With the average price per kilowatt hour for commercial customers rising 6.7 percent and the frequency and severity of power outages increasing in 2025, business customer satisfaction with the nation’s electric utilities is strained.
According to the new J.D. Power 2025 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study, more businesses than ever are researching new rate plans to address their electric utility challenges.
“Business customers are actively shopping new rate plans, looking for ways to manage rising electricity costs and deal with growing reliability issues,” says Ramah Vaughn, director of utilities intelligence at J.D. Power in Troy.
“Utilities that recognize this trend and take proactive steps to engage with their business customers and help them lower costs, as well as respond more quickly to power outages and interruptions, are able to offset the negative effects of these issues on overall customer satisfaction.”
Following are some key findings of the 2025 study:
- More business customers shopping for new rate plans: More than half (53 percent) of commercial electric utility customers selected a new rate plan in 2025, up from 43 percent in 2024. The most common type selected is a standard utility rate plan (39 percent), followed by specialty rate plans (20 percent) and real-time rate plans (19 percent). Specialty rate plans, interruptible rate plans, green-based rate plans and time-based rate plans have seen the sharpest interest among business customers in the past four years.
- Outages become more serious, especially in the South: Nationwide, 74 percent of business customers experienced some type of power outage in 2025, up from 73 percent in 2024. The severity of those outages has increased significantly, with the average length of the longest outage for businesses in the Southern region reaching 22 hours. One-fourth (25 percent) of businesses experienced financial losses due to a power outage in 2025.
- Great communication offsets negative effects of outage: While power outages generally have a negative effect on business customer satisfaction with their electric utility, utilities that communicate proactively throughout an outage are able to counter that negative sentiment. The average safety and reliability satisfaction score among businesses that receive five or more points of contact during an outage event is 699 (on a 1,000-point scale), which is 210 points higher than those who receive no outage information from their electric utility.
Within each of the four U.S. geographic regions included in the study, utility providers are classified into one of two segments: large (serving 90,000 or more business customers) and midsize (serving 50,000-89,999 business customers).
The Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study was redesigned for 2025. As a result, overall satisfaction scores are not comparable with previous-year studies.
The study, now in its 27th year, measures satisfaction among business customers of 80 targeted U.S. electric utilities, each of which serves more than 50,000 business customers. In aggregate, these utilities provide electricity to more than 12 million customers.
Overall satisfaction is examined across eight dimensions (listed in order of importance): total monthly cost; trust; safety and reliability; ease of doing business; people; information provided; problem resolution; and digital channels.
The 2025 study is based on responses from 18,132 online interviews of business customers in decision-making roles related to their utility company. The study was fielded from February through October 2025.
For more information about the U.S. Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study, visit JDpower.com.
