What this page is, and what it is not
Our electricity page answers what does power cost me — the rounded rate, appliance costs, solar payback, highland savings. This page is the schedule underneath it: the quarterly pliego tarifario, at full precision, for every regulated distributor in the country, plus the two charges that are not in the tariff and move your bill anyway.
Everything below is read from CNEE’s own bill calculator — the tool the regulator links from its Precios Regulados page — and cross-checked against the quarterly comunicado PDF. The calculator returns its figures as named form values, so the numbers here are the ones CNEE bills with, not numbers read off a chart.
The quarter in force
CNEE announced this quarter on Friday 31 July 2026. Its own wording:
“las tarifas de energía eléctrica para los usuarios de EEGSA, DEOCSA y DEORSA se mantendrán estables frente al trimestre anterior durante el período comprendido entre el 1 de agosto y el 31 de octubre de 2026, consolidando así cuatro años de estabilidad tarifaria.”
The published movement for the quarter was small and one-directional: DEOCSA −0.5% on both the social and non-social tariff; EEGSA and DEORSA unchanged. Over a full year, between August 2025 and August 2026, CNEE’s own table reads:
| Distributor | Tarifa social | Tarifa no social | CNEE’s own reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| EEGSA | 0.0% | 0.0% | Estabilidad |
| DEOCSA | −2.4% | −3.2% | Reducción sostenida |
| DEORSA | −1.5% | −1.4% | Reducción sostenida |
| Simple average | −1.3% | −1.5% | Tendencia general a la baja |
The four-year stability chart in the same document is indexed to August–October 2022 = 100.
The release calendar is the actionable part. The four quarters are Feb–Apr, May–Jul, Aug–Oct and Nov–Jan, and CNEE publishes the comunicado in the last days of the preceding month. So the next schedule — the one that prices your December bill — lands at the end of October 2026.
Who is on which tariff
CNEE’s own figures, verbatim from the comunicado:
- Tarifa social: “aproximadamente 3.9 millones de familias guatemaltecas, equivalentes al 93% de los usuarios del país.” Split by distributor: DEOCSA 1.4 million users, DEORSA 0.9 million, EEGSA 1.4 million.
- Tarifa no social: “aproximadamente 300 mil usuarios, equivalentes al 7%.” Split: EEGSA 175 thousand, DEORSA 55 thousand, DEOCSA 50 thousand.
- INDE contribution: “más de 2.3 millones de familias guatemaltecas que consumen hasta 100 kilovatios hora (kWh) al mes reciben un aporte económico del INDE en su factura” — applied, in CNEE’s words, after the tariff: “Los programas de apoyo social, como el aporte económico administrado por el INDE, se aplican posteriormente sobre la factura de los usuarios que cumplen los requisitos establecidos, sin alterar la estructura tarifaria.”
That last distinction is the one people get wrong. The 100 kWh threshold is the INDE subsidy, not a tariff tier. The tariff threshold is 300 kWh, and it is the subject of the next section.
CNEE’s calculator returned No Aplica and Q0.00 for the INDE contribution on every probe we ran, including 80 kWh and 90 kWh bills in Guatemala City. So this page quotes CNEE’s description of the programme and states no INDE amount.
The 300 kWh cliff, measured
The table above is not an estimate. It is the same request to CNEE’s calculator, one kilowatt-hour apart.
Crossing 300 kWh does not price the excess at the higher rate. It reprices the entire month. On EEGSA that turns a Q489.93 bill into a Q521.75 bill — Q31.82 for one extra kilowatt-hour, against a normal marginal cost of about Q1.59 once IVA is on. The rate holds steady at 100, 101, 299 and 300 kWh, and flips at 301.
What to do with that. If your meter is reading in the high 200s with a week to go in the billing period, a single evening of a clothes dryer or an unusually warm week on a coastal air conditioner can cost you thirty quetzales rather than two. The cliff is also why bill spikes show up as sudden rather than gradual: the tariff did not change, the household crossed a line. Meter reading dates are printed on the factura; they are the line’s calendar.
Every distributor, including the ones nobody prices
CNEE regulates far more than the three names everyone knows. Its Pliegos tarifarios page says the quarterly calculation covers EEGSA, DEOCSA, DEORSA “y 16 empresas eléctricas municipales”, and its calculator lists all nineteen.
On 20 September 2026, 14 of the 19 returned a tariff. The eleven municipal utilities that do are, in several cases, dramatically cheaper than the national distributors:
- EEM Gualán bills Q0.928582/kWh social — roughly 35% below EEGSA and less than half DEOCSA’s Q2.034495.
- EEM San Pedro (Q1.183156), EEM Huehuetenango (Q1.218489) and EEM Jalapa (Q1.230669) all sit below EEGSA.
- EEM Joyabaj (Q1.786477) is the dearest municipal utility, still below both Energuate distributors.
- EEM Huehuetenango also has the lowest fixed charge in the country at Q10.395783/month, against DEORSA’s Q24.514623.
