Starting in 2026, every PG&E residential customer got a new line item on their bill, one that has nothing to do with how much electricity they used.

It's called the Income-Graduated Fixed Charge in the state's paperwork, but on your PG&E bill it shows up as the Base Services Charge. That is the line item to look for. For most households it runs $24.15 a month. Whether you used 5 kilowatt-hours or 500, that charge shows up the same. It's not a rate increase in the traditional sense. It's something new entirely: a bill for simply being connected.

Here's what most people don't realize about this charge, and why it matters if you're weighing solar.

Where it actually came from

This wasn't a decision PG&E made on its own. It traces back to Assembly Bill 205, a state law passed in 2022, which directed the California Public Utilities Commission to design a fixed charge based on household income. The CPUC voted 4-0 to approve it on May 9, 2024. Lower-income households enrolled in CARE or FERA assistance programs pay less, around $6 or $12 a month, while most other households pay the full $24.15. PG&E's rollout began with March 2026 usage, which means most people first saw the charge on the statement that arrived in April.

I've watched this floor rise for twelve years. When I got into solar in 2014, PG&E's minimum charge was $4.50 a month, and it only touched solar customers, because they were the only ones whose usage ever dropped that low. In 2015 the CPUC raised it to $10. By 2024 it was nearly $12. Still a minimum, still mostly a solar customer's problem. The $24 charge is different in two ways. It isn't a minimum anymore, it's added on top of whatever you use, and it hits nearly every one of PG&E's roughly five million residential accounts, with narrow exceptions for a few separately metered and master-metered rate plans. The CPUC designed it to be revenue-neutral, with per-kWh rates coming down at the same time, so it isn't new money for PG&E. What it is, is guaranteed money: on the order of a billion dollars a year that PG&E used to have to earn by delivering power, and now collects for your meter existing.

PG&E's own sample NEM statement from January 2015, showing the minimum charge at $4.44 a month. This is the floor that has since risen to $24.

This is PG&E's own language, printed on an actual August 2026 statement. Account and meter details have been redacted for privacy. The fee explanation itself hasn't been touched. You'll notice this statement shows $24.60 rather than $24.15: PG&E bills the charge daily, about 79 cents a day, so a 31-day cycle lands a little above the monthly figure and a 30-day cycle a little below.

One detail worth knowing if your bill doesn't match your neighbor's: PG&E doesn't bill everyone on the same calendar cycle. Billing cycles are staggered throughout the month based on your meter read date, so depending on your specific cycle, you may have first seen this charge on a March, April, or even May statement.

Why this changes the math on going solar

Here's the part that should get your attention if you're on the fence about solar.

This $24 charge is now the floor, and in practice it's a floor you can't build your way out of. California doesn't ban off-grid living outright, but the building code requires new homes to be wired for a utility connection, cities like Oakland require any home with power available nearby to connect to it, and there are no state standards for approving a fully disconnected house. In twelve years of doing this in Alameda County, I have never seen a building department sign off on one.

Unplug every appliance in your house and you'll still owe $24, because staying connected isn't optional in practice. What solar can do about the rest depends entirely on when your system was turned on. If you are on the original net metering or on NEM 2.0, a properly sized system can still bring the rest of the bill close to nothing, and a solar household's summer statement can land right around that $24 floor. If you are going solar today under the Net Billing Tariff, it cannot. Exports are now credited at a fraction of what you pay, and PG&E's own rules do not allow generation credits to offset delivery charges or the reverse. A well designed system still cuts the bill substantially. It just will not drive it to the floor the way it did before April 2023.

Put another way: the fixed charge doesn't hurt solar customers much, because they're already offsetting the variable costs it was layered on top of. It hits hardest for non-solar households, especially lower-usage ones, since a flat fee is a bigger percentage of a small bill than a large one.

One more thing worth knowing if you're weighing solar yourself: the $24 floor stretches out the payback period more for lower-usage households than for high-usage ones. If your bill runs around $150 a month, the $24 you can't offset caps your real savings at about $126, roughly 84% of the bill, not the full amount. That alone adds close to 20% to the payback period compared to what you'd expect if solar could erase the whole bill. It doesn't make solar a bad move for a smaller household, but it does mean the math takes a little longer to pay off than it would for a $300 or $400 bill.

Is California unusual here?

Almost every electric utility in the country charges some kind of fixed monthly connection fee. That part isn't new. What's different about California's approach is the size of it and the income-graduated structure behind it. Most utilities nationally cluster well below what PG&E now charges: a recent survey of 23 major U.S. utilities found a footprint average of just $7.56 a month, and only one of those 23 charges above $15. California's $24.15 sits well above even the high end of that range for most non-discounted households.

It's also worth knowing that California's electricity rates themselves are among the highest in the country, second only to Hawaii. That's a story worth its own closer look, and one I'll be digging into in a future post.

The $24 is the floor. Everything above it is still going up, and this is where it's headed.

Source: California Public Advocates Office, Figure 1, PG&E projected revenue increases 2026–2030. The teal bars represent additional expected revenues on top of base budgeted revenues (GRC).

The bottom line

This charge isn't PG&E being arbitrary. It's a real state policy with a real paper trail: AB 205, a CPUC vote, a phased 2026 rollout. But knowing where it came from doesn't make it disappear from your bill. What it does is change the calculation. If your goal is to get your monthly PG&E bill as close to zero as legally possible, solar is now working against a fixed floor that exists whether you have panels or not, and the only real move left is making sure everything above that floor is yours, not PG&E's. The $24 isn't going anywhere. The question is what you're going to do about the rest.

Questions about your bill? Free reviews at solarbillreview.com.

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Sources:

1. California Public Utilities Commission, Income-Graduated Fixed Charge decision (adopted May 9, 2024), implementing Assembly Bill 205 (2022).
2. California State Assembly, legislative analysis of AB 205, confirming PG&E's fixed-charge rollout window of January 1-March 31, 2026.
3. Molly L. Zohn, Klinedinst PC, "Is Grid Defection Legal in California?", International Energy Law journal (2016); analysis of California Building Standards Code and local grid connection requirements.
4. Survey of 23 major U.S. electric utilities' fixed monthly customer charges, electricrates.org (2026 reference data).
5. State-by-state average electricity rate comparison; California second-highest nationally behind Hawaii.
6. California Public Advocates Office, "The Full Bill Impact of PG&E's Expected Rate Requests," fact sheet, March 5, 2026 (updated June 24, 2026).
7. Sustainable Economies Law Center, "Unplugging Our Homes From Corporate Power," analysis of Oakland Municipal Code grid-connection requirement and off-grid permitting.
8. California Public Utilities Commission, fixed charge proceeding record (A.17-12-011 et al.), documenting PG&E's pre-2015 residential minimum bill of $4.50 per month and the $10 minimum bill set by Decision 15-07-001; CPUC Resolution E-5354 (January 2025) confirming removal of the minimum bill upon adoption of the fixed charge.
9. PG&E Energy Statement, August 2026 (author's personal bill; account and meter details redacted).
10. PG&E sample Net Energy Metering true-up statement dated January 2, 2015 (PG&E placeholder account 1023456789-0), as republished by Del Sol Energy, "True Up Bill Terror Stories."