Iloilo Electricity Bill: What Renters Pay on MORE Power (2026)

A one-bedroom in Mandurriao with a fridge, a washing machine and one 1.5HP split drew close to the same 250 kWh every month through the first half of 2026. In February that household paid ₱2,900. In July it paid ₱3,587. Nothing in the unit changed: same appliances, same hours, same tenant.

The interesting part is who caused it. MORE Power’s own charge, the distribution component, has not risen since 2022. Everything that moved on that bill came from outside Iloilo City.

This page costs one metered household across all seven published 2026 cycles, then takes apart what a renter can and cannot control: the aircon decision that dominates the number, the deposit you pay before the first bill, and the one line on the statement that national policy may be about to delete.

One Household, Seven Bills

Start with the series rather than the current number, because the current number is the least useful thing on this page. Every point below is transcribed from MORE Power’s own monthly rates table, which is the primary source for this article and publishes to four decimal places.

Now hold consumption still and let only the rate move. Our worked household uses 250 kWh a month, which is a light-aircon 1BR: fridge, fans, lights, laptop, rice cooker, washing machine, and a split unit run for a few hours on the worst nights. Consumption is our assumption, stated so you can substitute your own kWh reading. The peso figures are computed from the ledger, so they move when the rate moves.

Two readings matter here. The first is the spread: ₱687 separates the February bill from the July one, 23.70% on an unchanged household. The second is that almost all of it arrived at once. May to June alone was 17.18%, the largest single-cycle move the series has recorded, and a renter who set a budget from the May statement was short by ₱510 four weeks later.

That is the practical rule for Iloilo. One month’s bill is a sample of one, and the sample is not stable. If you are working out whether a unit is affordable, price it at the top of the series and treat the cheaper cycles as relief.

For the whole picture next to rent, water, internet and food, the Iloilo City cost of living guide reads the same ledger this page does, and the cost calculator will run your own kWh figure against the current cycle.

What Actually Moved

An all-in rate is four things stacked, and only one of them belongs to the utility whose name is on the bill.

MORE Power’s distribution charge, the component that pays for the poles, the substations and the crews, has been frozen since 2022 on the company’s own account, given by its regulatory affairs office to Daily Guardian in May 2026 (named secondary). Four years without an increase, across a period in which the all-in rate moved several pesos.

What moved was generation. The July cycle added ₱0.33/kWh on the generation charge alone, and MORE Power attributes it to the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market, where the average nodal price it buys at went from ₱10.36/kWh to ₱14.67/kWh on what it describes as persistent supply shortage and transmission constraints in the Visayas grid (Daily Guardian, 30 July 2026, named secondary). Transmission, billed through by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, rose alongside it.

The same forces hit Cebu harder. Visayan Electric billed ₱14.90/kWh on the same July cycle, so at 250 kWh a month an Iloilo household pays about ₱138 less than the identical household in Cebu City. That is a real gap and it is also a small one, less than either utility has moved in a single normal month. Electricity is not the line that should decide between the two cities, and the Cebu versus Iloilo decision framework sets out the ones that should. If you are comparing the two bills directly, the Cebu electricity guide works the same arithmetic on the VECO ledger.

Aircon Is the Bill

Everything above is context. This is the decision.

A 1.5HP split has a rated input power printed on the nameplate, usually on the side of the indoor unit or the spec sticker of the outdoor one. Monthly kWh is that wattage, times hours per day, times 30, divided by 1,000. Multiply by the current rate and you have your own answer rather than ours.

Like for like, the non-inverter costs ₱1,378–1,722 a month more for the same eight hours in the same room. That is larger than the entire February-to-July rate swing on our 250 kWh household, and it is decided once, at the appliance store, by someone who will never see your bill.

Note the direction the 2026 rate moves push that gap. The saving is a fixed number of kilowatt-hours priced at a rising rate, so every increase makes the inverter a better buy rather than a worse one, and shortens the payback on its sticker premium. Take the price difference between the two units in front of you and divide by the monthly saving above. We publish no Iloilo retail price band for aircon units because we have not verified one against a primary price list, and the two stickers you are standing in front of are better data than any table we could write.

Hours beat temperature by a wide margin. Cutting a 1.5HP inverter from twelve hours to eight saves the same order of kilowatt-hours as the inverter decision itself; nudging the thermostat two degrees saves single-digit percentages. Use the timer.

The Charge That May Disappear

There is a live policy question sitting on every Iloilo bill, and it is worth knowing about before you read a headline about it.

President Marcos used his 27 July 2026 State of the Nation Address to call for amendments to the Electric Power Industry Reform Act that would stop distribution utilities passing system loss charges to consumers. System loss is the electricity that leaves the substation and never reaches a meter: partly physics, partly theft. MORE Power told Daily Guardian on 8 August 2026 that it will not oppose the change, and reported by the Manila Times two days later on the same terms (both named secondary).

