Natural Gas Prices by State: 2025 Ranking and Bills

In 2025 the average household gas price ran from $7.69 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf) in Idaho to $52.38 in Hawaii, against a national average of $15.34. Of the 45 areas with a 2025 figure, 19 sat above the national average and 26 below it, and the middle of the list, Oklahoma and Kansas, was near $14.60. The six states missing from the 2025 column are in a separate table below with their 2024 prices.

The ranking is the easy part. What most readers need is what the number means for a bill, why a cheap state can still produce a large bill, and how much of the price is the gas versus the pipes and wires that deliver it. This page builds those three views from the same EIA tables. For the line items on one bill, see the natural gas bill guide; for the wholesale benchmark behind the commodity part, see what Henry Hub is.

The 2025 ranking, state by state

Table 1 lists every area with a published 2025 residential price, from highest to lowest. The first price column is the EIA figure in dollars per Mcf. The second converts it to dollars per therm using that state’s own 2025 delivered heat content (the EIA Btu-per-cubic-foot figure for the state), because a therm measures heat and an Mcf measures volume. The last column is the state’s price as a percentage of the national average.

Hawaii is its own category, at 3.4 times the national average and about 2.1 times the next state, Florida. On a per-therm basis Hawaii costs $5.71 against $0.74 in Idaho, a spread of 7.7 to 1. Next, the top of the mainland list is not simply where winters are coldest. Florida, Massachusetts, California, Georgia and Texas lead, mostly warm states plus Massachusetts. The cheapest states are mostly northern and mountain states: Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota and Utah fill six of the lowest six places. Excluding Hawaii, the highest mainland price (Florida) is 3.31 times the lowest (Idaho).

The six states without a 2025 figure

The September 2026 release shows NA for 2025 in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island and South Carolina. Rather than carry a 2024 number into a 2025 ranking, Table 2 shows what the EIA published for 2024, and the 2024 national average of $14.50 for scale.

All six were above the 2024 national average, and every one of them is an Atlantic-coast state: Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island in New England, Maryland in the Mid-Atlantic, and the Carolinas. Rhode Island, at $21.66, was the highest of the group and above every other 2024 price except Hawaii, Florida and Massachusetts. That is a description of the 2024 table, not a forecast for 2025, so check the table again when the EIA fills the gaps.

What the EIA number measures, and where it can mislead

The state figure is an average price for gas delivered to homes, collected from utilities on Form EIA-857 and from gas marketers on Form EIA-910. The EIA’s own definition of the residential price is the price of gas used in private dwellings, including apartments, for heating, cooking, water heating and other household uses. It is a dollars-per-volume average over everything the customer paid, so it already contains the gas itself, pipeline transportation, the local utility’s delivery charge, the monthly customer charge and, depending on the state, other charges on the bill. It is stated in nominal dollars, with no inflation adjustment.

Two limits matter when comparing states. The first is coverage. In states where customers can buy gas from a marketer rather than the utility, the EIA reports what share of residential deliveries its price includes. Table 3 lists the areas where that share was below 95 percent in 2025. In Wyoming only about two thirds of residential deliveries are in the price, so the state figure describes the customers the survey captured, and gas bought from a marketer shows up only to the extent that it was reported.

The second limit is the unit of the statistic. An average per Mcf rewards a state where households use a lot of gas, because the fixed customer charge is spread across more volume, and penalizes one where they use little. That single fact explains much of the next section.

Price is not the bill: what a typical customer used in 2024

Dividing each state’s 2024 residential deliveries by its 2024 residential consumers gives the gas used by the average customer. Multiplying by the 2024 price gives an implied annual spend per household. It is an average over everyone in the state, including homes that use gas only for cooking and water heating, so it is not the bill of a home that heats with gas, but it is a fair way to compare states on one axis. The national figure is 59.5 Mcf per customer and $863 a year at the 2024 price of $14.50.

The reversal is large. Florida has the second-highest price of any state, $25.48 per Mcf in 2025, yet its customers used 21.5 Mcf in 2024, roughly a third of the national figure, so the implied spend is $545 a year, far below the national $863. New York customers used 86.7 Mcf at a price near the national average, and the implied spend is $1,438. Alaska, where Table 4 shows customers using 148.4 Mcf, tops the list even though its price per Mcf is below the national average.

