Americans' concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.
The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.
As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.
The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won't be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren't finalized until August 2025.
Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can't afford to properly heat and cool.
