Duke publishes an official guide to reading your bill, complete with a sample customer named Sally Sample and tidy numbered dots. I sat down with it, and credit where due, it taught me what every line on my bill is called. What's actually inside each line took more digging, so I wrote up what I found, using Duke's own sample numbers. Consider this the annotated edition.
This is the billing-details page from Duke's own sample residential bill for our part of the state, and I recreated it to the penny: Sally used 1,410 kilowatt-hours in a cold month and owes $208.59, across six lines. As my notes go by, the line they belong to lights up on the bill, and the dots jump straight to them.
Each note pairs what Duke's guide says a line is for with the part I had to go find. Together they make the real user manual.
I think of this line as the subscription fee: fourteen dollars a month before anyone in the house flips a switch. The vocabulary turned out to matter more than the amount, because this line plus the Energy Charge below are what the filings call the base rate, and the base rate is the part a rate case raises. When the settlement coverage mentions another $6.53 a month, this little pair is where it lands.
For most of my adult life I'd have told you this line was fuel, some coal and gas marked up per kilowatt-hour, and I'd have been wrong on both counts. The fuel rides down on line 4, at cost. What this line prices is the system: the payment plan on the plants, poles, wires, and upgrades Duke has built (the rate base from the main guide's Part 2), the people who run it all, and the guaranteed return on the shareholder money behind it, 10.1 percent on equity today and 9.8 under the pending settlement.
That return is the profit engine of the whole company, and this is the only place it touches my bill or yours: folded into a per-kilowatt-hour price, wearing the name Energy Charge, with no line of its own. More on that in annotation 7.
This one is the mortgage on hurricanes past. Big storm cleanups get financed, and this line pays the installments, at a rate spelled out to eight decimal places, which I genuinely admire. It's small money on Sally's bill, and it's still my favorite little demonstration of how the whole system thinks: take a big cost, spread it across years of bills, and no single month is ever loud enough to argue about.
The junk drawer, and the thing rattling around loudest in it is fuel. Fuel passes through at cost: Duke earns nothing on it and loses nothing when it spikes, so the swings are ours to carry. This is the line that jumped $19.10 a month in the 2023 gas spike and gave $8.96 back in 2025, and it's the one Governor Stein was talking about when Duke announced it wants roughly $800 million more in fuel costs.
A detail from the fine print that I keep thinking about: riders only got their own line in January 2024. Before that they were folded into the energy line, where nobody could see them. Duke calls the change a transparency measure, and it is one... it's also a map of where things used to hide.
I keep this one loaded for cookout arguments. When somebody tells me renewables are why the power bill is so high, I get to point at the actual renewables line: a dollar twenty-five, on a $208.59 bill. The expensive machinery lives up in lines 2 and 4.
A flat 7 percent on the electric charges, set in state law. It goes to Raleigh, and it scales with everything above it, so every increase the machine produces hands the state a little raise too. The General Assembly that writes the utility rulebook collects a slice of every bill the rulebook produces.
Sources: Duke's sample-bill guide (DEC-NC residential), the source of every figure and every "Duke's guide says" paraphrase above · Duke's Reading Your Bill page and FAQ (base rate definition, rider contents, the January 2024 itemization change) · the Sept 2023 fuel adjustment (+$19.10/mo) · the Jan 2025 fuel decrease (−$8.96/mo) · Gov. Stein on the announced $800M fuel-cost request · NCDOR on the 7% rate for electricity
Duke's guide walks through every named charge on the statement, and it does it honestly. I read it start to finish, and one number never comes up: what Duke makes. There's no profit line on the bill, because the profit doesn't travel as a line. It travels as a rate of return folded into the base-rate math inside line 2, set every couple of years in a rate case that reaches most of us as a percentage on the news.
That rate is 10.1 percent on equity right now, and the pending settlement would make it 9.8. Those numbers stopped feeling abstract for me this week, when the state's Attorney General made them concrete: his office calculates that setting the return at 7.4 percent instead of 9.8 would leave about 1.37 billion dollars with customers over two years, and its analysis concluded Duke's building plan "overshot the mark" of what demand actually requires. That's the size of what rides, unlabeled, inside the Energy Charge.
None of this is a trick by the billing department, to be clear. It's just how regulated ratemaking presents itself, and it comes with a convenient side effect: the argument that actually determines my bill for years at a time happens in a docket, over a percentage that never appears on the paper I get mad at. The full story of that percentage, and the machine attached to it, is the main guide.
Sources: the July 17, 2026 comprehensive settlement (9.8% ROE) · WUNC on the ROE terms (10.1% today, 10.95% requested) · AG Jackson's July 21 statement (7.4% position, $1.37B over two years) · WCCB's July 22 interview ("overshot the mark")
If the Utilities Commission approves the settlement this fall (a decision is expected by November), the scheduled increases arrive as roughly $6.53 a month in 2027 and $4.66 in 2028 on a typical bill, and I know where I'll be watching for them: lines 1 and 2, the base rate. Line 4 will keep swinging with gas prices on its own schedule, in whichever direction gas prices feel like. And the percentage in annotation 7 will keep quietly deciding more than any number that's actually printed.
The question I couldn't shake once I could read the thing is why it needs to keep going up, and that one has a longer answer: Why is my power bill so damn high? covers the machine, the law that rewrote its rulebook, and what other states do instead.
i read my own bill against this page. weirdly satisfying