23 US states plus DC let you pick a supplier. Most of the country still cannot.

As of May 2026, 23 states plus the District of Columbia let at least some residential customers pick a competitive supplier. 10 offer both electricity and natural gas choice (DC included), 6 offer electricity choice only, and 8 offer natural gas choice only. The other 23 states keep the traditional vertically-integrated utility model where a single regulated utility generates, delivers and bills your energy.

In a regulated state your local utility owns the generation, the wires and the customer relationship. The PUC approves every rate. You cannot choose a different supplier. In a deregulated (also called retail-choice or restructured) state the utility still owns the wires, reads the meter and handles outages, but a separate competitive supplier sells you the kilowatt-hours or therms. The supply portion of the bill is the part you can shop. Delivery, taxes and most riders stay regulated.

No, and assuming it does is the most common mistake. State after state has shown that average residential customers on a competitive product paid more, not less, than the utility default rate. New York's December 2023 PSC Reset Order, Illinois' 2024 ICC complaint settlements and the FTC's 2024 enforcement actions all flowed from the same finding. Real savings show up where the structure is right: ERCOT-grid Texas with disciplined shopping, municipal aggregation in Illinois and Massachusetts, and the 2026 PSC-mandated 15%-below-utility product in New York. Outside those, the default service rate is often the safest option.

Five states dominate residential participation: Texas (mandatory ERCOT-grid choice, ~85% of households shop), Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Illinois. Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut have meaningful but smaller shopping populations. Several states (Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming) have choice on the books but no active residential market.

The 1992 Energy Policy Act gave states the option, not the requirement, to open retail competition. States with high pre-1996 rates (the Northeast and Texas) had the most to gain and moved first. States with low rates (Pacific Northwest hydro, public-power Nebraska, TVA-served Tennessee) had nothing to gain and stayed regulated. California ran the experiment, hit the 2000-2001 crisis driven by Enron-style market gaming, and froze residential choice. Today the line on the map is mostly the line between high-cost regions that needed restructuring and low-cost regions that did not.

Yes, always. In every deregulated state the TDU remains your default for wires, meter and outages. You only swap the supply portion. Bills come from either the utility (consolidated billing) or the supplier (dual billing) depending on the state. If your supplier fails or drops you, you return automatically to utility default service with no service interruption.

Statewide deregulation is rare. Choice usually depends on which utility serves your address. The most reliable check is to enter your ZIP code on your state regulator's shopping site: Power to Choose (Texas), PA PUC, Energy Choice Ohio, NY DPS ESCO directory. Then read the utility name on your most recent bill: that name decides whether you have choice.

Federal: the FTC Cooling-Off Rule gives you 3 business days to cancel a door-to-door sale over $25. State rules go further: Ohio gives 7 days; New York forces every mass-market product to guarantee savings against utility default; Illinois bans variable-rate residential offers after the first term; Texas requires plain-language facts labels for every offer. Read the Customer Disclosure Statement before signing, and never give a meter number to a door-to-door salesperson.