AEP Ohio's Quiet 30% Rate Cut — What the PUCO 2026 Settlement Actually Did

The PUCO 2026 settlement with AEP Ohio got coverage. Most of it focused on the fines AEP paid, the procedural fight over the prior rate case, and the political pressure from the Ohio Consumers' Counsel.

What got missed: the residential default supply rate actually came down.

Per NREL's U.S. Utility Rate Database, AEP Ohio's residential default supply rate — the per-kWh number you pay if you haven't switched to a competitive supplier — has fallen 30.9% from year-end 2015 to the current filing. The most recent tariff revision puts the residential default supply at roughly 10.65¢/kWh. That's among the lowest defaults in Ohio.

Meanwhile, the fixed monthly customer charge — what you pay before the meter spins — stayed exactly where it was: $16.49/month. So $197.88/year in customer charges regardless of usage. That's the highest monthly customer charge in our Ohio footprint, and it didn't move.

This post walks through what the settlement actually did, what the tariff filings show, and what a typical AEP Ohio customer's bill looks like as a result.

URDB indexes every approved tariff revision filed with the PUCO. For AEP Ohio specifically, that's about 200+ tariff plans across residential, commercial, and lighting sectors, with 30+ historical residential revisions on file going back to 2011.

Two halves of the bill, two opposite directions. The per-kWh half came down. The fixed-monthly half stayed flat at the highest level in the state.

The 2026 settlement resolved a longer-running rate-case fight between AEP Ohio, the PUCO Staff, the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, and several industrial intervenors. Three pieces matter for residential customers.

1. Default supply procurement reset. AEP Ohio runs its default supply through PUCO-approved competitive auctions. The settlement formalized procurement schedule and load-shape methodology that had been disputed in the prior rate case. The auctions cleared at lower prices than the disputed legacy methodology, which is the proximate cause of the recent drop in the residential per-kWh default rate.

2. Customer charge held flat, not increased. AEP had requested an increase in the residential fixed customer charge as part of the prior rate case. The settlement held it at $16.49/month. From a consumer-advocacy perspective, holding a fixed charge flat counts as a win, but it doesn't show up as a “cut” — it shows up as nothing happening.

3. Distribution-rider true-up. Various distribution riders (DIR, ESP IV) got rolled into a true-up adjustment. Small numbers, but they explain why your delivery-side line items may have shifted slightly without the supply rate moving.

The headline coverage tended to focus on the procedural fight and the fines paid. The under-covered piece is that the post-settlement default supply rate is materially lower than what AEP would have charged absent the settlement.

Take a household using 1,000 kWh/month on the default Standard Service Offer.

Customer charge: $16.49/month (fixed, doesn't change with usage).

Supply (default SSO): roughly 10.65¢/kWh × 1,000 kWh.

Distribution and riders: roughly 5-6¢/kWh blended for residential, varies by usage level.

The per-kWh side is now cheaper than it was at the post-2015 peak by about a third. The fixed side is unchanged. Net effect on a typical 1,000 kWh bill is roughly $30-40/month lower than it would have been at the 2015 default supply rate, but the bill still starts at $16.49 before any electricity flows.

If you use very little — say a small apartment at 400 kWh/month — that $16.49 is proportionally a much bigger piece of your bill. The 30% supply cut helps people who use more electricity more than it helps people who use less. That's the structural piece worth understanding: a fixed charge bites hardest at low usage.

After the cut, here's the current Ohio default supply landscape per URDB filings:

In other words, AEP Ohio went from being one of the more expensive defaults in Ohio at the peak to being one of the cheapest. For shopping purposes, that flips the math: a competitive supplier offering 9¢/kWh on a 24-month fixed plan is no longer obviously beating the default — you have to look harder. The PUCO's Apples to Apples tool lists every certified supplier offer for your utility, sortable by price.

If you're an AEP Ohio customer, two lines on your bill tell you where you are right now.

Look for “Customer Charge” on the delivery side. It should read $16.49 (or close to it — small rounding on some bills). That's fixed.

Look for the supply rate in the “Generation Service” or “SSO” section. It should be around 10.65¢/kWh if you're on the default. If you're higher, you're probably already on a competitive supplier — check the supplier name on the bill.

If you want to see the full revision history under that current number, it's on file with the PUCO and indexed in NREL's URDB. Each approved revision has an effective date, an approved rate, and a link to the source tariff PDF. Public record. That's how we got the −30.9% figure — by reading the actual revision sequence, not a press release.