Ekurhuleni electricity tariffs 2026/27: what businesses pay

Which tariff is your business on?

This page covers the three main tariffs that apply to businesses in the City of Ekurhuleni, the East Rand metro that takes in Kempton Park, Boksburg, Benoni, Germiston, Edenvale, Alberton, Springs, Brakpan and Nigel. Residential tariffs, resellers, the legacy Tariff C (closed to new customers) and the specialist bulk classes are out of scope, and so are sites that buy directly from Eskom (the name on your electricity invoice tells you which you are). Supply capacity decides the tariff, and the tariff decides what solar can and cannot save. At a glance:

Rates rounded to cents; exact figures in the tariff tables below. Tariff E and D rates vary by supply voltage; the columns above show 230/400 V (E) and the up-to-11 kV class (D). *Tariff B’s seasonal pair is quoted as printed in the signed schedule; see the note under that tariff.

1. Tariff B (up to 150 A per phase or 100 kVA)

For business, mixed-use, commercial and industrial connections at 230 V single-phase or 400/230 V multi-phase, up to 150 A per phase or 100 kVA, low voltage only. Energy is a flat rate that changes with the season; there is no demand charge, but a capacity charge is billed on every Ampere of connection size, with the phases of a multi-phase supply added together.

A transparency note: the signed schedule prints the high (winter) rate below the low (summer) rate, inverting the pattern of every prior year’s book. We quote the document as published, have flagged the anomaly, and suggest checking which rate your first winter bill actually applies. A micro-business class, Tariff A (up to 80 A per phase), also exists at a flat R4.4600/kWh in both seasons.

2. Tariff E (above 25 kVA, below 1 MVA)

The workhorse class for mid-size commercial and industrial sites: bulk supplies at any voltage with a network access charge below 1 MVA. Energy is time-of-use by season and period, plus a demand charge, a network access charge and a basic charge. Rates below are for 230/400 V supplies; direct-from-substation, up-to-11 kV and above-11 kV classes carry their own (mostly lower) rates.

A winter peak kWh costs 5.5 times a winter off-peak kWh, and three times its own summer peak. The three winter months are where this tariff bites.

How demand is billed on this tariff. Two rules make Ekurhuleni different. Demand registered during off-peak hours is not counted, so night-time load never sets the demand charge. And the network access charge bills the highest demand of the rolling preceding twelve months, counted during peak and standard hours only, with a monthly minimum of 25 kVA; a standby supply can be levied at its full installed capacity, and a new site can apply in advance for a limited demand exemption during commissioning.

3. Tariff D (1 MVA and larger)

For bulk supplies with a capacity of at least 1 MVA and a network access charge of at least 1 MVA over the previous twelve months. A customer who fails to hold more than 1 MVA of recorded demand for six months is moved to Tariff E. Same structure as Tariff E, at lower rates that improve with supply voltage:

Energy in R/kWh. The same off-peak-demand and network-access rules as Tariff E apply, without the 25 kVA minimum. The reactive rule and export credits match Tariff E’s. The above-11 kV basic charge is printed as R940.51 in the signed schedule, well below the other classes; quoted as published.

When are Ekurhuleni’s peak hours?

Three things follow from this clock. First, winter mornings are the expensive hours in Ekurhuleni, and at 06:00 a solar system has barely woken up: winter peak exposure is a load management and storage problem before it is a solar problem. Second, the summer clock is solar country: the 07:00 to 09:00 morning peak and the whole standard day sit inside generation hours. Third, weekends and gazetted holidays have no peak at all, so seven-day operations earn less from peak displacement than five-day ones.

Solar and the rest of the bill

What solar does to each tariff’s energy lines is under that tariff above. Three questions cut across all of them: demand and network access, power factor, and what stays.

Does solar reduce demand and network access charges?

More plausibly than anywhere else in Gauteng, because both lines count only peak and standard hours, which overlap daylight, and off-peak demand is ignored outright. But the network access charge is a rolling twelve-month high-water mark: one cloudy working afternoon, or one trip at the wrong moment, sets it for a year. Across our operating fleet solar typically reduces billed demand by around 10%, with a site-to-site range of roughly 5 to 25%, and our rule in feasibility work is firm: never count demand or NAC reduction in the business case. Model the energy savings; treat the rest as upside. Where those lines are the target, peak shaving with batteries and load management is the deliberate tool, and Ekurhuleni’s daytime-only scoping makes the battery arithmetic unusually clean: charging at night can never set the NAC.

Power factor: a laxer threshold than City Power’s

Ekurhuleni bills reactive energy at 35.10c/kVArh only when power factor drops to 0.85 or below, and only in peak and standard periods of the high-demand season. That is a far laxer test than City Power’s 0.96, so most well-run sites never see the charge. Solar still shifts the ratio the wrong way, because it reduces the kWh drawn while the reactive draw stays; a correctly installed, configured and programmed inverter compensates reactive energy and should leave your power factor better than it found it. If a reactive line appears after commissioning, it is a configuration question for the installer first.

What solar does not change

The basic charges, Tariff B’s per-Ampere capacity charge, and any demand or network access set outside generation hours. Ekurhuleni levies no network surcharge and no percentage account surcharge, so beyond the fixed lines, everything on the bill is billed per kWh or per kVA, and every one of those lines moves when consumption and daytime peaks move. An honest proposal models your half-hourly interval data against these exact rates.

Can you sell power back to Ekurhuleni?

Yes, and unusually for a Gauteng metro, the mechanism is published and priced. A customer registered under the city’s Embedded Generation Policy, who remains a net-consumer over the billing period and meters through a 4-quadrant bi-directional AMR meter, is credited for genuine surplus: R1.5285/kWh in winter and R1.0453/kWh in summer on Tariffs D and E, and R1.1461/kWh year-round on Tariff B (ex VAT).

Keep the credit in proportion. It is a fraction of what the same kWh is worth consumed on site, where it displaces energy at up to R11.8471 in winter peak. We size every system for self-consumption first and treat export credits as secondary value, never the case: registration, metering and approval all have to land before the first credited kWh, and a business case that needs them is built on the weakest line of the bill.

How much do Ekurhuleni tariffs increase each year?

No single number honestly describes Ekurhuleni’s 2026/27 increase, and the reason is a story worth knowing.

The council proposed a flat 9.01% increase on every line, matching the Eskom-related increases NERSA approved for the year, and published a draft schedule to match in March 2026. NERSA then approved a different set of tariffs on 23 May 2026, restructured line by line: in the city’s own words, some came out higher than the council-approved tariffs, some lower, and others aligned, with Eskom-linked lines moving by 8.76%. Some basic charges fell outright while time-of-use lines moved by their own amounts. The city implemented the NERSA-approved schedule from 1 July 2026, which is the schedule this page quotes, and simultaneously resolved to take NERSA’s decision on review in the High Court; the schedule itself marks certain lines as an interim billing measure pending that legal process. The direction over recent years is unchanged: energy costs compound at high single to double digits annually, and the regulator’s push toward cost-reflective structures keeps shifting weight between lines.

What that means for a solar decision. Two things. Every year of delay reprices the daytime energy a system would have served at roughly 9% more. And because the structure itself moves between years, a business case built on a percentage of the total bill goes stale; one built on your own interval data against the current schedule, as this page quotes it, can simply be re-run each July.

Common questions