Privacy Policy

Utility Rates is an informational website. We publish estimated utility costs by city and county using publicly available rate data. Browsing those pages does not require an account, and we do not run a newsletter.

One page asks for information on purpose: Share your utility bill. That form is optional. What we collect, what we may publish, and what we keep private is described below.

Some pages also include a third-party comparison tool for internet service or, on Texas electricity pages, retail electric providers. That partner collects what you enter under its own policies. Separately, Mediavine serves interest-based advertising on the site. Both are described below.

The form asks for a state, a city, and at least one bill: the utility, the month, and the amount. You can also add a provider name, usage, and a few flags about the bill (for example, whether it was budget-billed or an estimated meter read). Internet reports can include speed, connection type, and whether a promotional price will change later. Every one of those extras is optional.

Home details are optional, and they can be published. If you fill them in, we may show home type, whether you rent or own, household size, approximate square footage, and primary heating fuel next to the report. Those fields do not include your name. In a small town, several of them together can still point to a particular household. Leave any of them blank if you would not want that combination on a public page.

Some fields are stored and not published. ZIP code, if you provide one, is used to tell neighborhoods on different utility systems apart. Free-text comments are read during review. We do not publish ZIP codes or comments. The form has no fields for your name, street address, or account number. Please do not put those in a comment.

Nothing appears on the site automatically. Each submission is stored as pending and reviewed. We may reject a report that looks like spam, a duplicate, or something we cannot use. Approved reports are published only after a place has enough of them to be more than a single anecdote, and they stay labeled as visitor-reported, separate from our tariff-based estimates. A published line can include the city, utility, provider, month, amount, usage, and any optional home details you chose to share.

Email is a separate choice. We store an email address only if you check the box and provide one. We also store the consent wording shown on the form, and the state, city, and ZIP you entered with that submission, so we know which area to write you about. The only message that box authorizes is a notice when published bill data is available for your area. It is not a newsletter, and we do not sell or share the address. If that address was already unsubscribed, we leave it that way. Any email we send will include a way to unsubscribe.

Abuse checks. We store a salted one-way hash of your IP address and, when the browser sends one, of the user-agent string. We use those hashes to limit how many submissions one source can make in a day and to spot automated traffic. We do not publish them, and we do not keep the raw IP address in the submission database. We also store the page you came from and how long the form was open, for the same review. Before a submission is saved, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that it came from a person. Cloudflare processes that check, which can include your IP address, under Cloudflare’s privacy policy.

Submissions are kept so we can review them and, when approved, publish the non-identifying fields above. There is no account page where you can delete a report yourself. Email us and we will remove a submission or an email address we can match. Because we never ask for your name, include the city, utility, month, and amount, and the email address if you opted in.

Some pages include an embedded comparison experience operated by a partner (Allconnect / MyFinance). That includes the internet providers tool, city, county, and state internet-provider pages, and Texas pages that compare electricity providers. Each widget shows its own advertiser disclosure; that text describes how offers may be compensated and ordered.

Relationship to Utility Rates: We may receive compensation when you engage with that tool (for example, when you click through or sign up for service), depending on our agreement with the partner. That is a standard affiliate or performance arrangement and does not change our editorial utility-rate content elsewhere on the site.

Data collection: Information you enter into an embedded tool—such as a ZIP code, service address, contact details, or enrollment information—and cookies or similar technologies used inside it, are handled by the partner under their privacy practices—not by Utility Rates. For details, see the partner’s policies, for example Red Ventures’ privacy policy (Allconnect is a Red Ventures brand) and their cookie policy.

The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the Website.

First party cookies are created by the website that you are visiting. A third-party cookie is frequently used in behavioral advertising and analytics and is created by a domain other than the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies, tags, pixels, beacons and other similar technologies (collectively, “Tags”) may be placed on the Website to monitor interaction with advertising content and to target and optimize advertising. Each internet browser has functionality so that you can block both first and third-party cookies and clear your browser’s cache. The "help" feature of the menu bar on most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, how to disable existing cookies and how to clear your browser’s cache. For more information about cookies and how to disable them, you can consult the information at All About Cookies.

Without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of the Website content and features. Please note that rejecting cookies does not mean that you will no longer see ads when you visit our Site. In the event you opt-out, you will still see non-personalized advertisements on the Website.

The Website collects the following data using a cookie when serving personalized ads:

• IP Address
• Operating System type
• Operating System version
• Device Type
• Language of the website
• Web browser type
• Email (in hashed form)

Mediavine Partners (companies listed below with whom Mediavine shares data) may also use this data to link to other end user information the partner has independently collected to deliver targeted advertisements. Mediavine Partners may also separately collect data about end users from other sources, such as advertising IDs or pixels, and link that data to data collected from Mediavine publishers in order to provide interest-based advertising across your online experience, including devices, browsers and apps. This data includes usage data, cookie information, device information, information about interactions between users and advertisements and websites, geolocation data, traffic data, and information about a visitor’s referral source to a particular website. Mediavine Partners may also create unique IDs to create audience segments, which are used to provide targeted advertising.

If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices to opt-in or opt-out of this data collection, please visit National Advertising Initiative opt out page. You may also visit Digital Advertising Alliance website and Network Advertising Initiative website to learn more information about interest-based advertising. You may download the AppChoices app at Digital Advertising Alliance’s AppChoices app to opt out in connection with mobile apps, or use the platform controls on your mobile device to opt out.

For specific information about Mediavine Partners, the data each collects and their data collection and privacy policies, please visit Mediavine Partners.

• We do not require an account to browse the site or to submit a bill.
• We do not sell bill submissions or email addresses, and we do not use them for advertising.
• We do not use our own hosting logs to build advertising profiles.

Interest-based ads are described under Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.1). Comparison tools are described under Third-party comparison tools.

The site may be hosted by a third‑party provider (for example, Vercel). Bill submissions are stored in a hosted database (for example, Neon). Normal web traffic — IP address, browser, and pages visited — may be logged by the host for security and operations. We do not use those host logs for advertising. Advertising cookies are described in the Mediavine section above. See the host’s privacy policy for its own practices.

If these practices change, we will update this page. The date at the top is the latest version.