Maryland Small Business Electric Rates: How to Compare Supplier Offers

If you run a shop, office, warehouse, or any other small business in Maryland, your electric bill is probably split in two directions you did not choose on day one. One part pays for delivery—the poles, wires, outage response, and metering your electric distribution company (EDC) still owns. The other part pays for supply—the actual generation commodity priced in cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). In Maryland, supply is negotiable. You can stay on your utility’s default generation product or sign with a licensed retail electric supplier. The hard part is not finding a sales pitch; it is comparing offers so the all-in cost beats what you would pay by doing nothing.

This guide is written for Maryland small-business owners and managers who are shopping, renewing, or wondering whether a postcard rate is real money. It focuses on how to compare supplier offers in a market that has changed sharply for homes but remains active for many commercial accounts.

How Maryland’s market works for a small business

Maryland restructured retail electricity so customers can buy supply competitively while the local utility continues to operate the distribution system. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) describes the model plainly: in some states, customers may buy electricity directly from a power marketer, and the local utility still delivers it (¹). That is Maryland in a sentence.

Your utility’s default generation product is Standard Offer Service (SOS)—sometimes called the price to compare (PTC) on marketing materials. SOS is auction-based default supply; the price moves on a schedule set through regulatory processes. A retail supplier contract replaces only the supply line item (plus contract-specific fees), not the regulated delivery charges on your bill.

Maryland’s 2024 data show how large the competitive supply footprint already is. Total retail sales were about 59.0 million MWh, divided between roughly 32.0 million MWh sold by full service providers (bundled utility supply) and 27.1 million MWh sold by energy-only providers (competitive supply with separate delivery) (²). Nearly half of the state’s retail energy volume flows through competitive supply channels—much of it commercial and industrial load.

The five Maryland electric territories you will see on bills

Most small businesses fall under one of these EDC brands:

• Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE)
• Pepco Maryland
• Delmarva Power & Light (Maryland)
• Potomac Edison
• Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO)

Supplier offers are territory-specific. A rate that wins in Frederick County (Potomac Edison) may not exist for a Baltimore storefront (BGE). Always start comparison with the service address on your utility bill, not your mailing address.

What Maryland businesses actually pay: recent price benchmarks

Before you chase a supplier quote, anchor yourself to what businesses already pay in Maryland.

EIA’s latest year-to-date state table (through March 2026) shows Maryland’s commercial average retail price at 17.65¢/kWh, up from 14.08¢/kWh in the same period of 2025 (³). For context in the same table, Maryland residential averages run 24.38¢/kWh versus 18.44¢/kWh year-over-year, and the all-sectors average is 21.09¢/kWh versus 16.20¢/kWh (³).

Statewide, Maryland’s average retail price across all customer classes was 15.04¢/kWh in 2024 (²). Your shop is not “average”—a bakery with refrigeration looks nothing like a law office—but those numbers tell you direction: commercial supply costs have been moving up with the broader Mid-Atlantic trend, so a “savings” claim should be measured against your usage and your SOS price, not a national blog post.

Why kWh usage drives every real comparison

A kilowatt-hour is one kW of demand for one hour. Your bill’s supply charge is essentially:

Supply cost ≈ (kWh used) × (supply rate in $/kWh) + fixed fees

A supplier quoting 11.9¢/kWh on a flyer is meaningless until you multiply by your annual kWh and add monthly administrative fees, capacity pass-throughs, or renewal clauses. Gather twelve months of interval or monthly kWh from your utility portal before you take a meeting.

Demand charges: when “small” business is not small enough

Some Maryland commercial accounts see a demand charge based on your highest kW draw in a billing period, not only total kWh. A restaurant that spikes to 80 kW when HVAC and kitchen loads start together pays for that spike even if monthly kWh looks modest. Supplier offers may quote a strong energy-only ¢/kWh while capacity-related pass-throughs appear elsewhere. When you request quotes, ask whether the price includes capacity, transmission, and ancillary components or passes them through at cost—and model a month where demand spikes. Statewide averages cannot capture that nuance; your interval data can (³).

Worked example: translating two offers to dollars

Suppose your bakery used 10,000 kWh last month and your utility’s SOS supply equivalent is 12.0¢/kWh for energy (a round number for illustration). SOS supply energy ≈ $1,200 before any monthly fees.

• Supplier A (fixed 10.5¢/kWh, $15/month admin): (10,000 × $0.105) + $15 = $1,065
• Supplier B (9.8¢/kWh on the flyer, $45/month admin plus a $0.02/kWh adjustment): (10,000 × $0.118) + $45 = $1,225

Supplier B wins the postcard; Supplier A wins the month. That is why Maryland’s supplier average rate disclosures matter: realized prices diverge from marketing when fees stack (⁴).

