Mcf, Ccf, MMBtu, Therm: How to Read a Texas Commercial Gas Quote

Figures checked August 6, 2026. Heat content reflects EIA's July 31, 2026 release; the next monthly update lands August 31, 2026. Atmos and CenterPoint figures are the 2026 rate schedules on file; the Texas Gas Service schedule cited is its Central Texas transportation tariff.

Three quotes are on the desk. One is $0.86 per therm, one is $8.95 per Mcf, one is $8.60 per MMBtu. None of them can be compared to the others as written, and the converter you will find in ten seconds of searching will give you a confident answer built on a number that is not Texas's.

Nearly every gas conversion table online uses the U.S. average heat content of 1,037 Btu per cubic foot. Texas gas averaged 1,016 Btu/cf in 2025 and 1,013 as of May 2026. Texas utilities also measure a cubic foot at a different pressure base than the futures market does. Neither gap is huge on its own, and neither is a scandal. Both change what your quotes actually say.

This page is the reference to check your own arithmetic against: what each unit is, which one your Texas bill uses, what conversion factor a Texas account should use instead of the national one, and how to normalize competing quotes so the comparison is real.

Texas LDCs bill commercial accounts in Ccf, not Mcf — a 10x difference. Texas gas runs about 1,016 Btu/cf against a 1,037 national average, so the standard Mcf-to-MMBtu factor overstates a Texas account's energy by roughly 2%. Normalize every quote to one unit, using the Texas factor, before comparing anything.

The Four Units on a Texas Commercial Gas Quote

The split that does the work is the one in the third column. Volume units count space. Energy units count heat. Converting within a family is arithmetic — 10 Ccf is 1 Mcf, 10 therms is 1 MMBtu, always. Converting between families is not. It requires a measured heat content, and that measurement is exactly where Texas diverges from the national number.

One naming trap before going further. The M in Mcf is the Roman numeral for one thousand, not the metric prefix mega-. Mcf is a thousand cubic feet; MMcf is a thousand thousand, a million. Anyone arriving from a metric background reads Mcf as "megacubic feet" and lands an order of magnitude off.

Why the Standard Conversion Factor Is Wrong for Texas

EIA publishes 1,037 Btu/cf as the U.S. average heat content, and essentially every conversion table online uses it — sometimes as 1,038, sometimes expressed as a 1.037 or 1.038 multiplier. Those tables are not wrong. They are correct national averages, correctly sourced. They are simply the wrong reference class for a Texas account.

EIA also publishes heat content by state. Texas ran 1,016 Btu/cf for 2025 and 1,013 Btu/cf in May 2026. Using the national factor on a Texas account overstates its energy content by 2.07% against the 2025 figure and 2.37% against the most recent month.

This is not a one-year wobble. Texas has slid from 1,034 Btu/cf in 2015 to 1,016 in 2025 — a decade-long drift that tracks the growing share of lean Permian associated gas in the state's supply mix. EIA publishes no causal attribution for it, and neither will we, but the direction has been consistent long enough that it should be treated as structural rather than noise.

The qualifier that has to ride with every one of those numbers: EIA's Texas figure is an all-sector delivered average for the whole state. Your meter is not the state average. The number that actually bills you is the heat content your LDC publishes for your system in that month, and it moves. So the honest instruction is a two-parter — use 1.016 as a Texas default instead of 1.037, and ask your LDC for its published monthly figure once the volume justifies the phone call. Presenting 1.016 as the Texas factor would repeat the same error this section is correcting, one level down.

The Other Mismatch Nobody Mentions: Pressure Base

A cubic foot is not a fixed quantity of gas. It is a volume, and how much gas fills it depends on the pressure and temperature you reference it to. Texas Railroad Commission rules define the standard as 14.65 psia at 60°F. The Henry Hub futures contract NYMEX trades measures on standard base conditions of 14.73 psia at 60°F, and EIA has reported at 14.73 psia since 1965, when the federal standard moved off 14.65.

The gap is 0.546%. A cubic foot referenced to 14.73 psia holds about half a percent more gas than one referenced to 14.65. Your supplier hedges in a 14.73 MMBtu; your LDC bills you in a 14.65 Ccf.

