Most Reliable Electric States

How states earn the top reliability spots

The states with the lowest average SAIDI tend to share three structural advantages: dense urban service territories that shorten restoration travel time, mild weather without frequent hurricane / ice / wildfire events that trigger Major Event Day classifications, and a utility mix dominated by investor-owned utilities (IOUs) with the capital base to fund grid hardening and undergrounding programs. State public utility commissions (PUCs) in these jurisdictions also tend to set explicit SAIDI / SAIFI performance targets in rate cases, which gives utilities a regulatory incentive to prioritize reliability spending over other discretionary investments. The lowest-SAIDI tier consistently includes Delaware, Washington DC, South Dakota, and Nebraska, jurisdictions where geography (flat terrain, low storm exposure) and ownership structure (high cooperative density paired with strong municipal utilities) align in favor of fast restoration.

A second pattern emerges from the data: states where one or two utilities serve the bulk of the population tend to perform better than states with hundreds of small reporting entities. Concentration brings scale advantages, better outage-management software, larger restoration crews, and access to mutual-aid agreements that pull line crews across state lines after major events. Conversely, states with extensive cooperative networks covering long, sparsely populated rural territories carry a structural disadvantage that no amount of capital investment can fully erase: when a single tree-on-line event blocks a 30-mile radial feeder, the average crew has to drive an hour to reach the fault before restoration can even begin.

What SAIDI does not capture

The state-level SAIDI averages on this page are weighted across all reporting utilities in the state, but utility-level performance can vary widely within a state. A municipal utility in an urban core may post a SAIDI under 60 minutes while a rural cooperative covering a sprawling service territory in the same state averages 200+ minutes. To see your specific utility, search by utility name or browse all 50 state pages. Smaller utilities (typically those serving under 100,000 customers) may also not report reliability metrics every year, those gaps reduce the sample size in the state weighted average and can make the figure noisier than it appears.

SAIDI also says nothing about when outages occur. A utility that averages 80 minutes per year but always loses power during a 95°F afternoon when nobody can run AC creates a very different customer experience than a utility averaging 90 minutes scattered evenly through the year. Time-of-day reliability metrics (sometimes published separately as CAIDI, Customer Average Interruption Duration Index, or by hour-of-day breakdown in PUC filings) are not currently exposed in the EIA Form 861 dataset. Researchers wanting that granularity should consult their state PUC's annual reliability docket, which often includes outage-cause breakdowns (vegetation contact, equipment failure, animal contact, weather, planned maintenance) that reveal the underlying drivers of the headline SAIDI number.

How we computed this state ranking

State averages are calculated across all utilities in the EIA Form 861 dataset that reported SAIDI for the most recent year. We weight each utility by customer count where available, otherwise by simple average. The figures shown on this page exclude Major Event Days unless otherwise noted, meaning storm-driven outages from hurricanes, ice storms, and wildfires are removed before computing the state average. This makes the state ranking a proxy for day-to-day infrastructure reliability rather than full storm resilience. For storm exposure, see the worst outage states ranking, which is dominated by hurricane-prone and ice-storm-prone jurisdictions. Full methodology is documented at our methodology page.

If you find a record that disagrees with what your utility publishes, the most common reason is reporting lag: utilities file Form 861 to the EIA in the spring following each calendar year, and EIA publishes the consolidated dataset in the fall. The figures here reflect the most recent EIA release, which typically lags the calendar year by 12–18 months. For mid-year updates or unusual events not yet in the federal dataset, your state PUC's reliability dashboard is usually the more current source. We refresh our database when each new EIA release becomes available.

For deeper analysis, single-utility trends across the full reporting window, utility-level outage cause breakdowns, or how a state's average compares to its long-run trajectory, use the utility detail pages linked above and the underlying state pages. Each utility page renders the four-year SAIDI / SAIFI trend so you can see whether reliability is improving or deteriorating, plus the breakdown of customer count and utility type to help you contextualize the numbers against peer utilities.