What a Unit of Electricity Costs in Tanzania

The short answer

The average domestic electricity rate in Tanzania was about 229.59 TZS per kWh as of March 2026, inclusive of supply, distribution and taxes. A household using 150 kWh a month would pay roughly 34,439 TZS at that rate.

One important caveat: that is an average across domestic consumers, not the price of your next unit. TANESCO's actual tariff is a schedule of customer classes and charges approved by EWURA and revised by tariff order, so the rate that applies to you depends on your customer class and consumption. Use the average to sanity-check a bill or estimate an appliance; check the current EWURA or TANESCO schedule for the rate you are actually charged.

What a unit is

A unit on a Tanzanian prepaid meter is one kilowatt-hour — 1 kWh.

A kilowatt-hour is one kilowatt of power used for one hour. A 1,000 W appliance run for an hour uses 1 kWh. A 100 W appliance run for ten hours also uses 1 kWh, because a tenth of the power over ten times as long comes to the same energy.

That relationship is the whole trick to estimating any appliance: watts ÷ 1,000 × hours = kWh.

What your appliances cost to run

These are monthly running costs at the average domestic rate, assuming daily use.

The pattern is worth noticing: the appliances that cost the most are not the most powerful ones, but the ones that run for hours. A 2,000 W iron used for half an hour a day costs less than a 150 W refrigerator running all day. Power matters, but time matters more.

Why your bill moves without you changing anything

Several things shift a bill that have nothing to do with using more electricity.

• Tariff revisions — rates are set by EWURA and change by order, so the same consumption can cost more without any change in habit.
• A fixed monthly service charge, which applies whether you use any units or not.
• Your customer class: domestic, small business and industrial customers are charged differently.
• Seasonal load — refrigeration and fans work harder in the hot season.
• Meter or reading errors, which are worth checking against your own meter before paying a disputed bill.

How to check a LUKU meter yourself

A prepaid meter makes the arithmetic unusually easy, which is exactly why it is worth doing.

Buy units, note the meter reading before and after a period of normal use, and subtract. That gives you the kWh you actually consumed. Multiply by the rate to see what it should have cost, and compare against what you spent on tokens.

If the numbers diverge badly, check for a fixed charge, confirm you are reading kWh rather than shillings on the display, and query it with TANESCO before assuming the meter is wrong.

What sits inside the rate you pay

The figure per kWh is not simply the cost of generating power. It bundles several different things together.

This is why the average rate is a good basis for estimating and a poor basis for disputing a specific line on a bill. TANESCO's actual tariff distinguishes customer classes, and EWURA approves it by tariff order. If you are querying a bill rather than forecasting one, get the rate that applies to your own customer class from the current EWURA or TANESCO schedule — the average quoted here is not that number.

• Generation — producing or buying the electricity itself.
• Transmission and distribution — moving power from the plant to your meter, and maintaining the network that carries it.
• Taxes and levies that apply to the supply.
• Fixed network and service costs, which some tariff structures recover through a standing charge and others fold into the unit rate.

How to estimate your own household

Add up the appliances and you can forecast a bill before it arrives, which is the only way to know what is actually driving it.

List every appliance, find its wattage on the label on the back or base, estimate the hours a day it runs, and apply watts ÷ 1,000 × hours × 30. Then multiply the total kWh by the rate.

Two habits make the estimate realistic. For anything with a thermostat or compressor — a fridge, a freezer, an air conditioner — the rated wattage is the power drawn while running, not the average across the day, so multiply by a duty cycle rather than by 24 hours. And measure short uses in fractions of an hour: a kettle boiling for fifteen minutes is 0.25 hours, not one.

The estimate will not match a bill to the shilling, and it is not meant to. Its job is to tell you which appliance is responsible for the total, because that is the answer that changes what you do next.

Reducing a bill without guessing

The appliance table tells you where to look, and it is rarely where people expect.

None of this needs a new appliance. Because cost scales with watts multiplied by hours, halving the hours something runs saves exactly as much as halving its power — and hours are usually the easier of the two to change.

The same method works for the other household utility: the Water Bill Calculator takes the cubic metres on the meter and applies the published water and sewerage tariffs for 21 service areas, so a water bill can be checked line by line in the same way.

• Target the long-running loads first — refrigeration, freezers, and anything left on overnight.
• Replace incandescent bulbs with LEDs: the same light for roughly a fifth of the power.
• Iron and cook in batches rather than heating an appliance repeatedly for short tasks.
• Switch off at the socket rather than leaving things on standby, since standby draw accumulates across a month.
• Check the duty cycle on a fridge — a door that no longer seals properly runs the compressor far more often.

What Juma's appliance and his neighbour's month cost

At the March 2026 average domestic rate of 229.59 TZS per kWh, a 100 W appliance used 4 hours a day draws about 12.0 kWh a month and costs about 2,755 TZS, while a household using 150 kWh a month pays roughly 34,439 TZS.

Juma lives in Mwanza and runs one 100 W appliance four hours a day. A household on the same street uses 150 kWh a month.

Tariff figures reviewed: 19 October 2026

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