The Texas number is not arbitrary. CenterPoint's General Rules and Regulations still define a cubic foot of gas as the amount filling one cubic foot "at a gauge pressure of four (4) ounces above atmospheric pressure" — four ounces being 0.25 psi, on top of an assumed 14.4 psia atmosphere. It is a century-old delivery-pressure convention that Texas kept when the federal reporting standard moved.

If that sounds academic, CenterPoint's own tariff settles it. Rate Schedule GSS-2099-I-GRIP 2026 prices the identical commodity charge three times, once per pressure base:

The tariff's own ratios reproduce the pressure ratios to four decimal places. This is a regulated Texas utility doing the physics in public, in a filed document, because the difference is real enough to price. Texas Gas Service does the same thing in its transportation schedule, defining the Btu at 60°F and 14.65 psia on a "gross-real-dry basis."

Now the limit on that claim, because it matters. None of this means Texas businesses are being quietly overcharged 0.55%. An LDC states its pressure base in tariff and bills consistently within it, and for a bundled sales customer the utility's own Btu factor generally absorbs the difference. The exposure is narrower than the arithmetic suggests, and it lives in two places: reconciling a supplier's MMBtu-denominated hedge or nomination against LDC-billed volume, and transportation accounts nominating against a pipeline. The rule to take away is know which base each of your numbers is on — not "you are losing half a percent."

Worked Example: Three Quotes, One Account

Same account, same term, same start date, three suppliers, three units. Here is what the national factor and the Texas factor each produce:

Concede the obvious first: the winner does not change. A and C beat B under either factor. If the only question is which supplier to sign, the conversion factor was not the deciding input, and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling.

What does change is everything downstream of the decision:

• The margin moves 7x. Under the national factor, A and C beat B by $0.03/Mcf — close enough to call it a tie and pick on terms. Under the Texas factor the gap is $0.21/Mcf. Same three quotes, radically different sense of how much the choice is worth.
• There is a band where the winner flips. Against a $8.60/MMBtu offer, any $/Mcf quote between $8.74 and $8.92 wins or loses depending on which factor you used. That band is 2.1% wide at the 2025 Texas figure and 2.4% at the May 2026 figure — wider than the spread between competing suppliers in a normal Texas bid.
• The budget is wrong every year. On a 12,000 Mcf/year account, the national factor books 12,444 MMBtu where the Texas factor books 12,192 — 252 MMBtu/year of energy that is not there. At $4/MMBtu that is roughly $1,000 a year of phantom volume in the forecast; at $8.60/MMBtu, about $2,167.

The honest summary: the factor rarely picks the winner, routinely misprices the decision, and always misprices the budget. Two of those three are worth fixing even though only one is dramatic. The full quote comparison walkthrough covers what to do with the normalized numbers once you have them.

What Your Texas LDC Actually Bills You In

Three things follow from that table, and the first is the one that costs real money.

Both major Texas LDCs bill commercial accounts in Ccf. If your bill shows 2,400 units of gas, that is 2,400 Ccf — 240 Mcf. Not 2,400 Mcf. A buyer who reads it the other way is off by a factor of ten on their own consumption, which is not a 2% problem, and it will survive every careful conversion done downstream of it.

The fixed customer charge is unit-agnostic, and it dominates at low volume. Atmos Rate C carries $114.35 a month — $43.50 of base charge plus a $70.86 interim rate adjustment, less a penny of Rider CEE, which is why the number on the bill does not match the headline tariff rate. Spread over volume, that same charge is $2.29/Mcf at 500 Ccf a month and $0.09/Mcf at 12,500 Ccf. A 25x swing on one tariff, driven entirely by how much gas you burn. It is also why the EIA "Texas commercial price" — $13.08/Mcf in May 2026, $11.31 for 2025 — is a delivered statewide average and not a supply rate anyone can go buy.

