Top electricity companies: the 10 biggest by homes served, who you can pick and how to judge one

"Electric company" means three different things. Most "best" lists mix them, and that is why they disagree.

When someone asks for the best electric company, they usually mean the second kind. If your state has no choice, nobody has a second kind to pick, and the right question is how to push your utility and regulator, not which brand to pick.

Choose a state. The check says whether homes can pick a seller there, and then links the state's own shopping site, license list and complaint page. For the five states where our plan finder works, it also links our guide.

This check repeats public pages from your regulator and our own guides. It is not a rating of any company. States it does not list: ask your state utility commission whether homes can choose, because rules and exceptions differ.

How many companies a home can pick from, on the read date in each state:

A long list is not a better list. One company can sell under several brand names, and not every listed company has a plan for your address. The plan finder on this page shows plans for your ZIP in TX, PA, OH, NJ and IL only.

This is the only "top" list we publish, and it ranks size, not quality. The U.S. Energy Information Administration counts the homes each company serves. The table below is its 2024 count of homes that buy power and delivery from the same company.

Two Texas sellers sit just below this list in the same table: Reliant Energy Retail Services with 1,548,250 homes and TXU Energy Retail Co with 1,446,391. They are sellers that Texas homes choose, so size means something different for them.

Use these where you can choose, or to judge the utility you are stuck with. Each one points to a record you can look up in minutes.

1. 1
   Is it licensed?

   Search your regulator's own list before you give an account number. The check above links it for each state we cover.

2. 2
   What do complaints show?

   Look for a count per customer, not a raw count. A big company gets more complaints just by being big. The table below shows what each state posts.

3. 3
   Has the state acted against it?

   Look for fines, settlements and orders in your regulator's dockets. Read the order, not a news headline, and note the date.

4. 4
   Are the terms plain?

   Find the price per kWh, any monthly fee, the length, the fee to leave and what happens at the end. Our guide on how to choose a plan walks through the plan itself.

5. 5
   Does the price beat your default at your own use?

   Compare at your own kWh, not the 1,000 kWh a lot of ads use. Where your utility posts a price to compare, that is the number to beat.

Complaint records are not equal from state to state. This is what we found on each regulator's own pages.

"We did not find" means the page we read did not show it on October 25, 2026. A regulator may post it somewhere else. If you find one, tell us at info@theday.company and we will fix this table.

We score electricity companies on public records only, out of 100 points: how we score lists the formula. Complaints are the biggest slice, 25 points, and the record behind each point is on the company's review. We score Texas and Pennsylvania sellers, and the ranked lists live on their own pages:

We do not merge those into one national list, on purpose. Each state has its own price benchmark and its own records, so a 72 in one state is not the same test as a 72 in another. For Ohio and New Jersey, we list certified suppliers but have no scores yet, so read our Ohio supplier guide and New Jersey supplier guide with the five checks.

No one pays for a score or a spot, and the plan finder pays us only if you sign up through it. Read how we make money.

Search results for "best electric company" are often a map of local firms, review sites and lists of stocks. They answer other questions. Use these signs.

The company counts in the table above are read from each state's list by robots, and each row shows its read date. The federal numbers (homes served, share of homes with an energy-only seller, the count of choice states) are read by a person from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. We check the federal homes-served count each fall, when EIA posts the new year, and the choice-state count each April and October. The latest we had for the choice-state count is dated March 15, 2023.

What we could not verify: the size of each wires company's full territory (EIA counts delivery-only homes in other tables), a complaint rate per supplier in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois, and whether a state's "Quarterly Complaint Data" page is by company. We say so above instead of guessing.