The Iloilo numbers behind it are unusually good. MORE Power’s system loss currently runs 4.23%, against an Energy Regulatory Commission cap of 5.5% that has held since 2021, a cap we carry on two named secondaries that agree rather than on a resolution we could read at the regulator. About four percentage points of that is technical loss, which the utility describes as the law of physics and cannot remove; only 0.23 of a point is non-technical, meaning pilferage and metering error. The utility’s own account of the takeover is that system loss stood near 28% in 2020 and that its metered customer base has grown from roughly 62,000 accounts to between 106,000 and 107,000 as of July 2026, the bulk of that being households converted from illegal connections rather than new construction.

Here is the honest limit of what we can tell you about the money. MORE Power collects roughly ₱21 to 23 million a month through the system loss charge. Spread flat across 106,000 to 107,000 accounts, that is ₱196 to ₱217 per account per month, but commercial and industrial accounts sit in the same divisor and consume far more than a 1BR in Mandurriao, so a residential household’s real share is well below that figure. We cannot narrow it: MORE Power’s monthly rates table publishes an average all-in rate and generation charge documents, not a per-kWh breakdown of the system loss component by customer class. Until it does, or until a bill actually passes, treat this as a change worth watching and not as money already in your pocket.

What You Pay Before the First Bill

Getting a meter in your name is cheaper than most renters expect, and the deposit is the part that is misunderstood.

MORE Power’s application requirements for a residential connection are three documents, in original and clear photocopy, and the page states no application fee at all: a Certificate of Final Electrical Inspection processed at the City Engineer’s Office, one government-issued primary ID, and proof of occupancy such as a title, tax declaration or lease agreement. The Certificate of Final Electrical Inspection is the item that catches people, because it is obtained from the city rather than from the utility and it is the step that adds days.

The bill deposit is a different thing from a fee, and its shape matters more than any peso figure. It equals one month of your own estimated billing, computed from the load schedule you declare, and it is payable in three equal monthly instalments from the first bill. MORE Power re-evaluates it each year on the anniversary of your service application against your last 12 months of average consumption: where the deposit exceeds consumption the excess is credited back, and where average consumption exceeds the held deposit by more than 10% you are asked for the difference, again payable in three instalments under a promissory note (Daily Guardian, 31 July 2026, named secondary). It is refunded in full on service termination once outstanding bills are settled, or after two continuous years of full on-time payment.

Because it scales with your own load, a renter who declares two aircon units pays a materially larger deposit than one who declares none. Ask which load schedule the deposit was computed on before you pay it.

One thing that will not apply to you: the lifeline discount. MORE Power’s programme targets households consuming 95 kWh or less that are certified 4Ps beneficiaries or verified as living below the PSA poverty threshold, with the discount scaling from 10% at the 81 to 95 kWh bracket up to 100% at 20 kWh and below (Philippine News Agency on the expanded Lifeline Rate Law). Residents of condominiums and subdivisions are excluded outright. A foreign renter will not qualify on any of those tests.

The connection deposit is one of several move-in costs that land in the same fortnight. The first month in Iloilo City checklist prices the whole sequence, and the renting guide covers where the utility accounts sit in the lease.

Iloilo City Only

One boundary to get right, because it is the most common factual error made about this city. MORE Power is the sole distribution utility for the seven districts of Iloilo City and nothing else, and that is statutory rather than commercial: Republic Act No. 11212 grants the franchise for a distribution system conveying electric power to end users in the City of Iloilo, and stops there. Pavia, Oton, Leganes, Santa Barbara and the rest of Iloilo province are served by the ILECO I, II and III cooperatives at their own rates on their own cycles.

We publish no ILECO figure. We have not verified one against a primary source, so there is no number here, and pro-rating the city rate onto a provincial address would be an invention. If the unit you are looking at sits outside the city boundary, ask the landlord which utility bills the meter before assuming anything on this page applies. This matters for the same reason the city-versus-province distinction matters for safety statistics and inflation prints: the two are different jurisdictions with different numbers, and they are routinely mixed.

The Bottom Line

Your Iloilo electricity bill is decided by one appliance and one market. The appliance is yours: an inverter split instead of a non-inverter is worth ₱1,378–1,722 a month at the current rate, more than any other lever available to a renter. The market is not yours, and in 2026 it moved a 250 kWh household 23.70% in five months without anyone touching a thermostat.

So budget above the current cycle rather than at it, track the kWh reading rather than the peso total, and read the sub-meter arithmetic before you sign a lease in an older building. Every figure on this page is computed from our Iloilo electricity rate dataset, which records the source and confidence of each cycle individually, and our methodology sets out how we date, verify and refuse to interpolate those points.