Electric Utility Reliability Rankings

This rankings hub surfaces three views of the EIA Form 861 reliability dataset: a state-level ranking from best to worst SAIDI, a utility-level ranking of the most reliable individual utilities, and the corresponding least-reliable utility list. Together they let you triangulate how reliable the grid is at three resolutions, the state your home sits in, the utility serving your specific address, and the national outliers at both ends of the spectrum. Cross-reference the state ranking against the utility ranking when you find a high-SAIDI state that contains a low-SAIDI municipal utility, or vice versa: the within-state spread is often as large as the between-state spread.

Every figure on this page is queried in real time from the EIA Form 861 dataset (most recent release). State averages are weighted across all utilities in the state that reported SAIDI for the most recent year; the utility-level rankings filter to providers serving 10,000+ customers to avoid distortion from very small reporting entities with single-event SAIDI spikes. For the underlying methodology, how we compute weighted averages, treat Major Event Days, and handle reporting gaps, see our methodology page. For background on what SAIDI and SAIFI actually measure (and what they do not tell you), see the SAIDI/SAIFI explainer.

If you are evaluating a specific service address, the most actionable view is the utility-level page for the provider serving that ZIP code, the state and national rankings are useful context, but the figure that affects your day-to-day experience and your home insurance options is the SAIDI of the utility you actually receive power from. Many homeowners are surprised to find that two ZIP codes 10 miles apart can be served by utilities with SAIDI averages an order of magnitude apart. Use our utility search on the homepage to find your utility, then check the trend chart on its detail page to see whether reliability is improving or getting worse over the four-year EIA reporting window.

The state ranking is best read together with the utility-level rankings on this page. Suppose you discover that your state ranks 38th of 51 by average SAIDI, that is meaningful context, but the next question is whether your specific utility is one of the better or worse performers within the state. A state with a poor average can still contain top-decile municipal utilities; a state with a great average can still hide one or two cooperative outliers in remote areas. The within-state spread is often as wide as the between-state spread, which is why a homeowner shopping for a future address should always drill from the state ranking down to the utility-specific page.

Researchers and journalists using these rankings should also consult the underlying state pages and the methodology documentation. Each state page lists every reporting utility in the state with its SAIDI, SAIFI, customer count, and utility type, so you can replicate any aggregate figure on this hub. If you are writing a story or paper that cites a specific number, link to the source utility-level data wherever possible. The more granular the citation, the more durable the claim is against later EIA revisions or restatements. We document the most recent EIA release date in our methodology and update the timestamp on every page when a new release is ingested.

One final note on interpretation: SAIDI and SAIFI are imperfect measures of customer experience. They tell you the average minutes and frequency of outages but not when those outages occur, how long the longest single outage was, or how restoration is distributed across customer classes. A utility with low average SAIDI may still have a small percentage of customers (often in remote or radial parts of the territory) who experience disproportionately long outages. Federal regulators have begun tracking equity-weighted reliability metrics that account for this distributional dimension, but the EIA Form 861 dataset on which this hub is built remains a customer-weighted average. Use the rankings here as the starting point, then consult your state PUC docket for outage-cause and outage-distribution detail when the headline number raises follow-up questions.