Tampa Electric Company’s Big Bend plant in Apollo Beach, Florida. Credit: Dennis McDonald / TECO Plant Big Bend Apollo Beach
On Tuesday, the Florida Public Service Commission approved a rate hike for Tampa Electric customers.
According to Food & Water Watch, the average TECO residential customer will pay $5.51 more each month starting in January.
The move is the next step of a decision made last year to increase rates in 2025 and 2026.
A Food & Water Watch analysis finds that the average TECO customer’s bill will be 82% higher —$939 a year more —than five years ago.
Brooke Ward is the Senior Florida organizer with the Food and Water Watch.
“That’s almost $1,000 more that families have to be able to scrap together in just the last five years, in order to keep lights on in their home and to use life-saving electricity,” Ward told WMNF.
Ward called the move “a corporate greed grab game” and called on lawmakers to pass reforms in the upcoming legislative session.
“The truth of the matter is that Governor DeSantis’s administration has allowed a series of legislation to be passed over the past few years that allows utilities to get more from us, and we’d like to see some reforms, affordable energy reform legislation that rolls back how much money these utilities can get.” Ward said.
Last weekend, the Tampa Bay Sierra Club, Congress member Kathy Castor, and others protested the rate hike by throwing TECO bills into a trash can full of smoke.
This post first appeared at WMNF news, which is part of the Tampa Bay Journalism Project (TBJP), a nascent Creative Loafing Tampa Bay effort supported by grants and a coalition of donors who make specific contributions via the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. If you are a non-paywalled Bay area publication interested in TBJP, please email rroa@ctampa.com. Support WMNF News by visiting the community radio station’s station’s support page.
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This article appears in Nov. 6 – 12, 2025.
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