Where the money goes: city gate versus what the home pays

The EIA also publishes the city gate price, which is what a local distribution utility pays at the point where it takes gas from a pipeline. By its definition, a citygate is a point or measuring station at which a distributing gas utility receives gas from a pipeline company or transmission system. The distance between that price and the residential price is a rough measure of everything that happens after the utility receives the gas: local pipes, meters, customer service, the fixed monthly charge and any taxes. It is not a pure delivery charge, because the city gate price is an average across all of a utility’s purchases and the residential price covers a different mix of customers, so call it a proxy.

The comparison needs a year in which both numbers exist. The 2025 city gate price is NA for 10 states, so Table 5 uses 2024, when it is available for all 50 states (the District of Columbia is not reported in any year). Nationally the gap in 2024 was $10.25 per Mcf, with the residential price 3.41 times the city gate price. In 2025 the national gap was $10.49 and the multiple 3.16.

The range of the gap is wide enough to reorder the rankings. In 2024 the gap exceeded $15 per Mcf in Hawaii, Florida, Arizona, California and Alabama, and was under $5 in Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana. The residential price was more than five times the city gate price in Arizona (6.22x), Texas, Alabama and California, and under two times it in Alaska and South Dakota. That is why a state can have a modest wholesale gas cost and still a high residential price: Arizona’s 2024 city gate price was $3.29, below the national $4.25, but its residential price was $20.47.

There is one more reading of the table that deserves caution. A large gap does not prove high utility profits or wasteful spending. Fixed charges spread over little gas, such as in Arizona and Florida where households use a fraction of the northern states’ volume, raise the average price per Mcf mechanically. The pattern in Table 4 and Table 5 together is consistent with that, but the data cannot separate it from other causes, and no utility tariff is examined here. For how tariff components are built and how regulators adjust the gas cost line, see the purchased gas adjustment guide.

Same state, different years

State prices move, and not in parallel. Table 6 follows eleven states over six years, chosen to include the highest, the lowest and the most volatile. Hawaii and Florida stay at the top in every year. Massachusetts climbs from $14.71 to $25.06, a rise of 70 percent over the period, while the national average rose 42 percent. Nevada and Utah went the other way after 2023 and 2024, with Nevada falling from $18.69 to $13.14 in a single year.

Swings like Nevada’s are the reason to treat a single year’s ranking with care. A state that is cheap one year can be mid-table the next, and a small state’s average is easier to move, for example when a utility’s gas-cost recovery or a one-time charge shifts. The EIA table does not say which cause applies. When making a decision that depends on state prices, such as comparing heating fuels, look at several years rather than one.

How state prices relate to the national benchmark

Nationally, the residential price and the city gate price have both risen faster than the benchmark gas price over two decades, and the residential price has become much less sensitive to the wholesale price. Table 7 compares the annual Henry Hub spot price (in dollars per MMBtu) with the national city gate and residential prices (in dollars per Mcf) for nine selected years. The units differ, as the first column headers show, and one MMBtu is about 0.965 Mcf at 1,036 Btu per cubic foot, so the Henry Hub numbers are close to, but not exactly, comparable to the Mcf columns.

In 2005 the Henry Hub price and the city gate price were nearly the same, $8.69 and $8.67, and the residential price was $12.70, a gap of $4.03. In 2024 Henry Hub averaged $2.19, a quarter of its 2005 level, while the residential price had risen to $14.50 and the gap to $10.25. Cheaper gas did not reach the household. Between 2000 and 2025 the residential minus city gate gap grew from $3.14 to $10.49, and the Henry Hub price in 2025, $3.52, was lower than in 2000 or 2005. That is the central pattern in a state-by-state comparison: the molecule is a shrinking share of the price in most places, and what the state average shows is increasingly the cost of delivery.

The seasonal trap in monthly state data

The EIA also publishes monthly prices, and monthly numbers behave differently from annual ones. Table 8 shows the national monthly figures for February to July 2026 from the EIA’s Natural Gas Monthly tables. The residential price climbed from $14.95 to $26.45 per Mcf, a rise of 77 percent, while Henry Hub averaged between $2.77 and $3.62 per MMBtu and the city gate price stayed between $4.34 and $6.55.

