‘It’s a stressful life’: How energy debt is straining 800K Massachusetts utility customers

NOEMY RODRIGUEZ HAS HAD overdue utility bills stacking up over the last eight years.

Little has been easy for the single mother in East Boston. While working part-time as an organizer with the local nonprofit GreenRoots, Rodriguez cares for her three children, one of which suffers from epilepsy while the other two navigate attention deficit disorders. That’s left Rodriguez regularly shuffling between her apartment and work, getting her children off to school, and juggling medical appointments.

When she’s not fending off notices — and paying off some of her utility bill debt just in time — to avoid getting her electricity and heat shut off, that is.

“When you owe money and are in debt and receiving disconnection notices many times, it’s a stressful life,” Rodriguez, who immigrated to the US nearly 20 years ago from El Salvador, said through a Spanish translator. “It’s either bringing food to the table for your kids or paying your bills.”

Rodriguez is in much better standing now, after she finally qualified for a low-income discount rate for her energy bills and as of six months ago was enrolled in a payment forgiveness plan with Eversource, her electric provider. But she is one of some 800,000 customers of the six investor-owned utilities in Massachusetts saddled with late or overdue energy payments, known as arrearages.

Arrearages are seen as one clear indicator of financial distress within a household, particularly for low-income customers. Energy costs, which in Massachusetts and around the country have risen sharply, are one of the top household concerns in the Bay State and have contributed to an affordability crisis that has erupted onto the national political landscape.

Over time, severe debts can lead the utility company to disconnect that customer’s service for electricity or heat, a last-resort step that poses a health and safety risk.

A CommonWealth Beacon analysis of filings submitted by the state’s six investor-owned utilities as required by regulators over the course of the last seven years reveals a complicated picture.

Total arrearages owed by Massachusetts electric and gas customers have roughly doubled between June 2019 and June 2026, the filings show, increasing from around $580 million to $1.12 billion — a 93 percent increase.

But at the same time, the number of individual customers with arrears has actually fallen over that time. In 2020, around 941,000 customers were overdue on their energy payments.

This year, around 818,000 customers face arrears — a 13 percent decline that brings the number down below pre-Covid levels.

The result: The average customer with arrears is far worse off than just a few years ago, according to the filings, which are submitted to the Department of Public Utilities.

Across the six companies, gas and electric customers with arrears on average owed $815 in 2020.

Now, it’s $1,366 — a 68 percent increase.

For customers of certain utilities, the increase has been much larger. For Unitil, the average amount of money owed has ballooned nearly 80 percent. At Eversource, the largest utility in the state, it’s 108 percent.

Though total arrears continue to grow, the pace of that increase has slowed substantially in recent years. Arrears jumped 21 percent between 2020 and 2021 but rose just 1 percent between June 2025 and June 2026.

Massachusetts isn’t alone in the rising share of households facing energy insecurity around the country, yet the state, as wealthy as it is, sticks out given its high cost of living and increasing utility bills.

The percentage of US households facing energy insecurity rose from 27 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024, with nearly one-fourth foregoing or reducing the amount they spend on food or health care to keep the lights on, according to federal data compiled by the National Consumer Law Center.

“Energy affordability is definitely getting worse,” said Jenifer Bosco, NCLC’s managing director of energy advocacy. “Arrearages are growing. Certainly after Covid, after the disconnection moratoriums ended, people had pretty high amounts of arrears. For some families, that hasn’t really been fully resolved.”

Massachusetts in particular is headed in the wrong direction.

Data released by the Bipartisan Policy Center last month shows Massachusetts is the fourth-worst state for low-income customers in terms of energy burden, the share of household income dedicated to energy costs. For these customers, energy burden is so high in Massachusetts that it exceeds what the US Energy Department considers “severe.”

Average household utility bills in the Bay State are up 38 percent since 2020. And low-income customers consistently owe more money on average here compared to standard-rate customers, though both groups have seen large increases since 2019, NCLC found.

None of this data captures customers that heat their homes with delivered fuels like oil and propane. Heating oil customers are likely to face unprecedented stress this winter warming their homes, with fuel costs up 75 percent this year compared to last year, according to state data.

In addition to how expensive basic necessities have become in general, one key driver of the arrearage growth can be traced to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Arrearages rose sharply between 2020 and 2021 as Massachusetts, along with many other states, implemented temporary bans on utility disconnections for nonpayment.

Jessica Cain, vice president of customer operations at Eversource, said that 80 percent of customers who receive notice of potential disconnection take action, either by paying their bill, setting up a payment plan, or filing for assistance. The inability to send those notices during the pandemic, she said, coupled with the economic fallout from that time, is a dynamic that’s still playing out.

“Once people build debt,” Cain said, “it takes a long time to dig out.”

Massachusetts, in just a matter of days, is deploying a landmark new system meant to help alleviate the state’s energy burden issue.

State regulators have ordered the utilities to roll out sweeping changes to the discounts afforded to Massachusetts’s lowest income residents.

Starting on November 1, six new discount tiers for electric and gas bills will be available to residential customers that qualify based on their income status and household size.

