A Deming woman’s July bill from PNM came to almost $1,100, and August was over $1,000 again. “Take ownership for what the problem is,” she told KOB.
She has plenty of company. The average PNM household is spending about 20% more on electricity than it did in 2019, and it is not because homes use more. Homes used a little less over those six years.
- What the average household pays a year
- How much power it uses
In 2019 the average PNM household paid $907 a year for 6,839 units of power. Last year it paid $1,090 for 6,665 units. A Ledger calculation from the federal Energy Information Administration's Form EIA-861 detailed data files, pulled September 15, 2026, counting everything PNM billed, including the fuel charge and riders. The 2025 figures are an early release and may be revised.
Show the numbers
| Year | What the average household pays a year | How much power it uses |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 2020 | 11.8% | 5.5% |
| 2021 | 11.2% | 1.6% |
| 2022 | 10.4% | 1.7% |
| 2023 | 16.4% | 1.5% |
| 2024 | 18.4% | 0.8% |
| 2025 | 20.2% | -2.5% |
The increase everyone remembers, though, is not why summer bills came in so high.
A hot month is billed at PNM’s highest prices
Rates did go up on April 1. PNM had asked regulators for $174 million a year and settled for $105 million, in two steps. For a typical home, April’s step added about $6.23 a month. That is not what turns a normal bill into a shocking one.
Another piece of the bill moved the other way. The fuel charge covers what PNM pays for the fuel it burns and the power it buys, it is reset every three months, and it falls on part of a home’s power rather than all of it. Counted that way it has dropped by more than two fifths, from about 3.5 cents a unit last October to about 2 cents this July.
The damage comes from how PNM prices a summer month. The first slice of power a home uses each month is the cheapest it will buy, and everything after that costs more, most of all in June, July and August. For a home already past 900 units that month, every extra hour of air conditioning in August is bought from the dearest slice of all.
The top tier is where a big bill is made
What does it take to run a summer bill past $1,000? Worked back through PNM’s rate sheet, it takes about 4,450 units of power in a single month, eight times what an average PNM home uses and about two thirds of what it burns in a year.
Most of a bill that size is the power itself, and most of the power sits in the top tier. Everything above 900 units in a summer month is charged at PNM’s dearest rate, and on a $1,000 bill that slice alone comes to about $700.
- The first 900 units
- Everything above 900
- Fuel, riders and the fixed charge
A Ledger calculation from PNM's residential rate sheet, its published fuel charge for July 2026 and its five rider filings, all pulled September 15, 2026. A unit is a kilowatt-hour. Summer rates apply in June, July and August. The first 900 units cost the same on any bill that goes past them; it is the slice above 900 that grows. Before the city franchise fee and the gross receipts tax, which vary by address. An average PNM household used 6,665 units in 2025, or 555 a month.
Show the numbers
| The bill | The first 900 units | Everything above 900 | Fuel, riders and the fixed charge | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| An average month, 555 units | $56 | $0 | $34 | $90 |
| A hot month, 1,200 units | $107 | $60 | $61 | $228 |
| A $1,000 bill, 4,450 units | $107 | $708 | $184 | $1,000 |
Then PNM ran short of meter readers
In mid-July PNM ran short of meter readers in southern New Mexico, and within weeks the shortage had spread north to Albuquerque. About one in five customers were affected, and may have seen a bill estimated or late, a PNM spokesman told KRQE in August.
An estimated bill is a guess, worked out from last month’s reading and whatever the house used a year ago. Guess low, and the shortfall shows up whenever somebody finally reads the meter, sometimes as more than one month of power on a single bill. In Alamogordo, residents said bills covering two months on one statement pushed their usage into the highest-priced rate tier.
The state wants answers
On Sept. 10 the attorney general’s office wrote to PNM, asking why so many bills were estimated, whether the company had filed its method for estimating with the state, and whether the shortage was foreseeable. The letter, from Mark Hayden, director of the office’s utilities unit, to TXNM Energy President and CEO Don Tarry, gave PNM until Sept. 23 to respond.
Neither the office nor utility regulators have announced an investigation.
PNM has apologized for the confusion the shortage caused and, advocacy staff at the Public Regulation Commission say, suspended late fees and disconnections for affected customers. October’s bills will come from a real reading, it told KOB.
Blackstone still wants to buy PNM
Waiting on the other side of all this is Blackstone, which agreed last year to buy PNM’s parent company in a deal valued at $11.5 billion including debt, and still needs the same regulators to approve it. On Sept. 15 the companies offered $220 million in bill credits over ten years, which PNM projects would take about 3.5% off a typical bill for the first four.
Nothing in the offer stops PNM from asking for higher rates. When the same regulators approved the sale of New Mexico Gas Co. this summer, they required a freeze on base rates through January 2028.
PNM’s answer is due Sept. 23.
Updated Oct. 14, 2026: We revised this story to source its facts to public records where we could, and removed details and quotes we could not confirm from a record.
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