The contract: fixed, variable or hour by hour

On this page

1. The three contracts, and what they promise
2. Your spot price is not the average spot price
3. What a fixed price actually buys
4. The hour, and then the quarter
5. What control is worth, and what it is not
6. The contract is a third of the bill
7. What we do not claim
8. Check yourself

The three contracts, and what they promise

The retail contract is the only part of an electricity bill you are free to change. The grid is a monopoly, the tax is parliament's, the VAT is the state's. So this is the one choice you actually have — and it comes in three forms.

A fixed price. You pay the same öre per kilowatt-hour for the whole term, usually one, two or three years. Every hour costs the same, whatever the market does. You are buying predictability.

A monthly variable price. You pay the month's average spot price, plus the retailer's markup. Every kilowatt-hour in a month costs the same. So you are exposed to the month, but not to the hour.

An hourly or quarter-hourly price. You pay the price that actually applied in the hour — since October 2025, the quarter — in which the electricity was used. You are exposed to when you use it. You are also the only customer for whom charge control, heating control and a battery have any direct value at all.

There is a fourth form, which nobody chooses: an assigned contract. It is what the assigned retailer puts you on if you never made a choice — after a move, for instance. Almost eight per cent of households sit there.

What Swedish households actually have, August 2026

• Monthly variable price61,0 %

• Hourly and quarter-hourly price14,1 %

• Other contract forms9,4 %

• Assigned contract7,9 %

• Fixed price, all terms7,5 %

SCB, the distribution of electricity contracts nationally, August 2026. The fixed bar is the sum of three rows: 4.3 per cent on one year, 2.6 per cent on three years and 0.6 per cent on two — together 7.5 per cent. The rows add to 99.9 per cent, because each figure is rounded.

Read the bars as an answer to what do people do, not to what is right. Six in ten have chosen to carry the month. About one in seven carries the hour. And for all that is written about fixed contracts, fewer than one in ten has actually signed one.

One market, three different promises

Your spot price is not the average spot price

Now comes the idea that makes this module worth reading. It is simple, it is not in dispute, and it changes which contract looks best.

When someone compares a fixed price against a variable one, they almost always use the flat average spot price: every hour of the year, added up and divided by the number of hours. That figure weights three in the morning in June exactly as heavily as six in the evening in January.

Your house does no such thing. A house uses most electricity when it is cold and dark — and cold and dark is exactly when electricity is dearest, for the same reason: every other house is doing the same thing at the same moment. Consumption and price peak together.

A winter's day: the price above, the house below

So there is another figure, which is yours and nobody else's: the consumption-weighted spot price. You take each hour's price, multiply it by the kilowatt-hours you actually used in that hour, add it all up, and divide by your total consumption.

weighted price = the sum of (price × kWh) ÷ the sum of kWh

A small example makes it concrete. We shrink the day to two kinds of hour, and invent two prices — the figures are chosen to show the arithmetic, not taken from a market.

The flat average spot price for this day is the average of the two prices:

(1.20 + 0.60) ÷ 2 = 0.90 kr/kWh

But the house did not pay 0.90. It paid 42 kronor for 40 kilowatt-hours:

(36 + 6) ÷ 40 = 1.05 kr/kWh

Now the consequence is plain. Suppose someone offers you a fixed price of 0.95 kr/kWh. Against the flat average of 0.90 it looks like a bad deal — five öre too expensive. Against what the house actually paid, 1.05, it is ten öre too cheap.

40 × 0.95 = 38 kr fixed · 40 × 1.05 = 42 kr variable · a difference of 4 kr

An honest caveat: it is not a law of nature that the weighted price is higher. It follows from consumption and price moving together, which they do in very nearly every Swedish house heated by electricity. A house whose load sat only in the cheap hours would see the reverse — and moving in that direction is precisely what control is trying to do.

How to work out your own weighted price

Fetch your own hourly file from the grid company and the spot prices for the same period. Put them in two columns of a spreadsheet, one row per hour.

=SUMPRODUCT(price, kWh) / SUM(kWh)

Then compare the answer with the plain average of the price column. The distance between the two figures is the house's price profile, expressed in öre. It is the only figure a fixed offer should be held against. Note which period you used: a year that has been is not a year that is coming.

What a fixed price actually buys

A fixed price is not a saving. It is insurance, and it works like every other kind of insurance.

The retailer who locks your price must buy the electricity ahead of time and carry the risk that the market moves. That risk has a price, and the price sits inside the öre you are quoted. It is called a risk premium. Over many years, on average, a fixed price therefore costs a little more than carrying the market yourself — otherwise nobody would sell the insurance.

We put no number on the premium. We have found no Swedish source that measures it for households, and a premium that moves with the market cannot be caught in a single figure. That it exists follows from who carries the risk.

The question is not which contract comes out cheapest. It is how much variation your household can absorb in January.

That is a real question, and it has different answers in different households. A household with headroom can carry an expensive winter and come out ahead over time. A household for which a doubled electricity bill means borrowing should buy the insurance and stop second-guessing it. Neither one has made an arithmetic error.

One observation that is awkward for both camps. In March 2026 the hourly and quarter-hourly price was the cheapest option in every price area — in SE3 about 885 kronor against up to 1 459 kronor for a fixed contract, according to SCB's monthly statistics. In that same month the share of households on hourly or quarter-hourly pricing fell from 14.2 to 12.5 per cent, the largest drop since the series began. People buy perceived security over measured saving.

