Top 10 US Electric Utilities by Customer Count
PlainUtility ranks all reporting electric utilities by total customer count from EIA Form 861 filings. Live SSR query against the utilities table.
Research period:
Research question
Among US electric utilities reporting to the EIA, which serve the largest customer bases, and how do their reliability metrics compare against the national distribution?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete data-update process, source vintage, and field definitions.
Top 10 US Electric Utilities by Customer Count
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | Utility | State | Type | Customers | Parent company |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida Power & Light Co | FL | IOU | 5,811,951 | |
| 2 | Southern California Edison Co | CA | IOU | 3,651,383 | |
| 3 | Commonwealth Edison Co | IL | IOU | 3,242,491 | |
| 4 | Consolidated Edison Co-NY Inc | NY | IOU | 3,142,067 | |
| 5 | Georgia Power Co | GA | IOU | 2,735,271 | |
| 6 | Virginia Electric & Power Co | NC | IOU | 2,625,896 | |
| 7 | DTE Electric Company | MI | IOU | 2,266,484 | |
| 8 | Public Service Elec & Gas Co | NJ | IOU | 2,223,326 | |
| 9 | Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | NC | IOU | 2,186,570 | |
| 10 | Pacific Gas & Electric Co. | CA | IOU | 2,121,553 |
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Florida Power & Light Co, with a value of 5,811,951 on the Customers column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (5,811,951) and the 10th-ranked record (2,121,553) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Energy Information Administration, specifically the EIA Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report. PlainUtility ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Customer counts in the utilities table reflect EIA Form 861 self-reports as of the most recent filing year ingested. Utilities organize under various structures, investor-owned utilities (IOUs), cooperatives, municipal utilities, and federal power administrations, each with different reporting completeness and revenue-recognition conventions. The parent_company column reflects the holding-company relationship at the time of filing; mergers, divestitures, and re-organizations between filing years can create apparent discontinuities. Customer counts include residential, commercial, and industrial in some operator filings and only residential in others, depending on how the utility files its data class breakdown, comparisons across utilities require checking the source filing for the customer-class scope. Revenue figures are nominal dollars and not adjusted for inflation or regional cost differences. Utilities serving wholesale-only or generation-only roles may appear with zero customer counts.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 by total revenue, contrast with customer-count ranking
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/
- EIA, Sales to Ultimate Customers Database - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.php