The August 2026 Eversource Rate Increase & What It Costs to Heat a Bedford Home

Eversource's New Hampshire supply rate went up 23.94 percent on August 1. Here is the arithmetic on what that does to oil, propane, and heat pump heating this winter — with the numbers shown, not asserted.

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Last checked: August 6, 2026 • Rates verified against Eversource's published NH supply rate schedule

What Changed on August 1, and What It Actually Costs You

On August 1, 2026, the supply portion of the Eversource residential electric rate in New Hampshire moved from 11.303 cents per kilowatt-hour to 14.009 cents — an increase of 23.94 percent that holds through January 31, 2027. That window is not an accident of the calendar. It covers the entire first half of the heating season, which is precisely why a rate change that looks like a summer news item lands on your December bill.

The number itself is settled, but the interpretation of it has been sloppy. A 24 percent jump in the supply rate is not a 24 percent jump in your bill, because supply is only one line on it. And it does not automatically mean a heat pump has stopped making sense in New Hampshire — that conclusion requires comparing electricity to oil and propane on equal footing, which almost nobody does out loud. Below, we do it, and we show the multiplication so you can rerun it with your own numbers.

Bedford HVAC is a referral service — we connect homeowners with licensed, insured local contractors, and we have no equipment to sell you and no reason to talk you into or out of any fuel. Every dollar figure on this page is an estimate built from published rates and standard energy-content values as of August 2026. Your house will land somewhere different, and we will point out exactly where and why.

What Changed on August 1, 2026

The new residential supply rate is 14.009 cents per kWh — effective August 1, 2026 through January 31, 2027 for Eversource residential customers on the default service rate
The previous rate was 11.303 cents per kWh, in effect from February 1 through July 31, 2026 — so the change is 2.706 cents per kWh, or 23.94 percent
Eversource had asked for roughly 15 cents, seeking to recover about $38 million in under-collections from two consecutive cold winters; the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission directed the lower figure instead
This is not a permanent price — New Hampshire supply rates reset twice a year, on February 1 and August 1, and the next reset lands squarely in the back half of winter
It applies to supply only — the cost of the electricity itself, not the cost of moving it to your house
It does not apply if you buy supply elsewhere — households on a community power program or a competitive supplier are on that contract's price instead, though their delivery charges are unchanged

The Part of Your Bill That Didn't Move

Supply is one of two halves. The other is delivery and transmission — the poles, wires, and substations — and that half was not touched by the August 1 change. Add them together and the all-in effective rate for a New Hampshire residential customer now lands somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 26 cents per kWh. Treat that as an estimate and nothing more: delivery charges vary by utility, by rate class, and by how much you use, so the honest version of this number is a range, not a decimal. Your own figure is easy to get and far better than any range — take your last electric bill, divide the total dollars by the total kilowatt-hours, and you have the number that actually governs your house. Everything below uses roughly 23 cents as a working midpoint, and we flag it every time it does real work in a calculation.

Comparing Fuels Honestly Means Dollars Per Million BTU

Cents per kilowatt-hour, dollars per gallon of oil, and dollars per gallon of propane are three units that cannot be compared to each other, which is how bad heating advice survives. The fix is to convert everything to one common unit: what it costs to actually deliver one million BTU of heat into the house. That requires two adjustments. First, energy content — a kWh carries 3,412 BTU, a gallon of #2 heating oil about 138,500 BTU, and a gallon of propane about 91,500 BTU. Second, efficiency, because no appliance delivers everything it consumes. A combustion furnace or boiler loses part of the fuel up the flue; a heat pump does the opposite, moving several units of heat for every unit of electricity it draws, which is what a coefficient of performance above 1 means. Below is that math run at current New Hampshire prices as of August 2026.