A summer price on a state table is therefore not a like-for-like comparison with a winter price. When households use little gas, the monthly customer charge is divided across fewer units and the average per Mcf rises, even as the wholesale price is flat. The monthly data in this table is consistent with that, but it does not prove the mechanism, because the EIA does not break the average into components. The practical rule is to compare state prices on an annual basis, as Tables 1 and 6 do, and to compare your own bills on a like-for-like season.

Using the table for your own decision

A state average is most useful as a yardstick, not as a quote. Three uses hold up. First, a sense check on a bill: if the all-in price on your winter bill, in dollars per Mcf or per Ccf, is far above your state’s annual average in Table 1, ask whether the bill includes unusual charges, an estimated read or a low-use month. Second, a comparison of fuels. Table 9 shows what the same household would pay for the same gas at three prices, using the national average use of 59.5 Mcf a year, and also the cost per million Btu, which is the unit needed to compare gas with heating oil or propane. Third, an input to a heat pump or furnace decision, where the comparison against oil, propane and electricity is in the heating fuel cost per MMBtu guide.

For scale, EIA’s weekly residential heating oil price for the week of October 19, 2026 was $6.190 per gallon, and at 138,500 Btu per gallon that is $44.69 per MMBtu, against $14.81 for gas at the 2025 national average price. The comparison is only a snapshot, and a furnace’s efficiency changes both numbers, but it shows why the choice of state matters for the fuel decision: gas at Idaho’s price is about $7.42 per MMBtu, and at Hawaii’s price about $50.56.

Unit mistakes are the most common reason a state comparison goes wrong. The EIA table is in Mcf. Your bill may be in Ccf (one tenth of an Mcf) or therms, and a utility with an elevation factor changes the volume before pricing it. Convert before comparing, using the steps in the gas units guide. For the live wholesale price and storage position, the natural gas price page carries the current Henry Hub reading, and the storage report guide shows how inventories move it.

Patterns in the 2025 table

Group the 2025 table and a few regularities show. The ten lowest prices are mostly in the northern half of the country: Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota and Utah, then Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. None is in the Northeast or on the Pacific coast. The ten highest are Hawaii, Florida, Massachusetts, California, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, New Hampshire, Arizona and Vermont, a list that has three New England states and seven that do not. The Gulf Coast is the center of US gas production, yet Texas ranks sixth, which shows how little a state’s distance to the wellhead decides the retail price.

What the table cannot do is attribute the gaps. The EIA does not decompose state prices into commodity, pipeline, distribution and tax parts, so any statement about why a particular state is high is an inference from patterns such as the city gate gap and usage in Tables 4 and 5, not a finding. A state utility commission’s rate orders and gas cost filings are the primary sources for a specific utility.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Natural Gas Prices, annual tables: Average Residential Price (state table; series NG.N3010xx3.A, for example N3010US3 for the U.S.), Natural Gas Citygate Price (state table; N3050xx3.A), Percentage of Total Residential Deliveries included in Prices (state table), release date September 30, 2026, checked October 23, 2026. EIA, Natural Gas Delivered to Residential Consumers (2024), and Number of Natural Gas Residential Consumers (2024), checked October 23, 2026. EIA, Heat Content of Natural Gas Delivered to Consumers, 2025 values, checked October 23, 2026. EIA, Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price (series RNGWHHD), annual and monthly, release date October 21, 2026, checked October 23, 2026. EIA, Natural Gas Prices, U.S. monthly, checked October 23, 2026. Definitions: EIA, Natural Gas Prices definitions, sources and notes, checked October 23, 2026 (forms EIA-857 and EIA-910; nominal dollars). EIA, Heating Oil and Propane Update, week of October 19, 2026 ($6.190 per gallon), and EIA Btu factors (138,500 Btu per gallon of heating oil; 1,036 Btu per cubic foot of gas), checked October 23, 2026. Rankings, per-therm prices, implied annual spend, gaps and multiples are this page’s arithmetic and are not EIA statistics.