France Electricity Tariff API

How a household electricity price is built in France

France opened household supply to competition in 2007, but the state-owned incumbent still supplies most homes through a regulated reference tariff that the regulator builds up cost by cost. A single distribution company delivers power to about 95% of the country under a network charge that is deliberately uniform nationwide — a long-standing policy of geographic price equality regardless of distance from a power station. France also popularized time-of-day pricing early, and its peak/off-peak windows are assigned per connection by the network operator rather than chosen by the supplier.

What a household bill is made of

1. 1

   Energy

   The supplier’s own price. For the regulated tariff the regulator stacks a procurement cost, a capacity component, an energy-savings-certificate component, commercial costs and a fixed supply margin. France is a single bidding zone; market suppliers publish their own price grids, and genuinely hourly exchange-indexed retail offers exist alongside the mainstream flat products.

2. 2

   Network charges (TURPE)

   Set by the regulator and uniform nationwide, updated each 1 August, and independent of distance — the "postage stamp" principle. A small residential connection picks one of a handful of network formulas; the mass-market one has a per-kWh coefficient that varies by season and by peak/off-peak slot, with a high season over the winter months. The fixed part, charged per kilovolt-ampere of subscribed power, rides inside the supplier’s standing charge rather than appearing separately.

3. 3

   Taxes and levies

   The electricity excise is the only per-kWh statutory levy — it absorbed the old departmental and communal electricity taxes, so there is no separate local electricity tax any more. Households sit in their own band, made of an inflation-indexed base plus a uniform uplift that funds supply to the non-interconnected territories and is paid by every consumer, not only those living there. A separate contribution funding the industry pension scheme is charged as a percentage of the *fixed* bill elements, so it rides inside the standing charge. Municipal right-of-way fees are formula-based on commune population.

4. 4

   VAT

   20% on the entire bill — energy, network charge, excise and pension contribution alike. The old split that taxed fixed and variable components at different rates was abolished in 2025 for conformity with the EU VAT directive.

Regulation shaping the price

• CRE builds the regulated sale tariff by stacking costs under a statutory method, and sets the TURPE network tariff by deliberation under the code de l’énergie, on its own multi-year cycle.
• Peak/off-peak windows are assigned per delivery point by the distribution operator and are being reshaped: a regulator-mandated reform is moving millions of customers off a single night block, keeping the eight-hour total but placing part of it in the early afternoon to follow midday solar output, with different summer and winter windows for the later phase.
• Colour-calendar products, which assign each day of the year a colour carrying its own peak and off-peak rates, are a distinctive French shape sitting between static and dynamic pricing.
• Household solar is bought under a purchase obligation with tariffs revised quarterly; the terms for new installations were cut sharply in 2026, shifting the economics decisively toward self-consumption.

Market structure last reviewed July 2026.