Pakistan's Domestic Electricity Tariff, Explained

The rule that surprises people: bills are not telescopic

Almost every explanation of Pakistani electricity slabs you will read — including, until we corrected it, two guides on this site — describes them as telescopic: the first 100 units at one rate, the next 100 at a higher one, and so on. For most consumers that is wrong.

The notes printed under the notified schedule are explicit:

“only protected residential consumers will be given the benefit of one previous slab” · “residential life line consumer will not be given any slab benefit”

Read together: an unprotected consumer has every unit charged at the rate of the band their month reaches. A protected consumer gets the one immediately preceding band charged at its own lower rate. A lifeline consumer gets no benefit at all.

What that means in rupees

The consequence is a cliff at every band boundary. Take an unprotected household at exactly 200 units:

• 200 units × Rs 28.91 = Rs 5,782
• 201 units × Rs 33.10 = Rs 6,653.1
• One additional unit costs Rs 871.1 — before GST, which is calculated on top.

A protected consumer at the same 200 units pays Rs 2,355 (100 × Rs 10.54 plus 100 × Rs 13.01), which is why protected status is worth guarding carefully.

Fixed charges, and the minimum charge

Fixed charges are billed per kilowatt of sanctioned load per month, and they step up with your consumption band — from Rs 200/kW for a protected consumer under 100 units to Rs 675/kW at the top of the domestic schedule. For Time-of-Use domestic consumers they are calculated on 50% of sanctioned load or recorded maximum demand, whichever is higher.

Where a fixed charge applies, no minimum charge is added even in a month you consume nothing. Where it does not — lifeline consumers — a minimum monthly customer charge applies instead: Rs 75 single-phase or Rs 150 three-phase.

Larger connections and pre-paid meters

A residential connection with a sanctioned load of 5 kW or above is billed Time-of-Use: Rs 46.85 per unit at peak and Rs 34.53 off-peak, with a fixed charge of Rs 675/kW/month. Pre-paid residential supply is a flat Rs 42.12 per unit with the same Rs 675/kW/month fixed charge.

Quarterly adjustments: temporary, and dated

On top of the slab rate, NEPRA notifies periodic adjustments that apply for a defined run of billing months and then stop. They are not rate changes, and reading a bill without knowing which one was live is a common source of confusion:

• +Rs 0.3504 per unit — 2nd Quarter FY 2025-26 quarterly tariff adjustment, applied to the March–May 2026 billing months. S.R.O. 459(I)/2026
• −Rs 1.9857 per unit — 1st Quarter CY 2026 quarterly tariff adjustment, applied to the June–August 2026 billing months. S.R.O. 953(I)/2026

Both exclude lifeline consumers, incremental-consumption-package units, prepaid consumers. Because they expire, a bill from September 2026 will not carry the June-to-August rebate — so comparing two months without checking which adjustment applied to each will mislead you.

Who counts as protected, lifeline or unprotected

These are not informal labels — each is defined in the notified Schedule of Tariff, at S.R.O. 1165(I)/2022 of 25 July 2022, PART-II, A-1 Residential, page 29. The same text is still in force at page 69 of S.R.O. 1287(I)/2025 of 18 July 2025.

Protected

“Non-ToU residential consumers consuming ≤ 200 kWh per month consistently for the past 6 months.”

Two conditions, and most explanations only mention the first. The consumption test is ≤ 200 kWh a month, consistently for the past 6 months— a rolling look-back over the six immediately preceding months, each of which has to be at or below the threshold. Note the gazette's word is “consistently”, not “consecutive”; the practical effect is the same, but it is worth quoting what the notification actually says.

The condition almost nobody mentions: Non-ToU only

The definition is confined to Non-ToU residential consumers. Under clauses 3 and 4 of the same A-1 section, any consumer with a sanctioned load of 5 kW or above must be given Time-of-Use metering and billed on A-1(b).

Put those together and the consequence is concrete: a household with a sanctioned load of 5 kW or more can never be a protected consumer, however little electricity it uses. Fifty units a month makes no difference. If you have been wondering why your usage is low but your bill is on the unprotected schedule, your sanctioned load is the first thing to check — it is printed on the bill, in kW, near the tariff code.

Lifeline

“Residential consumers having a single-phase electric connection with a sanctioned load up to 1 kW. Lifeline consumers include residential Non-ToU consumers whose maximum of the last twelve months’ and the current month’s consumption is ≤ 100 units; two rates for ≤ 50 and ≤ 100 units continue to apply.”

Lifeline is stricter than people assume, and again on two axes. The connection must be single-phase with a sanctioned load up to 1 kW, and the consumption test looks back twelve monthsrather than six: the maximum of the last twelve months' and the current month's consumption must be ≤ 100 units. The two rates for ≤ 50 and ≤ 100 units sit inside that category.

Unprotected

Residential Non-ToU consumers not falling under the protected category are categorised as "Un-protected". That is the default, and it is where the great majority of domestic consumers sit.

What happens if you go over

Where a billing cycle runs beyond a calendar month, the units are pro-rated: Where a reading covers more than a calendar month, the units are pro-rated: if the pro-rated figure is at or below 200, that portion is charged at protected rates, the excess is carried into the next billing cycle, and protected status is retained for the month. Lifeline consumers get the same treatment at the 50 and 100 unit thresholds (CSM Revised 2025, clause 6.1.1.1(a)).

On regaining the status after exceeding the threshold, we will say only what the documents support. No notification imposes a lock-out or penalty period. What follows from a rolling 6-month test is simply that the six months behind you must all be at or below the threshold again before you meet the definition — that is an implication of the test, not a separate published rule, and you will see it stated as one all over the internet.

Which Schedule of Tariff applies to your company

Each distribution company has its own Schedule of Tariff, issued on 13 January 2026 and modified by S.R.O. 279(I)/2026. The rates are the same; the schedule number differs:

• FESCO — S.R.O. 41(I)/2026
• GEPCO — S.R.O. 42(I)/2026
• HAZECO — S.R.O. 43(I)/2026
• HESCO — S.R.O. 44(I)/2026
• IESCO — S.R.O. 45(I)/2026
• LESCO — S.R.O. 46(I)/2026
• MEPCO — S.R.O. 47(I)/2026
• PESCO — S.R.O. 48(I)/2026
• QESCO — S.R.O. 49(I)/2026
• SEPCO — S.R.O. 50(I)/2026
• TESCO — S.R.O. 51(I)/2026

Azad Jammu & Kashmir is not in this list: it is supplied by a government department rather than a NEPRA-licensed distribution company, and its tariff is notified separately. See the AJK page.

How we sourced these figures

S.R.O. 279 and the January schedules are image-only scans, and the ex-WAPDA annex of the underlying decision does not OCR reliably. Rather than run text recognition over a scan and publish whatever came out, the figures here were read visually from Annex-B-1 and then cross-checked two independent ways: against the K-Electric annex, which does carry a clean text layer and the same applicable variable charges, and against IESCO's independently typed tariff guide. All three agree on every one of the fifteen figures.

We rejected LESCO's own tariff page as a source: its most recent entry is dated 26 July 2023 and is three years stale. Our editorial policy sets out the rest of how we handle figures we cannot verify.