Household Electricity Price by Country 2026

Methodology : prices gathered by Selectra in march 2025. Updated every 6 months. We take the price of the 300th kWh consumed monthly, in the capital city, for residential consumers, with a 5 kVA meter power. Price is converted to $ at study date rate.

Which country has the cheapest electricity ?

The countries with the cheapest electricity price per kWh are Turkmenistan (1.1 pence per kWh), Sudan (1.1 pence per kWh) and Bahrain (1.2 pence per kWh). However, it makes more sense to rank the countries where electricity is the cheapest and power outages are uncommon. Top 3 then becomes Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. These are countries where energy has long been almost free, and where the State subsidises electricity. Quite the opposite of Australia where taxes and prices are both high ! In Europe, the countries where electricity is the cheapest are Turkey, Ukraine and Georgia

How does Australia rank in terms of power prices ?

With a kWh price of 0.294$ in June 2026, Australia ranks 104th out of 156 surveyed countries. In Oceania, the most expensive country is Australia with a kWh price of 0.646$. Australia ranks 2th out of 3 in Oceania for the kWh price, with a Oceanian average reaching 0.281$ per kWh.

Electricity price by continent

We take the average of national prices across each continent. Country-continent association is that of the UN, meaning that Central America is grouped inside North America. Asia has the cheapest energy as most oil and gas producing countries (Gulf and Central Asian countries) have cheap energy. On the opposite, Europe which imports most of its fossil fuels and has high taxes, has the most expensive electricity, around 20 pence per kWh.

Electricity price and liberalization

We have ranked the surveyed countries in "liberalised" and "non liberalised". Partly liberalised countries like the US or Canada are considered liberalised.

The difference is shocking, with a twice higher price in liberalised countries. At first sight, this goes strongly against liberalisation ! However, there are a few caveats. First, liberalised countries are mostly rich (EU, USA, Canada, Japan, Singapore). Second, liberalised countries are not affected by frequent power outages, while such events plague a vast majority of non-liberalised countries.

Electricity price and power cuts

Across the 10 countries that have the cheapest electricity, 9 endure frequent power outages. Service quality appears to be clearly correlated to kWh price. In the table below, the electricity price is 50% higher in countries where service quality is good than in countries suffering from frequent blackouts.

To rank countries, we ran a survey and tagged those where blackouts affect all residential customers at least 4 times per year. Out of the 156 countries analyzed, 93 have network stability issues, that is 60%.

The difference between rich, liberalized, expensive, and poor, unstable countries is striking. The definition of the kWh price by the state, ignoring offer and demand balance is the most common feature of countries where blackouts occur frequently.