Your electricity network charges rise 16.4% on 1 October. Switching supplier will not touch a cent of it

From 1 October the regulated part of your electricity bill changes, and the direction depends entirely on how much power you buy. Households were told to expect about €41 more a year. The regulator's own example of a small business is roughly €314 worse off once every line is netted out, and most of that sits in charges no supplier switch can reduce. Here is where it lands, what it costs on your own kilowatt hours, and the one number on your paperwork that is worth an afternoon.

Start with your own number

Find your last electricity bill, or the annual statement behind it. Somewhere on it is the number of kilowatt hours you used over twelve months. That single figure is all you need, because this increase is charged per unit and per year, not as a percentage of your bill.

If your premises is a standard small non-domestic connection on a 24 hour meter, your distribution charge for the year from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027 is exactly this:

(your annual kWh x 7.605c) + €164.80

Last year the same sum used 6.532c and €141.55. Both are up 16.4%.

Run it on 48,000 kWh, purely to show the shape of it. Last year: €3,276.91. This year: €3,815.20. An extra €538 of cost, with not one more coffee sold. Put your own number in and you have your answer in thirty seconds.

Two other charges move in your favour on the same date. They do not cover it.

Where the increase actually sits

Three separate regulated charges arrive inside your unit rate and your standing charge, and none of them belong to the company that sends the bill.

• DUoS, distribution use of system. Pays for the poles, wires and local substations that bring power to your door. This is the one that went up.
• TUoS, transmission use of system. Pays for the high voltage grid. This one came down.
• The PSO levy, a flat monthly public service obligation charge that funds renewable generation and security of supply. This one came down a lot.

The Commission for Regulation of Utilities, the CRU, set all three on 29 July 2026. They are charged to your supplier, who then decides how much to pass on to you. That is why your bill may not move by exactly these amounts, and it is also why nobody selling you electricity is going to explain them.

The regulator's own worked examples

The CRU publishes an impact table for typical customers. These are its figures, after it cut €138m off what the two network companies asked for.

Distribution, 2025/26 against 2026/27:

• Household, 3,682 kWh: €275 to €321. Up €45, or 16.5%.
• Small business, 35,000 kWh, no capacity charge: €2,428 to €2,827. Up €399, or 16.4%.
• Medium business, 1.25m kWh with 350 kVA of capacity: €54,571 to €63,435. Up €8,864, or 16.2%.
• Large user, 25m kWh: €648,873 to €615,605. Down €33,268, or 5.1%.

Transmission goes the other way for everyone small. The same small business example falls from €1,299 to €1,259, down €39 or 3%. Two things are moving there in opposite directions: the transmission network charges rose 13.2%, but the system services charge, which is much the bigger of the two for a small user, fell 9.4%.

Add both sides. The small business archetype paid €3,727 in network charges last year and pays €4,086 this year, up €359. The household paid €412 and now pays €453, up €41. Almost the same percentage. Nearly nine times the cash.

Now the PSO levy. From 1 October it falls from €5.65 to €1.93 a month for a commercial customer with a capacity under 30 kVA, a 66% cut worth €44.64 a year. The household version falls from €1.46 to €0.51, worth €11.40.

Net it all out and the regulator's own small business example is about €314 a year worse off. The household is about €30 worse off. Same decision, ten times the money.

Why the biggest users got a cut and you did not

This is not a stitch-up, and it is worth understanding because it tells you not to expect a repeat.

Until 2022 a rebalancing arrangement shifted network costs between large energy users and everyone else. It was stopped, an error was found in how it had been applied, and the correction was recovered from large users over three years. 2025/26 was the final year of that recovery. Their charges last year carried it and this year's do not, so their line falls while yours climbs.

Your side rose for duller reasons. Distribution allowed revenue for 2027 is €1,582.51m, up 18.38% on 2026, driven mainly by the cost of responding to Storm Éowyn, an under-collection of distribution revenue during 2026, and inflation. The CRU cut €49.45m off the distribution request and moved €40m of the winter resilience programme into capital spend rather than operating cost, which spreads it over fifteen years instead of one.

One distinction worth holding on to, because it is being mangled everywhere: allowed revenue is up 18.38%, the tariff you pay is up 16.4%. Anyone quoting 18.4% as your bill increase has read the press release and not the decision.