Five — Puerto Barrios, Ixcán, Zacapa, Quetzaltenango and Tacaná — return no rate in the calculator. This page publishes no figure for them rather than a zero. Xela is the case that bites: the city is served by its own municipal utility, so a DEOCSA rate is not its rate, and CNEE’s calculator will not tell you what is.
The practical consequence: the difference between the cheapest and dearest regulated rate in Guatemala is Q0.928582 vs Q2.123466 per kWh — a factor of 2.3, on identical electricity, decided entirely by your address. On 250 kWh a month that is about Q299 of difference, every month, before the fixed charge and the levy.
Service areas overlap — the department does not settle it
CNEE’s calculator builds its department list from the distributor you pick. Read off it on 20 September 2026:
| Distributor | Departments in its own picker |
|---|---|
| EEGSA (5) | Guatemala, Sacatepéquez, Chimaltenango, Escuintla, Santa Rosa |
| DEOCSA (12) | Quetzaltenango, Suchitepéquez, Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Chimaltenango, Sacatepéquez, Retalhuleu, Quiché, Sololá, Escuintla, Totonicapán, Baja Verapaz |
| DEORSA (14) | Jutiapa, Santa Rosa, Guatemala, Jalapa, Huehuetenango, Zacapa, Chiquimula, Alta Verapaz, Izabal, Petén, Quiché, Escuintla, El Progreso, Baja Verapaz |
Chimaltenango, Sacatepéquez and Escuintla appear under both EEGSA and DEOCSA. Guatemala, Escuintla, Huehuetenango, Quiché and Baja Verapaz appear under both DEOCSA and DEORSA. Add sixteen municipal utilities on top and the honest answer to which company serves my department is: more than one. Your factura names your distributor and carries your NIS; that is the authoritative answer for your address.
The distributor also decides your service quality, not just your price — CNEE measures that separately, and we cover it in outage and reliability limits by distributor.
The charge CNEE does not set and nobody publishes: alumbrado público
CNEE names the municipal street-lighting levy as a reason your bill moves while the tariff does not — and then, reasonably, does not set it. Each municipality does. The result is that a charge worth up to a quarter of your energy bill has no national published table.
Except that CNEE’s calculator quietly holds one. We probed 357 municipalities, one request each, on a fixed 150 kWh residential bill:
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Municipalities returning a non-zero levy | 315 of 357 |
| Minimum | Q2.45 |
| Median | Q28.00 |
| Mean | Q27.82 |
| Maximum | Q56.13 |
| Share of the energy charge | 0.76% – 25.00%, median 9.13% |
The highest are Puerto Barrios (Izabal) and San José Calderas (Chimaltenango) at Q56.13, then Moyuta (Jutiapa) and El Chal (Petén) at Q55.00 and Dolores (Petén) at Q52.00.
Some comparisons worth having before you sign a lease:
| Municipality | Levy on 150 kWh | Share of energy charge |
|---|---|---|
| Antigua Guatemala | Q31.43 | 14.00% |
| Mixco | Q30.99 | 13.80% |
| Guatemala City | Q29.19 | 13.00% |
| Panajachel | Q27.78 | 8.45% |
| Santiago Atitlán | Q23.80 | 7.24% |
| Villa Nueva | Q22.45 | 10.00% |
| Escuintla | Q22.45 | 10.00% |
| Cobán | Q20.00 | 6.21% |
| San Pedro La Laguna | Q20.00 | 6.09% |
| Flores (Petén) | Q40.00 | 12.42% |
Antigua charges 57% more street-lighting levy than Cobán on the same 150 kWh — Q31.43 against Q20.00. Villa Nueva and Guatemala City are neighbours with a Q6.74 monthly gap. None of that is in the tariff, and none of it is in the comunicado.
Read the zeroes carefully. Forty-two municipalities come back at Q0.00 — and that means CNEE’s calculator returns no levy for them, not that they charge nothing. Quetzaltenango city is the clearest example: it is served by its own municipal utility, which the calculator does not price at all. The zeroes cluster in San Marcos (6), Chiquimula (6), Zacapa (4), Alta Verapaz (3), Petén (3) and Sacatepéquez (3). Treat a zero as missing data.
How to read your own bill against this page
- Find your distributor and NIS on the factura. The distributor sets the rate; the NIS is what any query needs.
- Check the energy line against the table above. If you are under 300 kWh you should see the social rate; at 301 and above, the non-social one, applied to everything.
- Find the tasa de alumbrado público line separately. Compare it with your municipality’s row. It is not CNEE’s and it will not appear in any tariff announcement.
- Add the fixed charge and 12% IVA. Both are in the table; neither depends on how much you used.
- If the arithmetic does not close, the usual culprits are an estimated rather than actual meter reading, a tariff change mid-reading-period, or crossing 300 kWh. The complaint route runs distributor → CNEE → DIACO.
For the household side of the same question — what appliances actually cost to run, whether solar pays back, why highland living is cheaper — stay on the electricity cost page. For the other utilities that move the same monthly budget, see gas prices and water outages.