Rate-class eligibility is written in volume units. CenterPoint's GSS schedule applies to accounts whose average monthly usage for the prior calendar year was 150,000 cubic feet or less — that is 150 Mcf, or 1,500 Ccf. Atmos Rate C reaches industrial customers under 30,000 Ccf average annual usage. Misread the unit and you misjudge which rate class you belong in by an order of magnitude, which is a bigger procurement error than any price you were negotiating.

Rate schedules are versioned and move on GRIP and interim-rate cycles, so treat every figure above as dated to the 2026 filings and re-pull before you rely on one. The full cost stack behind a Texas commercial gas rate covers how these delivery charges sit alongside commodity and basis.

What About Gas Priced Per kWh?

If you searched for a business gas price per kWh, most of what you found is British. UK business gas bills are stated in kWh by convention, converted from cubic metres. No U.S. supplier quotes natural gas in kWh — do not ask a Texas supplier for one, because the answer will be a confused silence.

The conversion you actually want, if you are comparing gas equipment against electric:

• 1 MMBtu = 293.07 kWh
• 1 therm = 29.31 kWh
• 1 Mcf of Texas gas at 1,016 Btu/cf = about 297.8 kWh of energy content

The caveat matters more than the arithmetic. Energy content is not delivered work. A gas boiler running at roughly 80% thermal efficiency and a heat pump at a COP above 3 turn the same nominal kWh into wildly different useful output, and on the electric side the bill is not one number per kWh anyway — capacity and energy charges price differently, and demand charges respond to peak, not consumption. A unit conversion is the starting point of that comparison, never the conclusion.

How to Normalize a Quote in Five Steps

1. Find your billing unit on the bill. In Texas it is almost certainly Ccf. Confirm it before converting anything, because a 10x error here contaminates every step below.
2. Get every quote into one unit. Use $/Mcf as the common denominator — it is what suppliers and EIA both speak.
3. Use 1.016, not 1.037, for a Texas Mcf-to-MMBtu conversion, and ask your LDC for its published monthly heat content once the account is big enough to justify the call.
4. Ask each supplier which pressure base their quote references. A supplier who cannot answer has not read their own tariff, which tells you something separate from the price.
5. Compare delivered, not commodity. Add LDC delivery and the fixed customer charge. At low volume that charge swamps the per-unit difference you have been optimizing.

And then the honest closing caveat: normalizing units is the first step, not the decision. Swing tolerances, renewal mechanics, basis language, and credit terms decide more Texas gas contracts than three cents per Mcf ever will. The full procurement sequence covers the rest of it, and if you are pricing a winter position, the winter 2026–27 outlook covers where the market sits.

Frequently Asked Questions

What unit does my Texas commercial gas bill use?

Almost certainly Ccf — hundreds of cubic feet. Atmos Mid-Tex Rate Schedule C bills commercial sales customers per Ccf, and CenterPoint's GSS schedule states its commodity charge "for all Ccf billed." A bill showing 2,400 units is 2,400 Ccf, which is 240 Mcf. Confirm the unit before converting anything.

How many MMBtu is one Mcf in Texas?

About 1.016 MMBtu on EIA's 2025 Texas annual heat content of 1,016 Btu/cf, or 1.013 using the May 2026 monthly figure. The 1.037 in most online converters is the U.S. average — correct nationally, roughly 2% too high for Texas. EIA's Texas number is itself a state-wide all-sector average, so a large account should ask its LDC for the heat content used to bill its own system.

What is the difference between Ccf and Mcf?

A factor of ten. Ccf is 100 cubic feet, Mcf is 1,000, so 10 Ccf equals 1 Mcf. The M is the Roman numeral for a thousand, not the metric mega-. Texas LDCs bill in Ccf while suppliers and EIA quote in Mcf, which makes this the most expensive unit mistake available to a Texas buyer.

Is a dekatherm the same as an MMBtu?

Yes, exactly — 1 Dth is 10 therms is 1,000,000 Btu is 1 MMBtu, by definition, always. Mcf to MMBtu is a different kind of conversion: it depends on a measured heat content that varies by month and system, so it is an estimate that needs a source rather than arithmetic.

Why do natural gas suppliers quote in different units?