Standard Offer Service vs. supplier offers: what you are comparing

Think of SOS as the default benchmark. Any supplier offer should beat the all-in supply value of SOS for your customer class and season—not a teaser rate from last winter.

When competitive supply is working, the savings can be material at scale. In October 2023, the Retail Energy Supply Association (RESA) published a consultant report estimating Maryland consumers could have saved more than $39 million that month by choosing offers below the PTC, with 179 supplier offers under the benchmark statewide (⁵). BGE and Pepco Maryland accounted for large shares of that theoretical savings pool (⁵).

That snapshot is not a promise for your renewal month in 2026. It proves the mechanics of shopping: many offers can price below default service when wholesale markets cooperate. Your job is to verify the offer in front of you today.

Fixed, variable, and “pass-through” language

Maryland suppliers historically sold:

• Fixed-price contracts: supply rate locked for the contract term; risk shifts to the supplier.
• Variable-price contracts: rate changes with market indices; you bear short-term risk.
• Hybrid / pass-through structures: some components fixed, capacity or transmission costs passed at cost.

The Federal Trade Commission’s work on electric restructuring emphasized that consumers shop most effectively when they can compare timely, comparable information about prices and terms (⁶). For a small business, “comparable” means translating every offer into $/month at your kWh under realistic usage scenarios (base case, slow month, peak summer).

Maryland’s 2024–2026 reforms—and what still applies to businesses

Maryland’s SB 1 retail market reform bill, signed in May 2024, reshaped the residential market far more than the commercial one. Core residential provisions include (⁷):

• Non-green residential offers capped no higher than the trailing 12-month average SOS rate in your territory at signing.
• Residential terms capped at 12 months.
• End of purchase of receivables (POR) for residential receivables, pushing many households toward dual billing or supplier consolidated billing instead of utility consolidated billing.

Conference committee language preserved those residential limits and the residential POR sunset without substantive changes from earlier House versions (⁸).

Small businesses are not interchangeable with homes. SB 1’s residential price cap and 12-month term limit do not automatically govern your commercial contract—but licensing, switching, and billing mechanics still matter. Catalyst Power’s 2024 launch of commercial and industrial (C&I) retail service in Maryland—starting at BGE, with Pepco and Delmarva planned later—signals suppliers still see opportunity on the business side even as residential shopping thinned (⁹).

Residential market stress vs. commercial opportunity

By June 2025, Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) Staff told commissioners the state had “no residential supply market at this point,” with retail suppliers “not making any new offers” to residential customers and consumers reporting they could not find offers online or were dropped when suppliers exited (¹⁰). Staff framed the issue while discussing purchase-of-receivables discount rates and forecasting how much supply would remain on competitive contracts (¹⁰).

Industry trade press has long noted that commercial customers participate in Northeast retail choice at much higher rates than residential customers—in part because businesses have the usage data and bill sophistication to justify shopping (¹¹). If you operate a small business, you may still receive broker calls or online quotes even when your employees cannot find residential plans on the same websites.

That split makes discipline more important, not less: verify that any quote is for your rate class (general service commercial, not residential) and EDC territory.

Where to find offers—and how to compare them line by line

Maryland does not have a single state-run portal identical to Texas’s Power to Choose. Comparison paths include:

1. Your utility’s SOS / supplier information pages (for the benchmark).
2. Licensed supplier websites and broker platforms.
3. Third-party comparison sites that list licensed suppliers—read how each site is paid.

WattKarma, a licensed energy broker operating in Maryland among other states, advertises that it “compares every licensed electricity supplier” in its markets and publishes small business plans for customers under 50,000 kWh per month (¹²). Whether you use a broker or shop direct, the comparison math is yours to keep.

Consumer Reports advises that in states allowing supplier choice, it is worth comparing rates regularly and switching when you find a better deal, while watching promotional rates that rise after intro periods (¹³). The American Coalition of Competitive Energy Suppliers maintains state lists and comparison links for choice states (¹³).

A practical comparison worksheet

For each offer, build the same table:

Run the estimate at 80%, 100%, and 120% of last year’s kWh. Fees that look small per kWh can dominate if your bakery uses 6,000 kWh in August but only 2,500 kWh in April.

