The hardest question in apartment electricity procurement is not what rate you can get. It is which meters are actually yours to negotiate. A single Texas apartment community can carry five different metering arrangements at once, each with a different customer of record, and the answer decides whether you are taking 40,000 kWh a year to market or four million.

Get the classification wrong and everything downstream is wrong with it — the volume in the request for pricing, the load shape a supplier prices against, who has to sign, and what happens to residents. This guide sorts out the five arrangements, establishes which ones an owner controls, and covers the portfolio work that follows: ESI ID inventory, usage and demand, delivery charges, expiration alignment, and what happens when properties are bought and sold mid-term.

Five Ways a Texas Apartment Gets Its Electricity

These are not synonyms, and they are routinely used as though they were.

Arrangement What it means Customer of record Owner can shop it?
Individually metered Each unit has its own utility meter and its own account The resident No — resident's own account
Master-metered One meter measures all electric usage of the apartment house The owner Yes — the whole building's load
Submetered Master meter, plus owner-installed meters on each dwelling unit The owner, at the master meter Yes — but savings pass through to residents
Allocated Master meter, resident share computed by formula, no unit meters The owner, at the master meter Yes — but savings pass through to residents
All Bills Paid Owner carries resident electricity as an operating cost, no pass-through The owner Yes — and the owner keeps the benefit

Sitting alongside all five, at essentially every property: common-area and amenity accounts, and vacant-unit holdover accounts for units between residents. Those are always the owner's. Our guide to apartment common-area electricity works through that inventory meter by meter, including the site lighting that has no meter at all.

What the Texas Rule Actually Says

The governing rule is PUCT §25.142, and three definitions in it do most of the work.

For an owner deciding what to take to market, the operative provision is the charging limit. Under §25.142(d)(1)(F), the owner "shall not impose any extra charges on the tenant over and above those charges which are billed by the retail electric provider or utility to the owner." The rule also puts real obligations on a submetering owner: retaining utility bills, submeter readings, and test results; lease disclosures and a summary of the rules for tenants; separate, clearly labeled submetered electricity bills showing readings and how the charge was computed; and meter accuracy testing to ANSI standards. Where all dwelling units are submetered, the rule requires that submeters served by the same master meter be of the same type.

Read that limit carefully, because it changes the business case. If you submeter or allocate, a lower supply price does not become owner margin — it reduces what residents are billed, because you may only recover what you were charged. The owner's gain from procurement on those buildings is indirect: a more competitive all-in cost of occupancy, and less exposure when prices move. Where the owner absorbs the cost outright — All Bills Paid, common areas, vacant units — the savings land on the owner's own ledger. Two buildings that look identical from the parking lot can therefore have opposite procurement economics.

This article classifies meters so you can procure them correctly. It does not attempt to teach §25.142 compliance — registration, billing practice, dispute handling, and record-keeping obligations are real and are the owner's to meet with counsel. Read the rule.

All Bills Paid: The High-Volume Case

In an All Bills Paid community the owner carries electricity for every unit as an operating expense and recovers it through rent rather than through a utility charge. It is the arrangement where procurement matters most, for three reasons that compound.

ABP buildings therefore deserve the longest lead time and the most deliberate contract structure in a portfolio. They are also the accounts most likely to sit above the small-commercial threshold that governs which customer protections apply — a point the renewal checklist takes up in detail.

Which Meters the Owner Actually Controls

One test, applied per meter: is the ownership entity the customer of record, and is the service address in a deregulated territory? Both must be true. Neither is answered by looking at the building.

On the first: the name on the account governs. A resident in an individually metered unit holds their own account and only they can change it, regardless of who owns the building. An owner holds the master meter of a submetered property even though residents consume behind it, so the owner contracts for it.

On the second: most of Texas has retail choice, but not all of it. Properties in Austin (Austin Energy) and San Antonio (CPS Energy) sit in municipally owned territories with no competitive supply to shop. Lubbock Power & Light is municipally owned but voluntarily entered ERCOT retail choice, so Lubbock properties can shop. A portfolio spread across Texas will hold a mix, and confirming territory first saves chasing bills for accounts that were never contestable. Our explainer on how deregulated electricity works in Texas covers the structure.

