PlantBench / State energy and labor costs
State industrial energy and production wages for processors
Selecting a state on a calculator fills electricity, gas, and a production wage from the publications below. The table is those same figures for ten processing states. They are averages, not your tariff or your wage. Unpublished cells use the U.S. average and are marked.
Which sources are these?
Electricity is the EIA electricity/retail-sales annual industrial price for 2025, in cents per kilowatt-hour. The U.S. total in that series is 8.62 cents. Gas is the EIA Natural Gas Industrial Price for 2025, dollars per thousand cubic feet, converted to dollars per therm by dividing by 10.37. The wage is the BLS OEWS May 2025 hourly mean for Production Occupations, SOC 51-0000, all industries, not food manufacturing alone. The worksheet loads it with a 32% burden.
With no state selected, the worksheet does not use these averages. It uses a planning wage of $19.50 per hour, electricity at $0.085 per kWh, and gas at $0.95 per therm. Those three are not the BLS or EIA national figures.
How should you use the table?
Pick the state on the calculator if you want these starting rates, then replace them with the bill and the loaded wage you actually pay. The methodology page records the series names and which cells were unpublished.
Ten processing states
U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2025. U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2025, divided by 10.37 therms per Mcf. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. A marked cell uses the U.S. average because the state figure was not published.
| State | Electricity | Gas | Wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | $0.2162/kWh | $1.26/therm | $26.41/hr |
| Washington | $0.0688/kWh | $0.50/therm (U.S.) | $30.02/hr |
| Idaho | $0.0798/kWh | $0.40/therm | $25.33/hr |
| Wisconsin | $0.0892/kWh | $0.65/therm | $24.99/hr |
| Minnesota | $0.0932/kWh | $0.64/therm | $25.98/hr |
| Michigan | $0.0859/kWh | $0.77/therm | $24.75/hr |
| New York | $0.0955/kWh | $1.14/therm | $25.92/hr |
| Florida | $0.0884/kWh | $0.67/therm | $22.79/hr |
| Georgia | $0.0781/kWh | $0.60/therm | $22.61/hr |
| Texas | $0.0655/kWh | $0.36/therm | $23.94/hr |
Run it on the worksheet
Questions
Are these food-plant wages?
No. BLS publishes NAICS 311 detail at the national level. The state figure is production occupations across industries. It is a starting point, not a vegetable-plant wage.
Do these rates include demand charges?
No. The electricity figure is the industrial energy price in the EIA series. Demand charges, ratchets, and taxes on the bill are not in it.