Farmers Electric Cooperative in Texas: What Members Need to Know in 2026

Picture a stretch of northeast Texas farmland, the kind where the nearest town has one traffic light and the grain elevator is the tallest thing on the horizon. Farmers Electric Cooperative was built to serve exactly that landscape. Founded by rural residents who could not get power from investor-owned utilities, the co-op is a not-for-profit, member-owned electric distribution utility that delivers electricity to homes, farms, and small businesses across its service territory, buying its wholesale power through its generation and transmission cooperative, Rayburn Electric Cooperative.

Farmers Electric Cooperative is headquartered in Greenville, Texas, and serves parts of about a dozen counties east and northeast of Dallas, including Dallas, Collin, Rockwall, Hunt, Kaufman, Rains, Hopkins, Delta, Franklin, Fannin, Van Zandt, and Wood. Members are not customers in the traditional sense. When you connect service with a cooperative, you become a partial owner. Excess revenue (called margins) can be returned to members as capital credits over time, rather than flowing to outside shareholders.

The cooperative model has been the backbone of rural electrification in Texas since the 1930s and 1940s, when the federal Rural Electrification Act pushed power into areas private utilities considered unprofitable. That legacy shapes how Farmers Electric operates today.

This is the question that trips up many Texas residents who move from a city to a rural area and expect to shop for their electricity the same way. The short answer is no.

Most of Texas operates inside the ERCOT grid under a deregulated retail model overseen by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT). In that model, Retail Electric Providers (REPs) compete for your business and you shop plans on powertochoose.org, the state's official comparison site. Transmission and Distribution Utilities (TDUs) like Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, and TNMP own the wires and poles and charge pass-through delivery fees that appear on every competitive plan.

Nearly all electric cooperatives, including Farmers Electric, sit outside that competitive structure — co-ops were allowed to opt in, but only Nueces Electric Cooperative did. They provide bundled service, meaning the co-op owns the distribution infrastructure and holds the retail billing relationship with members, even though it buys its wholesale power from a generation and transmission cooperative. The PUCT regulates investor-owned TDUs and oversees the competitive market, but cooperatives answer primarily to their own elected boards and to the cooperative statutes under Texas law.

If your address falls inside Farmers Electric territory, you cannot shop a REP plan on Power to Choose. Your rate is whatever the co-op's board has approved.

Co-op rates are not handed down by a state regulator the way investor-owned utility rates are. Instead, Farmers Electric's board of directors, elected by the membership, approves rate schedules after reviewing the co-op's costs: wholesale power purchases, line maintenance, debt service, administrative expenses, and reserve requirements.

Because Farmers Electric is a distribution cooperative rather than a generation and transmission (G&T) cooperative, it purchases wholesale power from a larger power supplier and passes those costs through to members. When wholesale energy prices spike, as they did during winter storm events in recent years, co-op boards face real pressure to adjust retail rates or manage exposure through power purchase agreements.

For the most current rate schedule, contact Farmers Electric directly or visit their official website. ElectricRates.org focuses on the competitive REP market, so it cannot display co-op tariff rates. What it can tell you is that for competitive market customers in Oncor territory (which overlaps geographically with northeast Texas), the lowest all-in advertised rate as of August 2026 is approximately 6.8 cents per kWh and the median sits around 15.9 cents per kWh at 1,000 kWh of monthly usage. Those figures give co-op members a useful reference point when evaluating whether their current rate is broadly in line with the regional market.

The Electricity Facts Label (EFL) is a standardized disclosure document required by the PUCT for every plan sold by a licensed REP in the competitive market. It breaks out the energy charge, TDU delivery fee, and any other fees so that the all-in rate at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh is visible at a glance. The kWh-tier structure matters because some plans look cheap at 1,000 kWh but carry bill credits that disappear at other usage levels.

Farmers Electric, as a cooperative outside the PUCT-regulated competitive market, is not required to issue an EFL. The co-op does publish rate schedules and, in many cases, a breakdown of the energy and distribution components of the bill. Members who want full transparency on their rate structure should request the current tariff directly from Farmers Electric and compare the line items carefully.