The hour, and then the quarter

Two dates have changed what an hourly variable contract means, and they are often muddled together.

So since October 2025 it is not 24 prices that are published for tomorrow, but 96 — one for every quarter. They arrive at one o'clock the day before. The price signal became four times sharper, without anyone having to do anything.

24 hours × 4 quarters = 96 prices a day

Three practical consequences. Every retailer with more than 200 000 customers must offer a quarter-hourly contract. Customers who had hourly pricing were moved across automatically, with at least two months' notice. And fixed contracts and monthly variable contracts are not affected at all — they go on calculating exactly as before.

For a house with an electric car or a heat pump, a sharper signal means something concrete: the peaks are no longer smoothed across a whole hour. One quarter can be expensive while the next is cheap. That makes control which reacts within the quarter worth more than it was — and control that only knows about whole hours worth somewhat less.

For the advisor: why hourly data now overstates self-consumption

Under hourly settlement, an hour in which a house both exported and imported was netted to a single number, and the export vanished. Under quarter-hourly settlement, part of that mismatch surfaces as real import and export inside the same hour.

Measured self-consumption therefore falls somewhat and measured export rises, with nothing at all having changed in the house. Our own engine calculates in hours, and so overstates self-consumption slightly. The direction is certain, the size is not — no source we have found quantifies it, so we put no percentage on it.

What control is worth, and what it is not

Once you have hourly or quarter-hourly pricing, moving consumption suddenly pays. The value of a move is always the same multiplication, and it is a short one:

saving = the kWh you moved × the price difference

Two figures, and both have to be large. This is where most advice goes wrong: it points at things that are visible rather than things that are big. Let us calculate, using the same assumed price difference for all three — 50 öre per kilowatt-hour between the expensive and cheap parts of the day. That figure is chosen, not looked up.

The car comes from driving statistics: a Swedish passenger car covers 1 126 mil a year, which at roughly 1.56 kWh per mil is about 2 000 kWh including charging losses. The hot water comes from Energimyndigheten's own measurements, around 2 700 kWh of heat a year — which in a heat-pump house becomes roughly a third of that in electricity:

2 700 ÷ 3.0 = 900 kWh of electricity · 900 × 0.50 = 450 kr

A dishwasher draws between 0.5 and 1 kWh on an eco programme according to Energimyndigheten, and 1.4 kWh a cycle in the energy advisors' own table for an ordinary programme. We reckon with 1 kWh every other day, so 150 kWh a year. The sources disagree, and the difference between them says something worth keeping: the programme matters more than the machine.

And the caveat that matters most: a flat day offers nothing to move into. If the day's prices are nearly equal, the price difference is near zero, and the whole saving is near zero however skilfully the house is controlled. The spread is real, but it is uneven. During 2024 the annual average price sat between 28 and 57 öre per kilowatt-hour depending on the price area, while the single dearest hour reached 8.16 kronor in SE4 and the cheapest fell to minus 69 öre. That is all the same year.

The contract is a third of the bill

One last dampener, and a useful one. Everything this module is about applies to one of the four parts of the bill. The other three — the grid fee, the energy tax and the VAT — are not touched in the slightest by which contract you choose. What each part weighs is something the module on the electricity bill has already gone through line by line.

For a villa using 15 000 kWh or more, the total household price in the second half of 2025 broke down like this, according to SCB: the market price 66.85 öre, the grid price 56.62 öre, the energy tax 43.90 öre and VAT 41.84 öre — together 209.21 öre per kilowatt-hour. So the market part is about a third:

66.85 ÷ 209.21 = 32 %

So what happens if you negotiate away 20 per cent of the electricity price? The market part falls by 13.37 öre. The VAT follows it down, because VAT is charged on what you actually pay: 25 per cent of 13.37 is 3.34 öre. Together 16.71 öre out of 209.21.

0.20 × 66.85 = 13.37 · + VAT 3.34 = 16.71 · 16.71 ÷ 209.21 = 8 %

Twenty per cent cheaper electricity is an eight per cent cheaper bill.

It is still worth doing. But it is not the big lever in a house, and it is why this course spends more modules on walls, heat and consumption than on contract forms. You can only negotiate the price of what you buy — never the price of what you did not need to buy.

The share is a little larger in 2026, and why

The SCB table above covers the second half of 2025, when the energy tax was 43.90 öre. On 1 January 2026 it fell to 36.00 öre excluding VAT — 7.90 öre lower.

209.21 − 7.90 − 1.98 VAT = 199.33 · 66.85 ÷ 199.33 = 34 %

The bill shrinks, and the part you can negotiate therefore weighs a little more — around 34 per cent instead of 32. The arithmetic assumes nothing else changed, which of course it did: grid fees rose. Treat 32 and 34 as the same answer, a good third.

What we do not claim

Nobody knows where the electricity price is going. Not us, not the retailer, not whoever is writing in the newspaper. This course never forecasts the electricity price, and advice built on a forecast is advice built on a guess — however confidently it is delivered.

Forecasts exist, and they are made by people who know the system. Svenska kraftnät, for instance, expects the gap between north and south to narrow, and the flow between SE1 and SE2 to reverse in 2029. That is the system operator's judgement, not ours, and judgements about the electricity market have been wrong before.

Two things a household can know for certain, though, and both can be found out this afternoon. Its own consumption profile — when in the day and the year the electricity is actually used, taken from the grid company's own file. And its own tolerance for variation — how large a January bill is still a bill and not a problem.

Those are the two figures the choice of contract rests on. Everything else is weather.

Check yourself