Building the ESI ID Inventory

The ESI ID is the identifier that uniquely names a service point in the ERCOT market. Suppliers price ESI IDs, not addresses — one property routinely holds many, and two properties can share a mailing address while holding entirely separate ones. Until the list exists, nothing else can be done accurately.

For each account, capture:

Accounts on unmetered service will not have usage to pull, because there is no meter — their consumption is a deemed figure assigned by the TDU's tariff. They still belong in the inventory and still get supplied.

What a Supplier Is Actually Pricing

Three inputs shape the offer, and only the first is obvious.

Volume is the headline: annualized kWh across the accounts being bid. Load shape matters at least as much — the relationship between average and peak consumption, which is what load factor measures. Multifamily load has a genuinely useful characteristic here: it is residential in rhythm but commercial in size, and a master-metered or ABP building aggregates hundreds of households whose individual peaks do not coincide. That diversity smooths the combined curve in a way a single large commercial user's load rarely does, and it is worth making explicit rather than letting a supplier assume the worst.

Demand is the third, and it belongs to the delivery side of the bill. Larger accounts are billed partly on the highest fifteen-minute interval in the month rather than on total consumption — see what a demand charge is. No supplier discounts regulated TDU delivery charges; those are set by tariff and identical whoever supplies you. What the supplier controls is the energy price, and what your load shape controls is how good that price can be. Our breakdown of Texas TDU delivery charges separates the two halves of the bill.

One structural caution for large portfolios considering an indexed product. PUCT §25.499 applies to wholesale indexed products and products with a separate assessment of ancillary services costs offered to customers that are not residential or small commercial. Before enrollment the provider must obtain a signed acknowledgment of risk from the customer confirming they accept the price risk — the rule's own language has the customer acknowledging that wholesale volatility "may cause my energy bill to be multiple times higher in a month in which wholesale energy prices are high." If a large ABP or master-metered portfolio is offered a wholesale-indexed structure, that signature is a required part of the transaction, not a formality. Our guide to fixed versus variable rate structures covers the trade-off.

Aligning Expiration Dates Across a Portfolio

Properties are acquired at different times and contracted at different times, so end dates scatter. Consolidating them onto one date is what turns a dozen small annual negotiations into a single one with combined volume behind it.

The mechanism is bridging terms, not uniform terms: an account expiring in three months signs something short that carries it to the common target date, while an account with twenty months left is left alone until its own window opens. Alignment is not free — a blend of term lengths will not all price at the best available point, and forcing a short bridge in a bad market costs real money. It is a deliberate trade of some price optimization for negotiating leverage and administrative control.

The full sequencing — inventory, authority, notice windows, budget cycles, offer comparison — is the subject of the multifamily electricity renewal checklist, which is where to go once the classification work here is done.

Acquisitions and Dispositions

A supply contract runs between the supplier and the contracting entity. It does not follow the real estate automatically, and this is where portfolios most often get hurt.

Buying. Add electricity to the diligence list alongside the survey and the estoppels. Identify every ESI ID at the property, the current supplier, the end date, whether the contract can be assigned and on what consent, and what termination would cost. A property acquired with an expensive contract still running, or already on holdover, arrives with a cost problem that will not appear in the offering memorandum.

Selling. Contracts with remaining term are a closing item. Termination provisions in commercial supply agreements frequently key to remaining contracted volume, so the exposure depends on how much term is left and how the market has moved since signing. Establish the number early rather than discovering it in the final week.

Either way, a portfolio that transacts regularly should treat contract term as an asset-level attribute tracked in the same place as loan maturities — not as a facilities detail that lives on one property manager's desk. The pattern also applies beyond multifamily; our guide to when to renew a commercial electricity contract covers single-account timing.

What a Portfolio Approach Has Produced

One anonymized Elite engagement makes the shape of this concrete. Seven master-metered apartment complexes were brought together into a single procurement rather than contracted property by property — approximately 944,640 kWh of combined annualized consumption.

