Half-year prices

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Eurostat publishes household prices twice a year. Averaged into an annual figure, the 2022 spikes become a smooth rise, and the Netherlands gets a price no household paid.

Eurostat publishes household prices twice a year, and the price charts in the explorer use an annual average of the two halves. That average is not a neutral summary, which is why the warehouse keeps the published half-years beside it. The difference is the 2021–23 energy crisis: the mean absolute half-over-half change was 19% across countries in 2022 and 13% in 2023, against 3–5% through the 2010s.

The spikes above are single half-years. Averaged into an annual figure they become a smooth rise, which reads as a gradual squeeze rather than the step change households actually saw.

The Netherlands is the clearest case, and the one that should make you distrust any annual number here: €0.034/kWh in 2022-S1 against €0.142 in S2, as that year's energy-tax cuts landed in the first half. The annual average of €0.088 is a price no Dutch household paid in either half. The low figure is real and published, not a loading error, which is why the tests on this column allow it.

Averaged across countries

The EU has two average prices. Eurostat's weights each member by what its households consume. The plain mean of the national prices counts Malta as much as Germany, and runs well below it.

In 2026-S1 Eurostat's average was € 0.283 per kWh and the plain mean of the 27 members € 0.250 per kWh, which is 11.6% lower. The gap has been as wide as 16.6% and was narrowest in 2022-S2 at 8.0% of Eurostat's figure.

It closed in the crisis because the crisis landed unevenly. From 2021-S1 to 2022-S2 the plain mean rose 38% and Eurostat's average 26% over the same eighteen months: prices rose 5% in Germany and 13% in France, the two most populous members, and at least doubled in 4 smaller ones.

The weighted figure is what the average EU household pays, and the plain one is what the average member country charges. Neither is wrong, but only the first is the EU's average, and it is the one every chart on this site labelled as an EU average shows. Eurostat also prices 14 countries outside the EU, most of them cheaper than either line, so a mean over everything it publishes is lower again and is the average of no group anyone would name.