Red flags that should slow you down

• No PSC license match: Maryland’s “supplier” license category includes brokers, marketers, and aggregators—not only load-serving entities (¹⁴). Ask for the legal entity name and license number; match it to PSC records before you share your utility account number.
• Teaser rate without contract PDF: If it is not in the written supply agreement, it does not exist.
• Average-rate warnings from the residential market: Maryland utilities began publishing supplier-specific average residential rates; Pepco’s December 2024 filing showed averages from 4¢/kWh below to 11¢/kWh above default service, with two suppliers at least 10¢/kWh above SOS (⁴). Commercial averages are not identical, but the lesson holds: marketing rates ≠ realized averages.
• Unauthorized switching: The FTC’s restructuring reports flagged slamming (switching without consent) as a switching-cost issue in competitive markets (⁶). Only sign what you intend; treat account numbers like bank routing numbers.

Brokers, consultants, and in-house shopping

Maryland licenses brokers and aggregators under the same broad supplier umbrella the PSC uses for renewals (¹⁴). A broker may save time, but the contract is still yours. Ask how the broker is compensated—SB 1 restricted commission-based residential door-to-door sales, yet commercial deals still deserve full fee disclosure (⁷). Get the supplier-of-record legal name on the contract, not only the broker’s trade name.

After you sign: renewal traps

Commercial contracts often auto-renew at a variable month-to-month price if you miss an opt-out window. Calendar the notice deadline 60–90 days ahead. If wholesale prices fall and SOS drops, a fixed contract signed at 13¢ may look expensive—but exiting early can trigger early termination fees that erase months of savings. Consumer Reports’ broader advice still applies in choice states: compare total price and terms, and treat teaser rates as temporary (¹³).

Billing mechanics: why the cheapest ¢/kWh is not always the cheapest relationship

Through January 1, 2026, Maryland utilities reported how suppliers complied with the end of residential utility consolidated billing with POR, requiring drops to default service or a move to dual billing or supplier consolidated billing (¹⁵). BGE reported full supplier compliance aside from a minor effective-date correction; Potomac Edison manually dropped 278 residential accounts when suppliers missed deadlines (¹⁵).

Many small businesses were already on dual billing or supplier consolidated platforms before the residential transition. Still ask:

• Will I receive one bill or two?
• Who do I call for a supply-rate dispute versus a meter outage?
• How are late fees handled if one party misapplies a payment?

Confusion here shows up as “I switched but nothing changed,” when supply moved but cash application lagged a cycle.

Negotiation levers unique to small commercial accounts

You may not be “C&I big” enough for a bespoke hedge book, but you still have levers:

• Usage transparency: Twelve months of kWh and peak demand (if on a demand charge) improves pricing.
• Multi-site aggregation: Two locations under one legal entity may unlock broker pools.
• Green product specifications: Renewable energy certificates (RECs) or “100% wind” labels carry different price floors; SB 1 treated green residential offers separately from standard residential caps (⁷).
• Contract length trade-offs: Longer fixed terms buy certainty but raise exit risk if SOS falls.

Maryland’s broader policy debate—whether default service should remain utility-procured or move toward mandatory competitive assignment—continues in legislative and PSC forums (¹¹). Small businesses do not need to pick sides in that debate to shop well; you need a supply rate and contract enforceable on your timeline.

Step-by-step: comparing and enrolling without surprises

1. Pull twelve months of utility bills (PDFs). Highlight supply $, delivery $, total kWh, and customer class.
2. Write down today’s SOS / PTC for your class from the utility site.
3. Shortlist licensed suppliers; verify licenses and complaint history where published.
4. Request written offers with the same usage assumption (attach a one-page load summary).
5. Model all-in monthly cost including fees at three usage levels.
6. Check ETFs and renewal clauses on your current contract before you switch.
7. Sign only the supply agreement you reviewed; confirm legal entity name matches the license.
8. After enrollment, reconcile the first two bills against the worksheet—delivery should look familiar; supply should match the contract math.

If no supplier will beat SOS on an all-in basis, staying on default service is a legitimate outcome—not a failure. In 2025, Maryland regulators openly discussed the collapse of new residential offers (¹⁰). Commercial accounts may still see movement, but “shop” does not mean “switch every time.”

Bottom line

Maryland small businesses operate in a split market: regulated delivery, competitive supply. State data show rising commercial averages—17.65¢/kWh commercial year-to-date through March 2026—and a large competitive supply share statewide (³; ²). Comparing supplier offers means translating each quote into your kWh, your SOS benchmark, and your billing setup, then vetting the supplier’s license and contract—not chasing the lowest headline rate on a postcard.

When the math works, shopping can still capture real value—historically, millions of dollars statewide in a single month when offers undercut the PTC (⁵). When it does not, default service is the disciplined choice until the market clears. Either way, you keep the wires; you choose whether the electrons come from SOS or a supplier you can defend on paper.