Fajar Rehman
Pakistan’s electricity sector has once again made headlines, but not for the right reasons. The regulator recently approved the government’s motion for changes in electricity tariffs, building on the base tariff revision that was notified in January 2026. The February revision, officials would have us believe, is a routine adjustment in an ongoing process of tariff rationalisation. It is anything but routine.
This revision fundamentally reshapes how residential consumers are charged for electricity. The changes are structural, not cosmetic, and their consequences for household budgets, inflation, and macroeconomic policy are far more serious than the official narrative acknowledges. But buried beneath the tariff redesign is a data problem so severe that it threatens the credibility of the entire exercise.
Before getting to that problem, it is worth understanding what has actually changed.
The most significant shift is in how fixed charges are now structured. Previously, fixed charges were either absent for many residential consumers or applied as a flat monthly rate. Under the revised framework, fixed charges are now calculated on a per-month, per-kilowatt basis tied to a household’s sanctioned load. This is a fundamental change in the logic of tariff incidence. It means that a household consuming very little electricity but with a relatively high sanctioned load will pay substantially more in fixed charges than before, regardless of how carefully it manages its actual consumption. The burden falls not on those who use more, but on those who happen to have a higher approved connection capacity, even if that capacity goes largely unused.
This change affects groups that were previously shielded. Protected consumers, those placed in subsidised slabs because of their low income or low usage, are no longer exempt from fixed charges in the way they once were. This is deeply concerning. The protected category exists precisely because these households cannot absorb additional financial pressure. Bringing them into the fixed charge regime, and tying their charges to sanctioned load rather than actual consumption, undermines the very logic of protection. The inflationary consequences of this redesign are significant and almost certainly underestimated in official assessments.
All of this, however, is secondary to the crisis hiding in plain sight: the consumer numbers do not add up.
Within a span of less than a week, two official documents issued by the same ministry and the same division presented electricity consumer data that are not just inconsistent but irreconcilable. One document is the government’s motion submitted to the regulator. The other is a tariff-category table presented by the Power Division of the Ministry of Energy as part of the formal determination process. These two documents, produced by the same institution within days of each other, tell entirely different stories about how many electricity consumers exist in Pakistan and how they are distributed across tariff categories.
The total domestic consumer count in the motion stands at 30.4 million. The determination document places the same figure at 34.4 million. That is a difference of four million consumers. Four million households is not a rounding error. It is not a definitional nuance. It is a structural gap that demands explanation.
The divergence inside individual categories is even more alarming. In the 101 to 200 unit protected slab, the motion reports 6.1 million consumers. The determination document shows more than 12.5 million in the same category, more than double the figure. In the first unprotected slab, the motion records 5.6 million consumers while the determination document reduces this to just 0.9 million. These are not minor discrepancies that can be explained away by different methodologies or time periods. They represent a collapse in the reliability of the foundational data on which the entire tariff revision rests.
The consequences of this data chaos extend well beyond administrative inconvenience.
Electricity tariff calculations depend critically on accurate slab-wise consumer counts. Revenue recovery projections, subsidy requirements, and cross-subsidisation ratios all flow from knowing how many consumers fall into which category and what their typical consumption patterns look like. When the base population figures are this unstable, every downstream calculation becomes unreliable. No analyst, no researcher, and no policymaker can confidently model the revenue impact of the revised tariff structure when the two authoritative sources on consumer distribution contradict each other so dramatically.
The inflation implications are particularly worrying. Electricity tariffs are a direct input into the Consumer Price Index. Fixed charges, unlike variable consumption charges, affect household costs regardless of usage levels. When large categories of consumers are newly subjected to fixed charges, or face significantly higher fixed costs tied to sanctioned load, the inflationary pass-through can be substantial. Estimating that pass-through accurately requires knowing how many households fall into each affected category. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics will need to rely on some version of this data for CPI computation. Which version will it use? The motion figures or the determination figures? The answer to that question will shape how inflation is measured and reported at a time when public trust in price statistics is already fragile.
One could attempt to rationalise data inconsistencies if they came from different departments working with different datasets separated by months of lag time. That rationalisation is not available here. This is the same division, publishing conflicting figures within the same week, as part of the same regulatory process. That makes the situation very difficult to defend.
Either the motion relied on outdated or incorrect consumer data, or the figures presented during the determination process were revised without any public disclosure or explanation. Both possibilities are troubling. The first suggests that major tariff revisions are being justified on the basis of inaccurate information. The second suggests that significant data revisions are taking place quietly, without transparency, in the middle of a live regulatory proceeding.
The Ministry of Energy owes a clear and detailed explanation to consumers, researchers, policymakers, and markets. Electricity tariffs are not an abstract accounting exercise. They determine how much real households pay for a basic necessity, they shape inflation expectations, and they influence macroeconomic policy responses by institutions including the State Bank and the IMF. When the foundational numbers are this inconsistent, nothing built on top of them can be trusted.
A clarification is not optional. It is long overdue.
