The Government Finally Counted the Shutoffs. There Were 13.4 Million.

Until this year, nobody in Washington could say how many times a utility cut off a household's power for not paying the bill.▸ States collect the data unevenly, if at all, and no federal agency compiled it into a single number. That changed with Form EIA-112, a new survey the Energy Information Administration ran through 2025 and published in April 2026. The first count, for calendar year 2024: 13.4 million residential electricity disconnections.

A disconnection doesn't happen without warning first.▸ Utilities sent 94.9 million final notices to residential electricity customers in 2024 — equivalent to roughly two warnings for every three residential electricity accounts in the country, though the total isn't spread evenly, since a single account can be warned more than once a year. Of those warnings, 13.4 million actually ended in the power going off, and 11.4 million accounts were reconnected again within the same calendar year, per the same EIA tabulation.

These are event counts, not headcounts — the same household can appear in more than one column, and a reconnection recorded in March doesn't necessarily undo a disconnection from February.▸ Even so, the scale is now on the record for the first time: against an average of 143 million residential electricity accounts nationwide, more than 13 million were cut off in a single year. Natural gas customers faced the same pattern at smaller scale — 27.1 million final notices and 1.7 million disconnections in 2024, per the same report.

Behind the count is a debt that's growing.▸ About one in six U.S. households is behind on its utility bills, collectively owing roughly $25 billion to electric and gas utilities, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), the group representing the state officials who run federal home-energy aid programs. NEADA estimates up to four million households faced a disconnection at some point in 2025 — nearly 500,000 more than the year before. The safety net meant to catch them has not kept pace: the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program's total federal budget fell from $6.09 billion in FY2023 to roughly $4.13 billion in FY2026, per HHS's Administration for Children and Families — and NEADA says only about 17% of eligible households currently receive it.

The shutoffs aren't distributed the way electricity customers are.▸ Texas held about 9% of the nation's residential electricity accounts in 2024 (an average of 12.8 million of 143 million, per EIA's own customer-count tables) but accounted for 22.5% of every disconnection recorded that year — 3,028,150 of the 13,447,935 national total. Florida was second at 2,177,337. Together, the five hardest-hit states account for just over half of every disconnection in the country.

Texas and Florida are both states with deregulated or lightly regulated retail electricity markets and among the weakest disconnection protections in the country — neither caps how many days of notice a customer gets or requires special protection for medically vulnerable households the way many Northeastern states do.▸ That's a matter of state utility law, not federal policy, and it's the reason the same national affordability crunch shows up so unevenly on this chart.

Disconnection and notice figures are EIA's first published year of data (calendar year 2024) and describe event counts, which can exceed unique households or customers. Arrears, disconnection-risk, and eligibility figures are NEADA's own estimates, current as of its February 2026 mid-winter update, and are attributed as such throughout.