Budapest maintained its long-standing position and came out on top in December 2023 in a comparison of EU capitals where electricity and gas are the cheapest for residential consumers. In Europe, the difference in net residential electricity prices was six times higher in December, and 17 times higher for natural gas.
Prices in the Hungarian capital remained the lowest in the EU. The residential prices in Hungary have been frozen at low levels for several years. In August 2022, a new element of the regulation, the concept of average consumption, was introduced as a new price effect.
This means that households in Hungary can only buy electricity and gas at the universal service price up to the average consumption, and pay a higher price for the amount above that.
However, the impact of this is not specifically addressed in this survey.
The net end-user electricity price in Budapest was 9.61 euro cents/kWh. Residential electricity was most expensive in Dublin, Ireland (42.75 euro cents), London, UK (40.33 euro cents) and Berlin, Germany (38.09 euro cents).
