The Meralco Bill Increase That Erases the ₱9.5B Refund

What It Means

• A meralco bill increase from two separate ERC actions largely cancels out the ₱9.5 billion refund announced days earlier.
• Residential customers get back about ₱117 a month for six months, then absorb roughly ₱43 a month in new charges for years afterward.
• The offsetting charges come from a decade old pass-through collection and a Fit All hike approved without a public hearing.
• The refund window closes in six months. The charges that offset it run for thirty six months or longer.
• Once the refund ends, customers are left paying more than they did before the refund was ever announced.

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The Energy Regulatory Commission ordered Meralco to refund ₱9.5 billion to more than eight million customers in early August, the third such payout since 2015. Days later, the same regulator authorized Meralco to collect ₱8.71 billion in pass through costs going back to 2011, and separately let the National Transmission Corporation raise a renewable energy charge before holding a single public hearing on it. Add the two together and the meralco bill increase that follows largely absorbs the refund the public was told to expect.

The Refund Was Never the Full Story

ERC’s refund order covers overrecoveries from January to December 2025 under the actual weighted average tariff mechanism. Residential customers get ₱0.5861 back per kilowatt hour, worth about ₱117 a month for a household using 200 kilowatt hours, spread across six months starting the next billing cycle. That is the number that made headlines. It is also only one side of what actually lands on the bill, since the meralco bill increase from two separate ERC dockets was already moving through the system days before the refund order was announced.

Three days after that order, ERC confirmed Meralco could collect ₱8.71 billion in decade old under recoveries, covering generation, transmission, system loss, and real property tax charges from February 2011 through December 2022. Generation alone accounts for ₱7.3 billion, added at ₱0.0701 per kilowatt hour. Transmission and system loss add roughly another ₱0.0087 per kilowatt hour combined for residential accounts. None of it goes to Meralco. All of it goes to generation companies, the grid operator, and local governments. The collection runs for 36 months.

A Second Charge Landed the Same Week

The pass through collection was not the only new item on the bill. ERC also granted TransCo provisional authority to raise the Feed in Tariff Allowance by ₱0.1348 per kilowatt hour, taking it to ₱0.3359, starting with the August billing period. The increase was approved before TransCo’s application went through public hearings, justified by the fund running a negative working capital balance of ₱322.9 million as of May. For a household using 500 kilowatt hours, that single line adds about ₱168 a month on its own.

Combine the pass through collection and the Fit All hike, and a 200 kilowatt hour residential account absorbs roughly ₱43 in new monthly charges. Against the ₱117 refund credit, that still nets to real relief for six months. But the meralco bill increase does not stop when the refund does.

The Relief Has an Expiration Date the New Charges Do Not

The refund runs six months. The pass through collection runs 36. The Fit All increase has no end date until TransCo’s application clears a hearing that has not happened yet. Once the refund credit stops appearing on the bill, the ₱43 in combined new charges keeps going for another 30 months at minimum. A household that saw a net reduction for half a year moves into a stretch where its bill sits higher than it did before ERC ever announced a refund.

This is the part that gets lost when each ERC decision is reported as its own event. The refund is temporary. The meralco bill increase funding TransCo’s shortfall and the pass through arrears is not. Reporting them separately makes each look manageable. Reading them together shows a household trading six months of relief for years of higher charges layered on top of a rate base that was already rising before any of this was announced.

The Meralco Bill Increase Undercuts ERC’s Own Relief Framing

ERC has positioned the refund as consumer relief, arriving in the same window President Marcos used his State of the Nation Address to call for system loss charges to stop being passed on to consumers. The pass through collection ERC approved days later includes ₱595 million in system loss recovery. The Fit All hike moved on provisional authority, ahead of the hearing process meant to let the public and industry groups contest it.

None of these charges are unlawful. Pass through costs are collected on Meralco’s behalf for generators, the grid operator, and government agencies under existing law, and Meralco does not profit from any of them. But a regulator that announces a ₱9.5 billion refund while approving a meralco bill increase large enough to erase most of it inside the same news cycle is not delivering the relief its own press releases describe. The gap between the announcement and the bill is the story regulators would rather nobody added up.

Meralco has run this same refund cycle twice before, in payouts covering periods stretching back to 2015, including a prior refund cycle that landed the same way. The mechanics behind why these charges keep stacking on top of each other trace back to how the Meralco bill was built in the first place.

Once the refund window closes in six months, the household absorbing this meralco bill increase will be paying more than it was the month before ERC’s refund order ever made headlines.

More developments that reshape the operating environment in National Signal section of Hemos PH.