Utility Usage Tracker

How the numbers are worked out

This is a ledger with a chart on top, and the arithmetic is as simple as it looks. Each entry is one bill: a utility, a month, a year and an amount. Re-entering the same month for the same utility overwrites it rather than adding a second row, so a corrected bill replaces the wrong one. The average is the mean of your monthly totals for whichever tab you are looking at, the total is their sum, and the bar for a month is that month's amount over the largest month on the chart. On the combined tab, one month's figure is the sum of every utility you entered for that month — which means a month where you only logged the electric bill will look artificially low beside a month where you logged all four.

The year-on-year block compares mean monthly figures rather than annual totals, and it only appears once you have entered two calendar years. Comparing means is the deliberate choice: a year with four months entered and a year with twelve are not comparable as totals, and averaging at least puts them on the same footing.

The comparison figures are 137 for electric, 63 for gas, 45 for water and 65 for internet, monthly, in dollars, with 310 as the combined benchmark. Only the electricity figure sits near a published series we could check — the United States residential average was about 899 kilowatt-hours a month in 2022 by the Energy Information Administration's own count, and 899 kilowatt-hours at a typical residential rate lands within a few dollars of 137. The gas, water and internet figures are ours: nobody publishes a single national water or broadband bill, and we would rather say so than borrow the EIA's name for numbers it never produced. Everything you enter is held in this browser's local storage.

Where these numbers come from

1. 1. How much electricity does an American home use? — U.S. Energy Information Administration, FAQ (2022 data)

Every figure above was read out of the code that runs on this page. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published one, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.