sliced across the slab bands, and each slice is priced at that band’s rate. You are never charged the top rate on all your units — only on the units that fall above the previous boundary.

These are the domestic energy rates in the FY 2026-27 schedule used by this site:

Note that the customer charge is not telescopic. It is a single flat amount chosen by looking at your total consumption for the month, which is why it jumps in steps rather than accumulating.

A fully worked example: 240 units, 2 kW domestic

Take a household with a sanctioned load of 2 kW that consumed 240 units in the billing month. The energy charge is built band by band.

Now add the other two components. The fixed charge is 2 kW × ₹10, which is ₹20. Because total consumption of 240 units sits above the 225-unit threshold, the customer charge is ₹55.

The effective average works out to roughly ₹5.10 per unit — a long way below the ₹8.75 top band this household reached. That gap is the whole point of a telescopic structure, and it is why quoting "the rate" for electricity in Andhra Pradesh without saying how much you consume is meaningless.

What crossing a boundary actually costs

People often fear slab boundaries more than they should. Consider the same household at exactly 400 units versus 410 units. At 400 units the energy charge is ₹2,548.25. At 410 units it is ₹2,645.75. The extra ten units cost ₹97.50, because they are priced at ₹9.75 — the highest band — and nothing already billed gets repriced.

So crossing a boundary is not a cliff that re-rates your whole bill; it only makes your next units more expensive. That is still a real effect worth managing, but it is a gradient rather than a penalty.

Step 4: Add the charges the calculator cannot know

The remainder of your official bill comes from items specific to your account and your payment history. None of these can be predicted from units and load alone.

• Delayed payment surcharge (DPS) if a previous bill was paid after the due date. For domestic and small commercial services this is ₹25 per month; other LT categories are charged 5 paise per ₹100 per day, subject to a ₹150 minimum.
• Electricity duty and any other statutory levy applicable to your category.
• Meter rent, where your service uses a DISCOM-owned meter on a rental basis.
• Arrears carried forward from earlier unpaid bills, and adjustments reversing an earlier provisional bill.
• One-off items such as reconnection charges (₹100 for overhead LT services, ₹300 for underground cable), meter testing fees, or additional consumption deposit demands.
• Subsidy credits, where the state government has notified support for your category under its powers to subsidise tariffs.

Checking your own bill

1. Find the units billed and the reading dates on your bill, and confirm the period is roughly one month.
2. Find your category code and your sanctioned or connected load in kW.
3. Enter those into the calculator on this site and compare the energy, fixed and customer charge lines individually rather than only the total.
4. Account for the remaining difference using the duty, meter rent, DPS and arrear lines printed on your bill.
5. If a line still cannot be explained — particularly a large arrear or a category that does not match your usage — raise it with your DISCOM on 1912 or at your section office.

Doing this once teaches you more about your electricity costs than a year of paying totals. It also makes it obvious which behaviour changes are worth the effort: if your energy charge is ₹1,148 and your fixed charge is ₹20, there is no point negotiating your sanctioned load.

Frequently asked questions