Two families are in play. Volume units — cf, Ccf, Mcf — count space, which is what a meter measures. Energy units — Btu, therm, MMBtu, Dth — count heat, which is what NYMEX Henry Hub futures and most supplier hedges are denominated in. Each supplier quotes in whichever family matches how it sources and hedges the gas, and the buyer has to normalize before comparing.

Can I get a business natural gas rate per kWh in Texas?

No. Per-kWh gas pricing is a UK billing convention; no U.S. supplier quotes gas that way. To compare gas against electric equipment, convert: 1 MMBtu is 293.07 kWh, 1 therm is 29.31 kWh, and 1 Mcf of Texas gas holds about 297.8 kWh. Remember that energy content is not delivered work — boiler efficiency and heat-pump COP move that comparison further than the conversion does.

What is a pressure base and does it affect my bill?

A cubic foot only means something at a stated pressure and temperature. Texas rules use 14.65 psia at 60°F; NYMEX and EIA use 14.73 psia, a 0.546% difference in how much gas the same cubic foot holds. For a bundled sales customer this is not a hidden overcharge — the LDC states its base in tariff and bills consistently within it. It bites when reconciling an MMBtu-denominated supply or transport position against LDC-billed volume. Know which base each number is on.

The Bottom Line

Unit confusion is not the most expensive thing in a Texas gas contract, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. But it is the cheapest thing to fix, it sits upstream of every other comparison you make, and the errors it produces are silent — a 2% factor error and a 10x unit error both come out of the arithmetic looking perfectly reasonable.

Find your billing unit. Normalize to $/Mcf. Use the Texas factor. Then argue about the terms, which is where the money actually is.

Not sure which LDC or rate schedule serves your meter? That is the first thing our commercial natural gas brokerage in Texas establishes, before any pricing conversation starts.

Sources

• EIA, heat content of natural gas deliveries in Texas — annual. Texas 1,016 Btu/cf for 2025 and the 2015–2025 series. Released July 31, 2026.
• EIA, heat content of natural gas deliveries in Texas — monthly. Texas 1,013 Btu/cf for May 2026. Released July 31, 2026; next release August 31, 2026.
• EIA, converting natural gas prices between units (FAQ #45). The 1,037 Btu/cf U.S. average, the standard conversion formulas, the 14.73 psia reporting base, and EIA's own caveat that heat content varies by location.
• EIA, price of natural gas sold to commercial consumers in Texas. $13.08/Mcf in May 2026 and $11.31 for 2025 — delivered statewide averages including distribution and fixed charges, not supply rates.
• CME Group, NYMEX Rulebook Chapter 220 — Henry Hub Natural Gas Futures (PDF). Contract grade and the 10,000 MMBtu unit; Henry Hub standard base conditions are 14.73 psia at 60°F.
• 16 Texas Administrative Code §3.79 — Definitions. The Texas standard measurement base of 14.65 psia at 60°F.
• CenterPoint Energy, Rate Schedule GSS-2099-I-GRIP 2026 (PDF). Ccf billing, the three-pressure-base commodity table, the 150,000 cubic feet eligibility threshold, and the $39.30 / $57.30 customer charges.
• CenterPoint Energy, General Rules and Regulations (PDF). Defines a cubic foot of gas at four ounces above atmospheric pressure — the origin of the 14.65 psia base.
• Atmos Energy Mid-Tex, Rate Schedule C — Commercial Sales (PDF). Ccf billing at $0.09165/Ccf, the $114.35 total monthly customer charge, and the 30,000 Ccf industrial threshold.
• Texas Gas Service, Rate Schedule T-GTC (PDF). Central Texas service area, general terms for transportation, meters read on and after June 30, 2009. Section 1.3 defines the Btu at 60°F and 14.65 psia on a gross-real-dry basis.

Heat content figures are published averages and are not the heat content of any individual distribution system or meter. Atmos and CenterPoint figures are dated to the 2026 rate schedules on file and change on GRIP and interim-rate cycles. The supplier quotes in the worked example are illustrative and are not Elite Energy Consultants rates, quotes, or offers. Figures verified at the publisher on August 6, 2026.