NEA electricity tariff slabs decoded: why crossing 20 units changes your whole bill
Nepal's NEA domestic tariff, decoded: the free 20 units for 5A homes, the Rs 3 retro-charge when you cross it, the service-charge staircase, and the new 5% VAT above 50 units.
My aunt in Bhaktapur pays Rs 30 for electricity most monsoon months. Last Magh, with a geyser running and the family visiting, her bill came to about Rs 900, and she was convinced the meter reader had made a mistake, because thirty times more usage than "basically free" did not seem physically possible in one house.
No mistake. She had simply left the free band, and the tariff is built so that leaving it repriced everything at once: her first 20 units stopped being free, her energy rate climbed band by band, and her fixed service charge stepped up too. The whole structure fits on one table, and once you see it, every strange NEA bill you have ever received makes sense.
Where the table comes from, and how current it is
Nepal's electricity prices are not set by NEA alone: the Electricity Regulatory Commission approves them. The operative household schedule comes from the ERC's tariff determination decided in Kartik 2078, applied to billing from Poush 2078 (December 2021), and the ERC's charge-order page still lists it as the ruling consumer tariff, so those rates have now held for over four years. That order actually cut domestic tariffs slightly, by an average 2.84%.
Whether it holds much longer is an open question: NEA has been reported to be mulling a 10 to 15% increase, citing a small per-unit deficit, but nothing takes effect unless the ERC approves it, and as of this writing it has not.
The full domestic table, 5A and 15A
The two meter capacities most Kathmandu homes actually have. Each cell reads service charge / energy rate, straight from the ERC order (30A and 60A columns exist too, with higher service charges and the same energy rates from 21 units up):
| Units per month | 5A (Rs/month, Rs/unit) | 15A (Rs/month, Rs/unit) |
|---|---|---|
| 0–20 | 30 / free* | 50 / 4.00 |
| 21–30 | 50 / 6.50 | 75 / 6.50 |
| 31–50 | 50 / 8.00 | 75 / 8.00 |
| 51–100 | 75 / 9.50 | 100 / 9.50 |
| 101–250 | 100 / 9.50 | 125 / 9.50 |
| Above 250 | 150 / 11.00 | 175 / 11.00 |
*Free only if the month's total stays within 20 units; see the next section.
Energy is charged marginally, band by band, the way income tax slabs work: each band's rate applies only to the units inside that band. The bill for a month is then energy (summed across bands) plus the single service charge for the slab your total landed in. Worked from the table for a 5A home, my own arithmetic from the ERC rates:
| Month's usage | Energy charge | Service charge | Bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 units | Rs 0 | Rs 30 | Rs 30 |
| 21 units | Rs 66.50 | Rs 50 | Rs 116.50 |
| 80 units | Rs 570 | Rs 75 | Rs 645 |
| 150 units | Rs 1,235 | Rs 100 | Rs 1,335 |
| 250 units | Rs 2,185 | Rs 100 | Rs 2,285 |
Note what the first two rows say: the 21st unit of the month costs Rs 86.50 in marginal terms. There is no more expensive single unit of electricity in Nepal.
The 20-unit rule: free, until it isn't
The free band was introduced as budget policy (10 units in 2020, expanded to 20 units in 2021) and written into the ERC order as a waiver for 5-ampere consumers: no energy charge within 20 units, minimum charge of Rs 30 still due. Around 2 million households benefited in the first year, drifting down to about 1.7 million as consumption grew; the Kathmandu Post has reported the count swinging between roughly 1.6 and 2.2 million with the seasons.
The clawback is the part almost nobody reads. The ERC table's own footnote states that if a 5A consumer exceeds 20 units in a month, units 1 through 20 are charged at Rs 3 per unit. The free electricity is conditional on the whole month staying small; it is not a standing discount on your first 20 units. That footnote, plus the service charge stepping from Rs 30 to Rs 50, is the entire anatomy of the Rs 30-to-Rs 117 jump in the table above, and of my aunt's Magh surprise.