Your contract decides when you feel it

Answer this today, because it changes what you do next.

Out of contract, on a variable rate, or on a contract that passes network charges through? The increase reaches you on your October bill. Nothing to decide, only to price for.

On a fixed all-in rate that runs past October? You are insulated until it ends, and then the whole thing arrives at once inside a renewal quote. That quote is being built now. Ask your supplier in writing whether network charges are passed through or fixed, and exactly when your term ends. If it ends between now and next spring, open the renewal conversation this month rather than in the week it expires.

Either way the money is real. The only variable is the date it shows up.

The MIC line is the one worth an afternoon

If your bill or your ESB Networks paperwork mentions MIC, maximum import capacity, read this part twice.

MIC is the electrical capacity you have contracted for, measured in kVA. It is not what you use. It is what you have reserved, and on a maximum demand connection you pay for it every year whether you draw it or not.

For the year from 1 October 2026 each kVA of MIC costs €57.37 in distribution capacity charge, up from €49.28. Capacity-based customers pay the PSO levy per kVA too, at €0.24 a month or €2.88 a year. So every kVA of contracted capacity costs you €60.25 a year.

If your MIC sits 10 kVA above anything the business has ever actually drawn, that headroom is €602.50 a year of pure fixed cost. Nothing you do in the shop changes it.

Premises end up oversized for ordinary reasons: an ambitious fit-out, a kitchen spec that never happened, equipment scrapped years ago, a previous tenant's laundry. The fix is unglamorous. Ask your electrician or energy consultant to pull your actual maximum demand from twelve months of half-hourly meter data, set it beside your contracted MIC, leave a sensible margin for growth and heatwaves, then apply to ESB Networks through its online connections platform to hand the difference back.

One honest warning. Going back up is not free. Increasing MIC can require a network upgrade and a capital contribution from you, so do not cut to the bone, and do not cut at all if a real expansion is on the plan for the next two years.

While you are in there, note what a bigger connection costs before anyone talks you into upgrading your supply for a single new appliance. A low voltage maximum demand site pays a standing charge of €1,537.22 a year in 2026/27. A small non-maximum-demand site pays €164.80.

The night rate, and the meter that decides whether it helps

"Run things overnight" is advice you will hear from every direction, and it is half right.

On a 24 hour meter there is a single distribution unit rate, 7.605c, day and night alike. Running the dishwasher at 2am saves you nothing at all on this part of the bill.

On a day and night meter the distribution unit is 8.893c by day and 1.086c at night. That is a factor of about eight. Water heating, ice making, dishwashing, laundry, overnight prep, van or car charging: anything you can genuinely move is worth moving.

On a smart time of use arrangement there is a third rate: a peak unit of 9.662c against a day off-peak unit of 8.783c, about 10% more for the peak window.

So the first question is not "can I shift load", it is "which meter am I on". It is printed on your bill. If you are on a 24 hour meter and you do have a real night load, ask your supplier what changing the arrangement would involve before you reorganise anybody's shift.

What this does to what the business is worth

The part that outlives this tariff year is that the fixed elements rose at the same rate as the units. The standing charge is up 16.4%. The capacity charge is up 16.4%. Both are payable in full in a dead January.

Cost that does not flex with trading pushes up your break-even point and thins the gap between a slow month and a loss. It also turns up in diligence. A buyer working out your real profit looks hard at how much of the cost base survives a bad quarter, and a business paying for 20 kVA it never draws is carrying roughly €1,200 a year of waste that a buyer will either take off the price or, more often, read as a sign the rest of the costs have never been looked at either.

Which is the reason an MIC reduction is worth more than the cash it returns. A permanent, documented cut to a fixed cost lifts profit every year, and profit that repeats is what gets multiplied when you sell. A one-off saving does not. Our guide on improving profit margins takes the rest of the cost base in the same order.

And if you plan to reprice to absorb this, price against the number rather than the fear, because for once you have the number. How to raise prices covers doing that without losing volume. If you are also still absorbing the rising cost of employing someone in Ireland, including the PRSI step that lands on the same 1 October, do both sums before you set the new list.