Water, Electric, Gas Bills SKYROCKET in El Paso | What Homeowners Must Know NOW

Water, Electric, Gas Bills in El Paso - What Homeowners Must Know

The Affordability Issue

Affordability is all you're hearing about in the news lately. But if you're living in El Paso, Texas, there are some serious issues happening with our utility companies-water, gas, and electric-that are going to affect the affordability of living here in El Paso. Let's look at exactly what each utility is proposing, how much of an increase, and what that means for you.

El Paso Water: 12% Increase

El Paso Water is proposing a 12% increase on the bill. For an average bill in El Paso, that's going to be around $10 extra a month. They're citing rising costs of water, wastewater, and stormwater services, plus investments in infrastructure as the reason. They're having public hearings on January 14th, 2026, and if approved, it will go into effect on March 1st.

Water is critically important. We recently did a video on upcoming developments and talked about a Meta AI data center that was going to use a massive amount of water-up to or more than 400,000 gallons a day. There's another data center that's supposed to come to Santa Teresa called Project Jupiter, which will also consume a lot of water. We hope to God that El Paso Water's price increase isn't driven by these data centers. If we're paying for water infrastructure for data centers, that's not cool.

To their credit, El Paso Water is doing different projects. The Bamonte wastewater treatment plant on the west side is getting a big overhaul. They're doing work on the desalination plant to expand it. Those are needed investments. We want wastewater and stormwater infrastructure to work properly. But if these increases are going to appease big corporations rather than serve residents, that's problematic.

El Paso Electric: $20-22 Monthly Increase

For El Paso Electric, the average bill is about $96 and will go up to about $118. That's roughly $20 to $22 more a month for most people. They say it's to recover costs and fund future infrastructure. An administrative law judge recommended a smaller increase, which would mean a lower profit margin allowed. The final decision is going to be made in February 2026.

They're saying they need this extra money to pay off $1.55 billion in various investments made between 2021 and 2024.

Now, this is interesting. There's something in the fine print about El Paso Electric's plans. They're planning to spend $4.4 billion in capital projects over the next 5 years. Most of that spending is driven largely by the construction boom and power-hungry data centers, plus increased electricity demand for air conditioning homes and businesses caused by higher average temperatures.

This sounds a little sketchy. $4.4 billion over five years? Some of that makes sense-air conditioning costs, maybe temperatures getting a little higher. Fair enough. But the power-hungry data centers part is insane. If we're paying for Meta's AI data center, we know from our previous video that it consumes an astronomical amount of energy. That's not cool.

Texas Gas Service: 27% Increase

Texas Gas Service is proposing an increase of 27%. That's about $10 to $15 on average. The city council and local leaders are pushing back, which is good because somebody's got to do something about all these increases. The final approval authority is the Railroad Commission of Texas, and it's going to be decided in early 2026.

In our last video about corporate developments, a lot of people in the comments were saying the city council was corrupt or bribed and not doing anything. But it does sound like the city council unanimously voted this one down. We can't speak to other accusations, but at least on this one, they stepped up. A 27% increase is pretty substantial.

The Combined Impact

If all of these proposed changes took place, people would see their monthly cost increase by about $40 to $45 a month. That translates to about $480 to $500 more per year. When we did our video on developments, it got people riled up. We wanted to keep talking about issues that are going to affect El Pasoans.

We're real estate agents and we do work with a lot of PCS and relocating traffic. One of the things we say is awesome about El Paso is that it's affordable. But once utility costs start going up, it starts to eat into that affordability. We wanted to make sure you're aware of what's coming.