Electricity prices in France: households, industry, the European market

In 2025, a French household pays on average €0.262/kWh for its electricity, all taxes included, for ordinary consumption; a mid-sized business consumer pays €137.3/MWh, excluding recoverable taxes. These two prices are those Eurostat publishes for France, for defined consumption bands, and they measure neither the tariff of a particular contract nor the wholesale market price.

The question this page addresses is the one that returns with every price surge: why did the French bill not follow the European wholesale price in 2022, why did businesses suffer more than households, and where do things stand three years later?

For households, the price went from €0.121/kWh in 2008 to €0.185/kWh in 2019 — +52.7% in eleven years, more than four times overall inflation over the period. Then the crisis: €0.198/kWh in 2021, €0.215/kWh in 2022, €0.245/kWh in 2023 and €0.289/kWh in 2024, the peak, before easing to €0.262/kWh in 2025. Between 2021 and 2024, the rise was +45.5%.

For businesses, the path is of a wholly different violence. The price, €58.1/MWh in 2008, had reached €83.0/MWh in 2021 (+43.0% in thirteen years). It climbs to €122.0/MWh in 2022 then €230.7/MWh in 2023: +177.9% in two years, almost a tripling. It then falls back to €161.5/MWh in 2024 and €137.3/MWh in 2025, or −40.5% from the peak.

Over 2008-2025, the household price rose by +116.6% and the overall price index by +29.8%: electricity became dearer nearly four times faster than the rest of consumption.

What changed in 2022 was the European wholesale price, driven by the price of gas after the invasion of Ukraine and by the unavailability of part of the French nuclear fleet. On the European market, the electricity price is set, hour by hour, by the most expensive plant needed to balance supply and demand — the so-called merit order. When a gas plant sets the price, a nuclear or hydro kilowatt-hour sells at the price of gas.

Households were protected by the tariff shield, which capped the rise of the regulated tariff: only +8.3% in 2022, the year of the shock. Mid-sized businesses, often on market contracts, took the shock head-on: +47.0% the same year. The gap between the two curves in 2022-2023 is the measure of that protection — and of its cost, borne by the State budget.

France produces electricity that is mostly nuclear and hydro, whose cost does not depend on gas. The regulated access to historical nuclear electricity (ARENH) scheme required the incumbent to sell part of that output to competitors at a fixed price; it cushioned the shock for the volumes covered, but not beyond. That is why the French bill rose less than the wholesale price, without being disconnected from it.

The price paid by businesses and industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) moved together in 2023 — but in a direction that has nothing to do with causality: industry's share rises from 10.8% to 13.2% because the value added of the energy branch swells with prices, not because manufacturing sold more. The coincidence is real; the attribution would be false.

Three dates. The years 2010-2011, when both prices begin a steady rise with market opening and rising public-service electricity contributions. The year 2022, when the gas price drags the wholesale price up and the tariff shield severs the link for households. And the year 2024, when the shield is mostly lifted for households — their price peaks that year, one year after the businesses' peak.

Overall inflation in 2022 (5.2%) and 2023 (4.9%) includes this electricity rise; the shield limited its contribution to the price index, which also contained the uprating of indexed quantities.

In 2025, households pay €0.262/kWh and businesses €137.3/MWh. Compared with 2019, that is +41.8% for the former and +77.3% for the latter, while the overall price index rose by +16.0%. The crisis is over; the levels have not come back.