American anxiety about paying for electricity and home heating fuel has intensified since the outbreak of the Iran war. But newly released national data reveals that even before the conflict began, these worries were already widespread, deeply entrenched, and accelerating faster than official figures can capture.
The new data comes from preliminary reports drawn from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a nationally representative study of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The early findings confirm that energy insecurity — a largely invisible hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet a household's energy needs — affects millions of American families and is getting worse at an alarming pace.
As a researcher who has spent years visiting hundreds of homes across the country and listening directly to people living with energy insecurity, I rely on this survey data to put numbers to suffering I have witnessed firsthand.
The most recent tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, though complete results remain pending. The prior survey was conducted in 2020, but its findings were not finalized until August 2025.
Despite the data's incompleteness and slow release cycle, the overall picture is clear: even households that once felt confident about covering their energy costs are now struggling to keep up with bills, making painful trade-offs to keep the lights on, and living in homes they cannot afford to heat or cool properly.
A pandemic success story, undone
The survey asks respondents whether, in the previous 12 months, they received a disconnection notice threatening to cut off their home's electricity, gas, or other fuel service for unpaid bills. It also asks whether services were actually disconnected; whether they bought less food or skipped medication to pay energy bills; or whether they allowed their home to reach unsafe temperatures because heating or cooling was too expensive to run or repair.
Taken together, the responses paint a portrait of a substantial share of the American population struggling to afford housing and energy, and resorting to a range of coping strategies to get by.
A longitudinal look at the data makes the trend unmistakable: more Americans are living with energy insecurity today than in previous years. In 2024, 43.6 million American households — 32.9% of all homes — reported experiencing some form of energy insecurity. In 2015, that figure stood at 31.3%. By 2020, it had actually fallen to 27.2%.
That 2020 dip reflects the real impact of pandemic-era government interventions, including direct cash payments and moratoriums on utility shutoffs, which proved effective at reducing energy hardship — but were ultimately too short-lived to sustain those gains through 2024.
A post-pandemic surge reaches new households
Middle-income households — those earning between $60,000 and $200,000 annually — were hit hardest by post-pandemic inflation in housing, food, and borrowing costs. The new survey data shows that rising energy costs compounded that squeeze significantly.
In 2020, 20.1% of households earning between $60,000 and $100,000 reported struggling to afford their energy. By 2024, that figure had jumped to 32.1% — a 12 percentage-point increase, more than double the national average rise of 5.7 points.
Racial disparities persisted as well. Black, Hispanic, and American Indian households have historically faced disproportionate energy insecurity, and between 2020 and 2024, their risk continued to grow.
But the steepest climb was among white households: in 2020, 20.1% reported trouble affording energy costs. By 2024, that share had risen to 26.4%.
Working-age adults and seniors feel the strain
In 2024, larger proportions of householders under 60 — and of households with children — reported difficulty meeting their home energy needs compared with 2020. These parallel increases confirm that younger, working-age households are under mounting financial pressure.
Yet working-age adults without children, particularly moderate-income renters, have less of a safety net to fall back on when utility bills go unpaid. That's because most energy assistance programs were designed to prioritize those who have historically been most vulnerable — leaving this group with fewer options.
Older Americans have historically been among the best-protected, shielded by both government and utility programs and by the fact that household wealth typically peaks later in life. Even so, the share of seniors experiencing energy insecurity rose from roughly 1 in 5 in 2020 to 1 in 4 in 2024 — a sign that long-standing protections for older Americans are losing their effectiveness.
A well-insulated home is no longer enough
Home efficiency has long been seen as a buffer against high energy bills. But the data undermines that assumption. Households in well-insulated homes or those with double-pane windows saw their rates of energy insecurity rise at roughly the same pace as those in poorly insulated homes.
People in uninsulated homes still carry the highest risk of being unable to afford their energy costs — but their risk grew more slowly than those in better-insulated dwellings.
Meanwhile, households with single-pane windows, already in a precarious position, saw their risk of unaffordable energy costs climb by 7 percentage points.
The greatest need, the least support
Geographically, the sharpest increases in energy insecurity appeared in warmer regions of the country. The Southwest recorded the largest jump of any climate zone — a full 10 percentage points — followed by the Southeast and Gulf Coast, where the rate climbed from 30.1% to 35.6%.
As rising temperatures drive up demand for cooling, most government assistance programs remain oriented toward heating costs in colder northern states — a geographic mismatch between where help is directed and where the need is growing fastest.
Even the Northeast, where federal energy assistance reaches a large share of households, saw higher proportions of residents struggling to pay their energy bills.
A crisis that has outgrown its policy framework
Energy insecurity remains most severe among the most disadvantaged Americans — low-income households, renters, and Black, Hispanic, and American Indian families.
But the trend lines now tell a broader story: energy insecurity is spreading into middle-income, white, working-age households in efficient homes in warm-weather regions — populations that previously had relatively little trouble covering their energy needs.
The 2024 RECS data makes clear that the existing safety net for energy affordability is not keeping pace — not in scale, not in geographic reach, and not in the demographics it serves.
The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides funds to help families pay utility bills, was created in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis. It was built around the need for home heating assistance — not cooling — and focused on helping households in immediate danger of losing life-sustaining utilities. Its focus and funding have changed little since then.
Meanwhile, the economics of household energy have shifted dramatically. New conflicts are prolonging dependence on volatile fossil-fuel markets, driving price swings through the same supply chains the program was designed to buffer against half a century ago. On the domestic front, the proliferation of data centers is pushing residential electricity rates higher. Clean energy investments that might have insulated households from energy price shocks have been politically targeted and curtailed, with real consequences for both household budgets and public health.
The 2024 data — rigorous and reliable as it is — is already lagging behind a fast-moving crisis. Millions more Americans are struggling to keep the lights on, the heat running, and the air conditioning working. And there is every reason to believe the situation today is worse than even the most recent numbers show.
Some of Diana Hernández' funding at Columbia University includes a service agreement with a regulated utility company in New York that supports compliance with state laws regarding disadvantaged communities and community-centered capital planning efforts.