What Each Fuel Costs Per Million BTU Delivered — August 2026 Estimates

Cold-climate heat pump, COP about 3: each kWh delivers roughly 10,236 BTU, so a million BTU takes about 98 kWh. At 20 to 26 cents all-in, that is roughly $20 to $25. A COP near 3 is realistic in moderate cold, not in a February cold snap — see the next section.
#2 heating oil at $4.71 per gallon, 85 percent efficiency: a gallon delivers about 117,725 usable BTU, so a million BTU takes about 8.5 gallons — about $40. New Hampshire oil ranged roughly $4.29 to $5.41 per gallon this year per the NH Department of Energy, which swings that same math to about $36 to $46.
Propane at $3.78 per gallon, 90 percent efficiency: a gallon delivers about 82,350 usable BTU, so a million BTU takes about 12.1 gallons — about $46. Propane's low energy density per gallon is why its cheaper-looking price per gallon does not translate into cheaper heat.
Electric resistance heat, COP of 1: baseboard, an electric furnace, or a heat pump running on backup strip heat delivers 3,412 BTU per kWh, so a million BTU takes about 293 kWh — roughly $59 to $76. It was the most expensive way to heat a house before August 1 and the increase widened the gap.
Natural gas is deliberately absent here. Bedford has gas along its main corridors, gas supply moves on its own schedule rather than with this electric change, and we are not going to invent a rate to fill the row. If you are on the mains, run the same conversion using the price on your own gas bill.

Where a Heat Pump Stops Winning — the Honest Version

Those numbers make a heat pump look untouchable, and at COP 3 it is. But COP is not a constant. It falls as the outdoor temperature drops, and the useful question is how far it can fall before a heat pump costs the same as oil. Run it backward: at roughly 23 cents per kWh all-in, matching oil at about $40 per million BTU requires a COP of about 1.7. Before August 1, holding delivery charges constant at roughly 9 cents, the all-in rate was closer to 20 cents and that same break-even sat near 1.5. That is the real effect of the increase in one sentence — the bar a heat pump has to clear moved from about 1.5 to about 1.7. On paper, most cold-climate equipment clears 1.7 well into the single digits. In an actual house it clears it later than the spec sheet suggests, because defrost cycles, duct and line-set losses, and any auxiliary resistance heat that engages all drag real-world performance below the lab curve. Putting those together, the practical crossover for many New Hampshire homes lands somewhere around 20 to 25°F, and below that oil can genuinely be the cheaper fuel. That is a real caveat and worth planning around — but notice where it puts you: the large majority of New Hampshire's heating hours sit above that crossover, in the 25 to 50°F range where the heat pump is not merely competitive but roughly half the cost per BTU. The August increase did not change that conclusion. It narrowed the margin.

What This Means for a Bedford House in Particular

Your consumption is the multiplier, and Bedford's is high. A typical New England single-family burns 600 to 900 gallons of oil a season, which at $4.71 is roughly $2,830 to $4,240. A 3,000-plus-square-foot colonial with a finished basement is more likely to sit at the top of that band than the bottom — the same percentage swing in any fuel price simply costs more here.
Propane households feel this differently. Off the gas corridors — the neighborhoods where propane is the default rather than a choice — propane is already the most expensive of the three delivered fuels per BTU, so an electric increase that leaves a heat pump at roughly half propane's cost per million BTU changes very little about that comparison.
Multi-zone homes have more places to leak money. Two systems, several zones, dampers, and staging mean more settings that can be quietly wrong. A zone board calling for backup heat that the heat pump could have covered is invisible on the thermostat and extremely visible on a 14-cent supply rate.
Dual fuel is the setup this crossover was made for. Bedford's mains support exactly the configuration the math above describes: the heat pump takes the many hours above the crossover, the furnace takes the few below it. The switchover setpoint is what decides which fuel pays for each hour, and it is a setting, not a fixed property of the equipment.
Whole-house electric baseboard is the urgent case. At roughly $59 to $76 per million BTU, resistance heat is now three times the cost of a working heat pump. If any part of your house — a bonus room over the garage, a finished basement, an addition — is heated by baseboard, that is the square footage where the arithmetic is not close.

