What is your KSEB billactually made of?

താരിഫ് പട്ടിക

The KSEB domestic tariff, in full.

LT-1A, the domestic category almost every Kerala house is on. These are the rates in force from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2027.

And what else is on the bill

The energy charge is the big number, but it is not the only one. A KSEB domestic bill is assembled like this:

Energy charge + fixed charge + electricity duty + meter rent + fuel surcharge + other charges − any government subsidy.

The electricity duty is 10% of the energy charge, so it rises with everything above it and cannot be avoided. Meter rent is small. Once you have solar the net meter is rented on top of it — what that costs, and what else stays on the bill.

250 യൂണിറ്റ് പ്രശ്നം

The 250-unit cliff: one extra unit, ₹348.

This is what makes a Kerala bill different from everyone else’s. It is not a sales line — it falls straight out of the two tables above.

A single-phase household using exactly 250 units a month is charged band by band: ₹3.35 for the first fifty units, ₹4.25 for the next fifty, up to ₹8.50 for the last. Add the ₹160 fixed charge and the 10% duty and the bill is ₹1,756 a month.

The same household using 251 units loses the bands. All 251 units are charged at ₹6.75 — including the first fifty, which cost ₹3.35 the month before. The fixed charge steps up from ₹160 to ₹220. The bill is ₹2,104.

There are five of these steps, not one

Which is why cutting a little, near a step, is worth a lot

Take a household on 310 units a month with an electric geyser using about 60 of them. Drop the geyser and they are at 250 — back inside the bands, and down a fixed-charge step at the same time.

രണ്ട് മാസത്തെ ബിൽ

Why your bill is bi-monthly, and what that hides.

Almost nobody explains this correctly, and it is the reason most Kerala households have no idea which slab they are in.

The slabs are monthly. The bill is two-monthly. KSEB reads a domestic meter once every two months, and applies the monthly slabs to half the reading. So the 250-unit line, which decides everything, shows up on the paper you are holding as roughly 500 units — a number that appears nowhere in the tariff table.

That is why a household can sit one unit from a ₹348 step and never know it. They read 498 units off the bill, look at a slab table written in monthly figures, and draw no conclusion at all. Halve it first — which is what the 2 months / 1 month switch on the calculator does for you.

It also means the step is charged twice before you can react. A bi-monthly period that crosses the line prices both of its months on the non-telescopic scale, and you find out eight weeks later.