FPL Peak Hours: When to Shift and Save

FPL’s optional Time-of-Use rider prices peak electricity at 25¢/kWh and off-peak at 6.8¢/kWh, a 3.7x gap. What trips people up isn’t the price, it’s that the peak window itself is a completely different shape depending on the month.

FPL’s RTR-1 Residential TOU Rider

FPL doesn’t offer a standalone TOU plan, it’s a rider (RTR-1) added on top of the standard residential rate (RS-1). The rate itself doesn’t change between seasons, only the shape of the peak window does.

Season	Months	Peak hours	Peak rate	Off-peak hours	Off-peak rate
Winter	Nov–Mar	6–10am and 6–10pm	25.05¢/kWh	10am–6pm and 10pm–6am	6.8¢/kWh
Summer	Apr–Oct	12pm–9pm, single block	25.05¢/kWh	9pm–12pm	6.8¢/kWh

Winter has two separate three-and-a-half-hour peak windows bracketing the day, morning and evening. Summer collapses into one nine-hour block covering midday through evening. The rate is identical either way, only the clock changes.

That’s the opposite of what most people assume about Florida. Air conditioning is the dominant summer load, and you’d expect the peak to be a narrow late-afternoon window like California’s 4–9pm plans. Instead, FPL’s summer peak starts at noon and runs for nine straight hours, because AC demand in Florida stays elevated basically all afternoon and evening, not just the last few hours before sunset.

What Shifting Is Worth, in Dollars

Take a load of laundry and running the dishwasher after dinner in summer, about 4 kWh, squarely inside the 12pm–9pm peak block.

At peak: 4 kWh × $0.2505 = $1.00 Same load shifted to after 9pm: 4 kWh × $0.068 = $0.27

That’s $0.73 saved per shifted routine, a 73% cut. Over 150 summer days, consistently moving one load a day out of the nine-hour peak window is worth roughly $110 for the season.

The Nine-Hour Summer Window Is the Real Challenge

FPL’s summer peak isn’t a narrow evening window you can dodge by running the dishwasher an hour later. Noon to 9pm covers lunch, the entire afternoon, dinner, and early evening, essentially all the hours a household is normally active and home. Getting real value from this rider in summer means concentrating discretionary usage into the after-9pm and before-noon hours specifically, not just “avoiding dinnertime.”

Winter is more forgiving. The two separate peak windows (6–10am, 6–10pm) leave a wide 10am–6pm off-peak block in the middle of the day, plenty of room to run midday loads like laundry or a pool pump at the cheap rate without touching either peak window.

Should You Add the TOU Rider?

This only pays off if you can genuinely push usage into FPL’s off-peak hours, and in summer that’s a narrower ask than it looks (nine hours off, fifteen hours on). A household with a pool pump that can run overnight, an EV that charges after 9pm, or a flexible daytime schedule in winter can come out ahead. A household running the AC and cooking dinner right in the middle of that nine-hour summer block will likely do better staying on the standard flat rate.

For the broader picture on what’s driving a high Florida electric bill beyond the rate structure, 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.