Con Edison Peak Hours: When to Shift and Save

Con Edison’s default rate charges the same price no matter when you use power. Most customers never think twice about that. But Con Ed also offers an optional Time-of-Use rate where summer peak electricity costs 27.9¢/kWh and off-peak costs 5.2¢/kWh, more than a 5x gap for the same electrons.

Almost nobody switches to it, mostly because almost nobody knows it exists.

Con Edison’s Optional Time-of-Use Rate

Con Ed calls it the Residential and Religious Voluntary Time-of-Day rate (Rate III on the tariff), a name left over from when it was originally designed to accommodate Sabbath-observant customers. It’s open to any residential customer today, you don’t need to meet any religious criteria to enroll.

Period	Hours	Summer (Jun–Sep)	Rest of year
Peak	8am–midnight, every day	27.9¢/kWh	17.1¢/kWh
Off-peak	Midnight–8am, every day	5.2¢/kWh	5.2¢/kWh

That’s a 16-hour peak window, wider than almost any other utility on this list. The upside: off-peak runs every single night, all year, at a rate that barely moves with the season. The downside: 8am to midnight covers essentially all of a typical household’s waking hours, so shifting meaningfully means concentrating usage into the 8-hour overnight window.

This TOU rate is separate from Con Edison’s standard flat rate (Rate I), which most customers default to. It’s also separate from the older, closed Rate II, which stopped accepting new enrollees in March 2014 and carries different hours and pricing for the legacy customers still on it.

These are delivery charges only. Con Edison, like most New York utilities, bills delivery and supply separately, and your supply charge (what actually generates the electricity) is on top of these numbers and doesn’t vary by time of day under most standard supply arrangements.

What Shifting Is Worth, in Dollars

Take a summer evening: dishwasher, a laundry cycle, and cooking, about 5 kWh, all inside the 8am-to-midnight peak window (which, at these hours, is most evenings for most households).

At peak: 5 kWh × $0.279 = $1.40 Same load shifted after midnight: 5 kWh × $0.052 = $0.26

That’s $1.14 saved on one evening’s routine, an 81% reduction on that portion of the bill. Run a pattern like that on 120 nights across the summer season and it’s about $137 for the season, just from delivery charges on one shifted routine. The percentage swing is dramatic; the dollar swing is smaller than California utilities on this list simply because Con Edison’s delivery rates are lower in absolute terms than SCE’s or SDG&E’s peak pricing.

Why This Rate Is Hard to Use Well

The 8am-to-midnight peak window is the honest catch with this plan. Unlike a utility with a 4–9pm peak, where you just need to delay a few evening chores by a couple of hours, Con Edison’s off-peak window only opens at midnight. Getting real value out of this rate means running the dishwasher on delay-start for after midnight, doing laundry in the very early morning or very late at night, and generally treating “daytime” as expensive electricity, all day, every day.

That’s realistic for households with an EV that can charge overnight regardless, or anyone with a flexible schedule. It’s a much harder sell for a family running a normal evening routine, since nearly everything people do with electricity, cooking, laundry, kids’ bedtime routines, happens squarely inside the 16-hour peak window.

Should You Switch?

If your household’s electricity use is concentrated in the evening, between dinner and bedtime, this plan likely costs more than the standard flat rate, not less; you’d be paying peak pricing for hours that would otherwise just be flat-rate hours. If you have real ability to push heavy loads into the midnight-to-8am window, the savings are real and the off-peak rate barely changes by season, so the win is consistent year-round rather than a summer-only benefit.

The only way to know for sure is to check your own hourly usage against both rate structures rather than guess based on a “should” story. For the fixed-cost side of a high Con Edison bill that no rate switch will fix, see why is my electric bill so high.

For more ways to cut the bill beyond the rate plan itself, see how to lower your electric bill.