The lowest income customers, earning 100 percent or less than the federal poverty level, will receive discounts of up to 95 percent. That’s more than double the current flat low-income discount rate, which is roughly 42 percent for electric customers and 25 percent for gas customers.

Though Massachusetts is not the first to establish such a tiered discount system — New Hampshire and Illinois, for example, offer discounts into the 80 percent range — it appears the Bay State’s discounts will be the steepest in the country.

Alanna Kelly, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Utilities, said in a statement that the new tiered discount rates will help the state’s “most vulnerable customers pay their energy bills” through the deeper savings.

“Reducing hardship for low-income families through meaningful assistance creates a more equitable energy system, and the DPU will continue to advance energy affordability and protect ratepayers,” she said.

Ensuring that no household pays more than 4 percent of their household income on energy costs through the new discount rates theoretically lessens the disproportionate pressure on lower income customers.

But it also means that customers who don’t qualify for the low-income rates could be forced to pay more to subsidize those heavy discounts, including customers that narrowly fall outside the discount window.

Cain, for instance, estimated that the average Eversource customer not eligible for the new discount rates could see an increase of $5 to $8 per month for gas and $2 per month for electricity.

One reason Massachusetts’s discount rate is so generous is because the DPU sought to achieve the lower 4 percent energy burden rate. When Connecticut implemented its low-income discount tiers, for instance, it aimed to achieve an energy burden of 6 percent, leading to discounts of up to 50 percent on customers’ utility bills – providing comparatively less assistance to those in financial distress than Massachusetts’s plan but also limiting how much other customers could be saddled with higher bills to pay for the program.

It’s not that the utilities are necessarily against the new discounts. National Grid in 2025 was the first utility to pilot a tiered system in Massachusetts, though the discount — up to 71 percent for households earning 100 percent or less than the federal poverty level — was less generous. The utility’s program led to some 30,000 more customers being enrolled for low-income discount rates and a drop in the percentage of low-income customers with arrears from 42 percent to 35 percent in one year.

The two other states in which Eversource operates, New Hampshire and Connecticut, have offered a tiered low-income rate system since 2002 and 2022, respectively.

Lowering arrearages and reducing energy burden, especially in already stretched low-income households, has benefits for everyone, said Josh Ryor, a principal at the Regulatory Assistance Project who recently left his role as assistant secretary of energy in Massachusetts.

“The idea is it’s more cost-effective to get the rate to something that customers can actually pay, and actually getting what they can pay from them,” Ryor said. “That will lower everyone’s rates.”

But it’s the scope of the discounts in Massachusetts that has utilities, regulators, and advocates alike on edge to see how it all plays out. That includes ensuring qualified customers are actually enrolled at the proper rate for which they are eligible.

And a segment of the population may be in for a surprise: The upper tier of the low-income group will qualify for a roughly 30 percent electric discount, which is less than current flat 42 percent discount.

The DPU, in its order earlier this year, also instituted a change that exempts customers eligible for the new low-income discount rates from paying into the program themselves, as all ratepayers do for other initiatives like Mass Save. This move, the utilities warned regulators in a joint 2024 filing, “would result in higher bill impacts to non-income eligible customers” and “unfairly increase” those customers’ cost burden.

“Asking the question of, ‘At what cost is it worth it for some customers to pay for special programs and benefits for others?’ is absolutely critical,” Cain said.

Outside of the new discounts, struggling Bay Staters have also for the past 20 years been able to enroll in their utility’s arrear management plan (AMP), as Rodriguez of East Boston did, to help them erase debt with monthly payments.

AMPs are generally considered a helpful tool that both utilities and advocates have supported as a key mechanism that returns customers to good standing and avoids the need for the electric or gas provider to incur costly legal and disconnection expenses.

Each utility’s AMP is slightly different, but in general, low-income customers with arrears can be placed on a payment plan in which a portion of their debt is forgiven for every new payment made and service will not be shut off so long as those payments are made.

At National Grid, for instance, AMP enrollment surged from around 16,000 customers in 2019 to more than 80,000 last year, and the utility has forgiven about $30 million in customer debt so far this year.

Rob Morgan, who receives electricity from Eversource and gas from National Grid, is one of those customers benefiting from AMPs.

Morgan, a Roxbury resident in his early 30s who lives in an apartment alongside his elderly aunt and cousins, has struggled with overdue energy bills. But Morgan said in an interview that about a month ago he successfully enrolled with Eversource’s arrear management plan and secured the current low-income electric discount rate.

Jawayne Caesar, an energy navigator at the community organization Reclaim Roxbury, helped review Morgan’s paperwork and coordinate with Eversource to get his utility bills back on track — an important step for him to reach his goal of buying a home next year.

Caesar said that over the last year alone, as Reclaim Roxbury has incorporated utility bill assistance into its mission, he has met with hundreds of Roxbury residents looking for help managing what has become a major financial pain point in household budgets.

More and more of those residents are carrying balances upwards of $4,000, he added.

“I wish it were uncommon for me,” Caesar said. “But the balances are ballooning to the point that it’s untenable. People feel defeated.”

Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon