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Banknotes: Electricity costs can be a problem for citizen's money recipients

Photo: Marijan Murat / dpa

The plan of the traffic light government has led to controversial debates: recipients of citizen's money are to receive higher benefits in the coming year in order to cope with the price increase. Single people, for example, receive 61 euros more per month. Union politicians criticized the surcharge as too high, others it did not go far enough.

Now experts from the comparison portal Verivox have calculated the extent to which the higher amount compensates for energy costs. According to this, despite higher citizen's money, the share for electricity will remain too low in 2024. According to the portal's calculations, the shortfall for a person living alone is expected to amount to 129 euros per year.

At 563 euros per month for a single adult, 45.70 euros are provided for the payment of the electricity bill, it said. However, according to Verivox calculations, the electricity costs of a single household with a consumption of 1,500 kilowatt hours amount to an average of around 56.45 euros per month in Germany. The actual electricity costs are thus around a quarter (24 percent) higher than the subsidies earmarked for this purpose.

However, consumers can reduce their electricity costs by changing their tariffs. In the new customer tariff, an average of 43.27 euros per month is currently due nationwide, which is even a good five percent less than estimated in the citizen's money, it said.

How high this increase is varies from region to region. In Bremen, recipients of citizen's allowance living alone have to pay an average of 40.35 euros each month for the cheapest electricity tariff. This is around twelve percent less than provided for in the citizen's allowance rate. Over the course of the year, this results in a mathematical surplus of 64 euros.

In Bavaria, Berlin and Lower Saxony (both minus seven percent), the real electricity costs in the cheapest tariff are also significantly lower than the electricity cost share provided for in the standard rate. On the other hand, citizen's allowance recipients in Brandenburg and Schleswig-Holstein would have to pay around eleven euros (two percent).

"Local basic services are particularly expensive. Here, electricity costs as much as 44 percent more than recipients of citizen's money are legally entitled to," says Thorsten Storck, energy expert at the comparison portal Verivox. Above all, he advises households that have never changed their provider to compare tariffs. For the calculations, the prices of the local basic suppliers as well as those of the most important supra-regional suppliers were taken into account.

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