If you are ever unsure how your co-op bill is constructed, ask the cooperative's member services team to walk you through the current rate schedule — and use your member-owner rights in co-op governance, such as annual meetings and board elections, to press for clearer rate disclosure. That is one of the structural advantages of the co-op model.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of cooperative membership is capital credits. Because a co-op is not-for-profit, any revenue that exceeds operating costs in a given year is called a margin rather than a profit. Those margins are allocated to members on a pro-rata basis according to how much electricity each member purchased during the year.

The co-op does not typically write a check immediately. Instead, it retains those allocated margins as working capital, and over time, as the co-op's financial position allows, it retires (pays out) capital credits to members. A long-term member of Farmers Electric may receive capital credit checks years or even decades after the margins were originally allocated.

This is not a coupon or a rebate program. It is actual equity in the organization. When you leave co-op service, you generally do not forfeit accumulated but unretired capital credits. The co-op continues to retire them on its normal schedule. Keeping your membership records current, including your mailing address, ensures you receive any future payments.

Texas utility service territories have boundaries that were drawn decades ago and do not always follow intuitive geographic lines. If you are moving to a property near Hunt or Kaufman County or anywhere else in northeast Texas, it is worth verifying your actual service provider before assuming you are in Farmers Electric territory or in the competitive market.

A property on one side of a county road might be served by Farmers Electric. A property on the other side might fall under Oncor's TDU territory, where you can shop dozens of REP plans. One quick way to check is to look at a recent electric bill or call the co-op directly. You can also use the address-lookup tool on our Texas electricity page to see whether competitive plans are available at your location.

For addresses confirmed in the competitive market, ElectricRates.org displays live plans with full EFL details so you can compare the all-in rate at your actual usage level, not just the headline number in an advertisement.

Generally, no. Because Farmers Electric holds an exclusive certificated service territory under Texas law, you cannot simply choose a competing provider for your physical address inside that territory. This is fundamentally different from the competitive market, where switching REPs is a routine act that typically takes a single billing cycle.

There are some limited scenarios where a property owner might petition the PUCT or negotiate directly with utilities to change service territory boundaries, but this is a complex and uncommon process. The more practical consideration for most members is to engage with the co-op's governance process. Members elect the board of directors, attend annual meetings, and can vote on major policy questions. If rate levels or rate design are a concern, organized member participation is the main lever available.

Some cooperatives have also launched programs that allow members to subscribe to community solar or renewable energy options that affect the energy component of their bill. Whether Farmers Electric offers such programs in 2026 is best confirmed directly with the co-op.

Even without the ability to shop competing REP plans, there are meaningful ways to reduce what you pay each month.

Budget billing: Many cooperatives offer an averaged payment plan that smooths out the peaks of summer and winter bills. Ask Farmers Electric whether budget billing is available and how the year-end true-up works.

Time-of-use awareness: If your rate schedule includes any time-differentiated pricing, shifting discretionary loads like dishwashers, laundry, and EV charging to off-peak hours can lower your bill without reducing comfort.

Efficiency upgrades: Insulation, programmable thermostats, and HVAC tune-ups address the usage side of the equation. Farmers Electric may participate in Texas cooperative efficiency programs that offer rebates on qualifying equipment. Contact them directly to ask.

Know your rate tiers: Some co-op schedules include tiered pricing where the per-kWh rate changes at certain usage thresholds. Understanding those thresholds helps you decide whether small behavioral changes near the breakpoint are worth the effort.

Compare to the market as a reference: Even if you cannot switch, knowing that the median all-in rate for competitive Oncor customers as of August 2026 is approximately 15.9 cents per kWh gives you a real-world benchmark. If your co-op rate is meaningfully higher, that is useful information to bring to a board meeting.

Farmers Electric Cooperative serves a part of Texas where the private utility model never fully reached, and for many members it remains a reliable, community-rooted option. The trade-off is limited rate shopping flexibility and governance that happens at annual meetings rather than on a comparison website.

If your address is inside Farmers Electric territory, the most useful steps you can take are to request a current rate schedule, understand your bill components, participate in co-op governance, and explore any efficiency or renewable programs the co-op offers.

If you are not sure whether you are in co-op territory or in the competitive market, check your bill header or visit ElectricRates.org for a live address lookup. Texans in competitive TDU territory can see rates from dozens of REPs side by side, filtered by contract length, renewable content, and usage level, using the Electricity Facts Label as the authoritative source for every plan.