R100 used to feel like a small but useful top-up. After the latest tariff resets, it feels thinner. In some homes it is the difference between dinner on the stove and a dead cooktop two days earlier than usual.
The public debate around electricity usually gets trapped in percentages. That is neat for regulators and useless in a kitchen at 7pm. Households feel something simpler: the token prints fewer units, the meter runs down faster, and the expensive bits of the day arrive sooner than expected.
The same hundred rand now buys less
Eskom’s new direct-customer tariffs took effect in April 2026, with municipal tariff changes following from July. The published averages are close to 8.8% for Eskom direct supply and 9% for municipal customers, but nobody pays an average bill. People pay the tariff assigned to their area, their usage block, and their fixed charges.
The real squeeze shows up here. A R100 prepaid purchase now covers fewer kilowatt-hours than it did before the change, even before you get into service charges and other add-ons. Using the published Block 1-style rates as a simple comparison, the same R100 now looks like this:
| Area | Before change | Units for R100 | After change | Units for R100 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eskom direct area | R2.65 per kWh | 37.7 kWh | R2.88 per kWh | 34.7 kWh | 3.0 kWh fewer |
| Johannesburg, City Power | R3.22 per kWh | 31.1 kWh | R3.51 per kWh | 28.5 kWh | 2.6 kWh fewer |
| Cape Town | R3.57 per kWh | 28.0 kWh | R3.89 per kWh | 25.7 kWh | 2.3 kWh fewer |
| Durban, eThekwini | R3.10 per kWh | 32.3 kWh | R3.38 per kWh | 29.6 kWh | 2.7 kWh fewer |
The table tells the whole story. The same hundred rand buys fewer units everywhere. The size of the loss changes by area, but the direction does not.
Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Eskom direct all sting differently
Johannesburg sits in the middle of the pack in this comparison. Before the change, a R100 token at a Block 1 rate of about R3.22 per kWh bought just over 31 units. After the increase, it drops to about 28.5 units. This is not a rounding error; it is the sort of difference you notice when the kettle starts to become a luxury item.
Cape Town is harsher. At roughly R3.57 per kWh before the adjustment, R100 only bought about 28 units. After the increase, it slips to around 25.7 units. For a household already watching every appliance, losing more than two units on a hundred rand is enough to shift the daily routine. The geyser stays off longer. The washing machine waits. The air fryer gets skipped.
Durban does slightly better on the same comparison, but not by enough to make anyone feel relieved. A R100 token falls from about 32.3 units to 29.6 units once the higher tariff lands. This is still a real cut in runtime, especially for homes that rely on prepaid top-ups to bridge the last week of the month.
Eskom direct supply is the least painful of the four in this set, which is not the same thing as cheap. A R100 purchase moves from about 37.7 units to 34.7 units once the 8.8% increase is applied. That is the biggest unit loss in absolute terms, around 3 kWh, because the base rate is lower and the percentage increase still bites into it. For households on direct supply, the token still lasts longer than in most municipal areas, but the direction of travel is the same.
A prepaid slip hides more than the energy price
People usually talk about electricity as if every rand goes straight into kilowatt-hours. It does not. A prepaid bill is usually a bundle of different charges, which is why the final number feels slippery.
The biggest item is the energy charge, the actual cost of the electricity you use. Most people notice this part first because it determines how many units the token buys.
Then there are fixed items. Depending on the tariff structure, you can see service fees, network access charges, or other standing costs attached to the account. These do not shrink just because you used less power. This is a trap for low-usage households. A family that tries to save electricity can still end up paying the same fixed amount as a heavier user in the same tariff class.
Some bills also carry levies, including environmental-type charges, and then VAT is added on top of most of the taxable components. The result is a bill that looks simple on the slip machine and gets more complicated the second you ask what the money is actually paying for.
The practical consequence is ugly. If the energy charge rises while fixed charges stay put, the people who use the least electricity are often punished hardest per unit consumed. They are the ones trying to conserve, and they absorb the biggest hit from fees that do not care how carefully they live.
Why the average increase does not tell you much
The word “average” does a lot of hiding here.
A household on one tariff block does not experience the same increase as a household on another block. Consumption thresholds can change the effective price. A municipality can also structure its fixed charges in a way that makes the first few units feel much more expensive than the headline increase suggests.
Two neighbours can buy the same R100 token and get different value out of it. One may be on a tariff with a modest fixed fee and a cleaner block structure. The other may be paying into a mess of standing charges, higher per-unit costs, and a tariff ladder that gets steeper as soon as the meter ticks over.
The gap between the printed increase and the lived increase is where most of the frustration comes from. If you only read the percentage, the change sounds manageable. If you are the person who now has to choose between cooking and charging everything at once, it does not feel manageable at all.
The real loss shows up in ordinary routines
A few kilowatt-hours does not sound dramatic until you translate it into use.
Three lost units can mean a kettle boiled fewer times, a geyser that cycles off earlier, a TV that stays dark, or a laptop charge that gets postponed. For homes with children doing homework, prepaid power is not an accounting issue. It is whether the lights stay on long enough to finish the day.
The stove is the clearest example because it is where electricity policy stops being abstract. A household that budgets around one R100 token used to count on a certain span of normal life before the meter became stingy. Now that span is shorter. Dinner moves up against load management, cooking gets interrupted, and the family starts planning around the token instead of the other way round.
Prepaid users feel tariff changes faster than postpaid users do. There is no monthly shock absorber. There is no vague end-of-month bill that can be ignored for a while. The cost is visible the moment the token is loaded. If the unit count is lower, the pain is immediate.
The pattern is bigger than one tariff year
The April and July changes are not an isolated event. They sit inside a wider pattern that keeps pushing household electricity closer to a premium expense. The official schedule may describe separate increases for direct and municipal customers, but the consumer experience is much simpler: each round of higher tariffs trims the usefulness of the same amount of money.
This has a knock-on effect for budgeting, especially in homes that buy prepaid electricity in small chunks. A family that used to stretch a R100 purchase across several days may now need another top-up sooner. Once that pattern starts, the cost compounds. More frequent top-ups mean more pressure on the same monthly income, and there is no clever phrasing in a tariff notice that changes that arithmetic.
Municipal customers tend to feel the squeeze harder because their base rates are already higher in many areas. Direct Eskom supply is cheaper in this comparison, but the increase still cuts into the same household budget. The whole system is built in a way that makes modest changes feel larger than the official averages suggest.
How to read your next prepaid slip
If you want to know what changed on your own account, ignore the headline percentage first and inspect the actual token.
Look for the rate per kWh, then check whether your purchase fell into Block 1 or a higher block. If there is a fixed charge, do not bury it under the energy figure. Separate the two. Then check VAT and any levies that are being added before the final token is issued.
A quick comparison like this is enough to spot the change:
| What to check | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Rand spent | R100 | R100 |
| Units received | Higher | Lower |
| Fixed fees | Same or higher | Same or higher |
| VAT impact | Built in | Built in |
| Household result | Longer runtime | Shorter runtime |
If your slip changed and your day now ends earlier, you do not need a lecture about percentages. You need to know which charge moved, which one stayed fixed, and how much faster the meter is eating your money.
The useful way to read the new tariffs is not as a regulatory headline, but as a smaller pile of units for the same note in your hand.