The contracted strategy across those properties is projected to save roughly $34,500 over six years, and it is currently about three years underway. That figure is a projection carried across contracted terms, not a realized, fully billed result — the remaining years have not been billed yet. It reflects electricity supply charges only: regulated TDU delivery charges, demand charges, and taxes are excluded, so it is not a total-bill number. Customer identity, locations, suppliers, and account identifiers stay private.

The mechanism was not a trick. It was seven properties negotiated as one block of load instead of seven small accounts negotiated alone at seven different moments in the market.

A Note on Benchmarking

Owners often want to know whether a property's consumption is reasonable before shopping it. ENERGY STAR's multifamily guidance is the standard reference: properties with 20 or more units can receive a 1–100 ENERGY STAR score, and the program acknowledges directly that whole-building energy data is hard to obtain in multifamily because residents often pay their own utilities. Where whole-building data is unavailable, it recommends benchmarking what you do have — comparing properties within your own portfolio, or benchmarking common areas alone to track usage and drive reductions there.

That is worth reading correctly. Benchmarking guidance describes how to measure performance; it is not procurement law and it says nothing about which meters you may contract for. Use it to decide where an efficiency project pays. Use the classification above to decide what to take to market. They are separate exercises and answering one does not answer the other.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a master-metered apartment complex?

One where a single meter measures all electric usage of the apartment house for billing purposes — resident consumption included — rather than each unit being metered separately by the utility. PUCT §25.142(b)(3) defines a master meter in those terms. The practical consequence for procurement is that the owner is the customer of record for the entire building's electricity, so the whole load is the owner's to contract for, not just the shared spaces.

What is the difference between submetering and allocation in Texas?

Submetering means each dwelling unit has its own meter installed by the owner behind the master meter, and residents are billed for what their own meter recorded. PUCT §25.142(b)(6) describes it as individual dwelling unit metering of electric service performed by the owner. Allocation bills residents a share of the master-meter total using a formula — square footage, occupancy, or similar — because there is no per-unit meter to read. Both are ways of recovering the same master-meter bill; only submetering measures. Either way, §25.142(d)(1)(F) prohibits the owner from imposing charges on the tenant above what the provider or utility billed the owner.

Which apartment electricity accounts can the owner shop?

Every account where the ownership entity is the customer of record and the service address sits in a deregulated territory. That reliably includes common-area and amenity meters, vacant-unit holdover accounts, and — where they exist — master meters and All Bills Paid buildings. It excludes occupied units where the resident holds their own account, because only that resident can switch it. The test is the name on the account, not the wire.

Can an owner switch electricity providers without resident consent?

On accounts the ownership entity holds, yes — that includes a master meter, even though residents consume behind it. No resident holds an account on a master-metered building, so there is no resident account to change and no interruption to anyone's service. Where the owner submeters or allocates, the supply cost is what gets passed through to residents under PUCT §25.142, so a better supply price reduces what residents are billed rather than what the owner keeps. Occupied units on individual resident accounts are outside the owner's authority entirely.

How do you align contract end dates across an apartment portfolio?

By choosing terms that land on a common target date rather than by choosing the same term length everywhere. A property twenty months from expiration and one three months out cannot sign identical 36-month contracts and end together; the shorter-dated account signs to a bridging term that carries it to the target. Alignment costs something — a blend of terms rarely all prices at the best available point — and buys a single negotiation with combined volume behind it. Our multifamily renewal checklist works through the sequencing.

What happens to the electricity contract when an apartment property is sold?

It does not transfer automatically. A supply contract is between the supplier and the contracting entity, so a sale generally requires either an assignment the supplier consents to or a termination, and termination provisions can carry a fee tied to the remaining volume. Treat contract status as a diligence item alongside the survey and the estoppels: identify every ESI ID at the property, its supplier, its end date, its assignment clause, and its termination terms before closing rather than after.

The Bottom Line

Classification comes before procurement, and it is not a formality. Which meters an owner controls determines the volume, the load shape, the signer, the resident impact, and — where §25.142 pass-through applies — whether the owner benefits from a better price at all. Two apartment communities of the same size and vintage can require entirely different strategies because one is master-metered and the other is not.

Sort the meters first. Then the portfolio work is straightforward: one inventory, one calendar, one negotiation with all of the volume behind it.

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