Tracking Rate Increases in ComEd's System
Rate increase history is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually sit down to pull it. I've spent years digging through ComEd billing data for residential and small commercial clients, and the frustrating part isn't finding that rates go up — it's documenting exactly when, how much, and under what regulatory order. ComEd, or Commonwealth Edison, files rate cases with the Illinois Commerce Commission periodically. Each filing establishes new base rates, fuel adjustments, and surcharge structures. The "rate increase history" is essentially a timeline of those adjustments. What most people miss is that there are multiple layers: the base energy charge, the supply component, the delivery charge, and then all the add-ons like the Renewable Energy Surcharge, the Coal Retired Plants Surcharge, and various rider adjustments. Tracking all of these individually is where the work actually happens. I had a commercial client last year who was being billed under a time-of-use rate that ComEd had quietly transitioned from a standard flat-rate schedule. The increase wasn't dramatic in any single line item, but stacked together across seasonal TOU tiers and the updated demand charges, they were paying roughly 18% more than the prior year without any visible notice. The workaround was pulling monthly bills back six years, exporting them as CSVs, and cross-referencing with the ICC docket numbers on each rate change. That gave us the exact filing date for every adjustment, which let us dispute the earlier months with actual documentation instead of guesswork.
The process is tedious because ComEd doesn't publish a single clean historical table. You get rate schedules on their website, then supplemental filings through the ICC portal, then quarterly adjustments that never make it into the main documentation. I usually start with the ICC docket search for ComEd rate cases, pull the order dates, and then match those to bill cycles. The ICC docket numbers are your anchor — everything else branches from there.
How to Pull and Verify the Data Yourself
First, you need your account number and service address. ComEd's online bill viewer only goes back about seven years for standard users, which covers most residential needs but leaves gaps for long-term commercial analysis. For anything older, you have to request records through their customer records department, and that typically takes 10 to 14 business days. Once you have the bills, the useful fields are: the effective date of each rate change, the rate schedule code, the fuel cost adjustment percentage for that month, and the surcharge totals. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for each of those plus a notes field for whichever ICC docket triggered the change. Populating that for a full year of bills usually takes about 45 minutes if you're familiar with the codes, closer to two hours if you're learning the structure for the first time. The common pitfall is assuming that a rate increase shown on one bill happened on the bill date. It didn't. It happened on the effective date listed in the rate schedule documentation, and that effective date can be weeks or even a month before the bill that shows the change. I've seen people attribute increases to the wrong billing period and then file disputes that get denied because the dates don't align with ComEd's records.
Get the Full Details
Another thing nobody warns you about: ComEd applies retroactive reconciliations. A rate case might be approved today, but the ICC order can specify that the new rate applies retroactively to a date six months ago. That means your bill history will show adjustments that look like errors when you're scanning it month by month. The reconciliation appears as a credit or debit line item, and it's easy to overlook unless you know to look for it. I always filter for "adjustment" or "reconciliation" line types when reviewing historical bills. The biggest limitation of this whole exercise is that ComEd's publicly available rate schedule documents don't always include the numerical values for every rider at every point in time. They give you the current schedule, and occasionally an archived version, but the granular monthly values for fuel adjustments and surcharge percentages are often only visible on the actual bills. That's why pulling the bills themselves is non-negotiable if you need precision. For clients who need this done regularly, I've found that setting up a monthly archive of bills — saving them as PDFs and logging the key rate data into a running spreadsheet — cuts the annual review from a three-day project down to roughly four hours. The initial setup takes a few weekends, but after that you're just filing and updating rather than digging through archives every time.