A plan to expand the free band to 30 or 50 units was announced in 2023 and then dropped: NEA priced the expansion at Rs 12 billion a year against Rs 1.8 billion for the current scheme, and the government backed off.
The service-charge staircase
The second stepwise mechanic hides in the left half of each table cell. The ERC schedule sets one fixed monthly service charge per slab-and-ampere combination, which means the charge is chosen by where your month's total lands: a 5A home pays Rs 50 at 50 units, Rs 75 at 51, and Rs 100 at 101. The regulator publishes no prose sentence spelling out the repricing; it follows from the table's structure, and the bill-calculator sites that track NEA read it the same way. If your printed bill seems to disagree, believe the bill and check the meter reading dates instead.
In rupee terms the steps are small, Rs 25 here and there. The reason to know about them is diagnostic: a bill that jumps by more than your usage seems to justify has usually crossed one of the staircase boundaries at 20, 50, 100 or 250 units (or the per-unit rate step at 30), and the fix, if you want one, is rarely more than a few units of restraint at month-end.
What actually pushes a home across bands
Slab position is decided by a handful of heavy appliances, not by lights and phone chargers. Indicative arithmetic from published wattage figures (estimates, not measurements): a 2,000-watt induction stove draws about 2 units per hour, so daily cooking can add 60 to 120 units a month; an electric geyser used an hour a day adds around 60; a continuously running fridge can add up to about 100 depending on size and efficiency; a 1-ton AC through a Tarai summer, 200 or more.
That sounds like an argument against electric cooking. It is not, because the comparison that matters is against LPG, and there the reporting is consistent: induction users interviewed by the Kathmandu Post spend around Rs 700 to 800 a month cooking on electricity, against a Rs 1,900 cylinder lasting roughly 25 days for a large family, and an earlier Tribhuvan University study put a family of five at about Rs 1,000 on electricity versus Rs 1,650 on gas. Crossing into the Rs 9.50 band while dropping the cylinder is a trade that usually pays; the same logic at vehicle scale is the EV-versus-petrol post's territory, and home EV charging, for what it is worth, simply pays these same domestic slab rates, since the ERC schedule has no household time-of-day tariff.
For scale: a Kathmandu Post analysis of NEA data notes that about 45% of metered households average only around 7 units a month, while the rest average around 119. Most readers of this blog are in the second group, living between the 51 and 250 unit rows.
The budget's 5% VAT above 50 units (threshold still moving)
The FY 2083/84 budget wrote a new line into bills: 5% VAT on household electricity consumption above 50 units a month, first 50 units exempt, slated for Shrawan 1, 2083. Coverage reports the VAT applying to the energy charge only, not the service charge, touching around 2.5 to 2.6 million residential consumers, roughly 44% of NEA's customer base. On the worked 150-unit bill above it would add about Rs 48; the widely-quoted news estimate of "up to Rs 24 a month" for the 51-to-150 band matches a home at about 100 units, not 150, so treat the headline ceilings as loose.
Whether it arrives in this form is genuinely unsettled as this is written: the Finance Minister told Parliament in late June that the threshold may rise to 100 or 150 units before implementation, and at least one outlet has reported the electricity VAT being withdrawn outright. Check your first Shrawan bill against the final Finance Act rather than against this paragraph. The change sits alongside the budget's other price moves, mapped in the cheaper-and-costlier post.
The cheapest discount in your budget: pay within a week
NEA's payment schedule rewards promptness and punishes drift, per the rules as reported:
| When you pay (from meter-reading day) | Effect |
|---|---|
| Within 7 days | 2% discount |
| Day 8–15 | Face value |
| Day 16–30 | +5% |
| Day 31–40 | +10% |
| Day 41–60 | +25% |
| After 60 days | Line can be disconnected without notice |
Two percent is small; 25% is not, and households that let two bills pile up are paying a worse rate than most loan penalties. Autopay through the NEA billing portal or a wallet closes the gap cheaply (eSewa and Khalti each charge about Rs 5 on NEA payments above Rs 500). A monthly Rs 1,000-ish line item that quietly leaks 5 to 25% to late fees is exactly the species of drip the cost-of-living budget never shows.