What to Do Before November

Calculate your real all-in rate. Total bill divided by total kWh. It takes thirty seconds and replaces every estimate on this page with a fact about your own house.
Find your gallons. Your oil or propane dealer's delivery history for last season is the single most useful number in any fuel comparison — it converts every per-BTU figure above into your actual dollars.
Ask your dealer about budget, pre-buy, and cap plans before the season prices out. These smooth cash flow and can hedge price, but a cap is a product with a cost built in — ask what that cost is rather than assuming protection is free.
Verify the dual-fuel switchover setpoint if you run a heat pump alongside a furnace. Set too high, you burn fuel through hours the heat pump would have covered cheaply; set too low, you run the heat pump into its inefficient range. This is a service-visit adjustment, not a purchase.
Service the heat pump before it carries a winter. A system low on refrigerant or running dirty coils loses COP, and COP is the entire economic argument — a unit limping at 2.2 instead of 3.0 quietly hands back most of its advantage over oil.
Know the incentive landscape as it stands. NHSaves rebates are still running for qualifying heat pumps, with pre-verification required on the higher tier for homes coming off electric resistance heat. The federal 25C tax credit is not part of the picture — it expired December 31, 2025, and a system installed in 2026 does not qualify, regardless of what an older article or a salesperson tells you.

Want This Math Run on Your Actual House?

Call (603) 506-4389 and get connected with a licensed local contractor who will price it against your real fuel use — not a national average.

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Bedford Heating Cost Questions

How much will the August 2026 Eversource increase actually add to my bill?

The supply rate rose 2.706 cents per kWh, so the arithmetic is simple: every 1,000 kWh you use costs about $27 more than it would have at the old rate. What that totals depends entirely on your consumption, which is where the estimates stop and your house begins. A home heating with gas or oil and using electricity mainly for lights, appliances, and a well pump sees a modest change; a home carrying its heat electrically through a New Hampshire winter uses several times more and sees a correspondingly larger one. Multiply 2.7 cents by the kWh figure on your own bill and you will have a far better answer than any average.

Is a heat pump still cheaper than oil in New Hampshire after this increase?

For most of the heating season, yes — and the margin is wide enough that a 24 percent supply increase narrowed it rather than closed it. At an estimated 20 to 26 cents per kWh all-in and a COP near 3, a heat pump delivers a million BTU for roughly $20 to $25, against roughly $40 for oil at $4.71 a gallon in an 85 percent efficient system. The honest qualifier is that COP falls with the temperature, and once real-world performance drops toward roughly 1.7 the two fuels cost the same. In practice that crossover tends to arrive somewhere around 20 to 25°F, below which oil can be the cheaper choice — which is exactly the case for dual fuel rather than an argument against heat pumps.

We heat with propane outside the gas mains — does an electric rate increase matter to us?

Only indirectly, and mostly as information for a decision you may already be considering. Propane at $3.78 a gallon works out to roughly $46 per million BTU delivered in a 90 percent efficient system, because a gallon of propane carries only about 91,500 BTU — noticeably less than oil's 138,500. That makes propane the most expensive of the three delivered fuels per unit of heat, and even at the new electric rate a heat pump running near COP 3 costs roughly half as much per BTU. If you are on propane and your equipment is approaching the end of its life, that gap is the number worth having a contractor confirm against your own gallon usage before you replace like for like.

Does the rate drop again on February 1, 2027?

It changes on February 1 — whether it drops is a different question, and anyone who tells you they know is guessing. New Hampshire supply rates reset twice a year, on February 1 and August 1, and the direction each time depends on wholesale market conditions and on any under-collection or over-collection the utility is still working through. Some context on this particular increase: Eversource sought roughly 15 cents, citing about $38 million in under-collections from two cold winters, and the Public Utilities Commission directed 14.009 cents instead. The practical takeaway is not to forecast the next reset but to note that your rate is fixed through January 31, 2027, and that this window covers the most expensive stretch of the heating season.

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