What you actually need to know
- The bill has two staircases, and only one of them is about your usage rate. Energy is charged band by band (with a rate step at 30 units), but the fixed service charge jumps at 20, 50, 100 and 250 units. A bill that grew faster than your usage almost certainly crossed a boundary.
- The 20-unit free band is all-or-nothing. On a 5A meter, unit number 21 costs about Rs 86.50 once the retro-charge and the service step are counted. Households genuinely near the line (many with elderly parents living alone are) can hold a Rs 30 bill with nothing more than switching the geyser to a specific day-count.
- Pay within seven days, always. The 2% discount is free money, the 25% late tier is an expensive loan you never agreed to, and autopay makes the whole question disappear.
This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide, in the save-the-gap section next to the Kathmandu cost-of-living budget.
Got an NEA bill that refuses to make sense against this table? Email the unit count and amount (no account numbers) to parjanya57@gmail.com.
Frequently asked questions
- Is electricity really free up to 20 units in Nepal?
- For 5-ampere household consumers only, and only if the whole month stays within 20 units. The Rs 30 monthly minimum charge still applies, so the cheapest possible NEA bill is Rs 30, not zero. The regulator's tariff order adds a sting: if a 5A household consumes even one unit beyond 20, the first 20 units stop being free and are charged at Rs 3 per unit. Roughly 1.7 to 2 million households have qualified in a typical month since the rule took effect in late 2021.
- Does NEA charge all my units at the highest slab rate I reach?
- No. Energy is charged marginally, band by band: a 5A home using 80 units pays Rs 3 for units 1 to 20 (because it crossed the free threshold), Rs 6.50 for units 21 to 30, Rs 8 for 31 to 50, and Rs 9.50 for 51 to 80. The one true whole-bill repricing is the 5A free band itself, where crossing 20 units retroactively charges the first 20. The other thing that jumps in one step is the fixed monthly service charge, which is set by the slab your total consumption lands in.
- What is the service charge on my NEA bill, and why did it jump?
- It is a fixed monthly charge that depends on two things: your meter's ampere rating and the consumption slab your total for the month falls into. The regulator's table sets one service charge per slab, so a 5A home pays Rs 50 a month at 50 units but Rs 75 at 51 units, and Rs 100 once the month crosses 100 units. It moves in steps, not gradually, which is why a small increase in usage can look like a disproportionate jump on the bill.
- How does the new 5% VAT on household electricity work?
- As legislated in the FY 2083/84 budget, 5% VAT applies to household consumption above 50 units a month from Shrawan 2083 (mid-July 2026), with the first 50 units exempt; reports of the change say the VAT lands on the energy charge only, not the service charge. The provision was still moving as this post was written: in late June the Finance Minister told Parliament the threshold may rise to 100 or 150 units before implementation, and some reports suggested outright withdrawal. In the 50-unit form it would touch around 2.5 to 2.6 million residential customers; check the final Finance Act.
- Is there a discount for paying the NEA bill early?
- Yes, 2% if you pay within seven days counting from the meter-reading day. From day 8 to 15 you pay the plain amount. After that the penalties stack: 5% extra from day 16 to 30, 10% from day 31 to 40, and 25% from day 41 to 60. Past 60 days NEA can disconnect the line without further notice, and reconnection means fees and queueing.
- How many units do common appliances actually use?
- Indicative arithmetic from published wattage figures: a 2,000-watt induction stove draws about 2 units per hour, so an hour a day adds roughly 60 units a month. An electric geyser is similar. A fridge running around the clock can add up to about 100 units a month depending on size and efficiency, and a 1-ton AC run 8 hours daily in Tarai heat can add over 200. These are estimates for orientation, not measurements; the appliances you run daily decide which slab your home lives in.