SCE Time-of-Use Rates: A Plain-English Guide to Saving

If you’re a Southern California Edison customer, you’re almost certainly on a time-of-use rate — SCE moved its residential customers onto them by default. The price you pay per kilowatt-hour changes with the time of day, and the gap between the cheap hours and the expensive evening is wide. Move some of your usage out of that evening window and you pay less for the same energy. This guide breaks down SCE’s main residential plans and the two ways to actually capture the savings.

How SCE time-of-use pricing works

Every SCE residential TOU plan shares one idea: an expensive peak period in the evening, and cheaper energy the rest of the day. The plans differ in exactly when peak falls, how steep it is, and whether they add a lower overnight “super off-peak” tier. The numbers below are approximate summer below-baseline prices for 2026 — always confirm your current numbers on SCE’s Time-of-Use rate plans page, since they change and depend on your baseline allowance and season:

TOU-D-4-9PM — peak 4–9 p.m. every day

Off-peak runs around 37¢/kWh and the 4–9 p.m. peak lands well above 60¢. The five-hour daily peak, weekends included, is the one to plan around.

TOU-D-5-8PM — peak 5–8 p.m. every day

A narrower peak. The peak price is a bit higher, but the window is only three hours, so it’s easier to coast through. Off-peak is around 39¢. The name is literal: TOU-D is SCE’s residential time-of-use family, and 5-8PM is the peak window.

TOU-D-PRIME — peak 4–9 p.m., built for electrified homes

For homes with a heat pump, EV, or battery. It carries a fixed monthly Basic Charge in exchange for lower per-kWh energy, a genuinely cheap super off-peak overnight and midday tier, and a steep 4–9 p.m. peak. For larger all-electric loads it usually beats the standard plans.

The pattern is the same across all of them: the grid is busiest in the early evening as air-conditioning peaks, so that’s when power costs the most.

Summer vs. winter: the prices shift twice a year

Like the other California utilities, SCE runs two seasons and switches automatically on your bill:

• Summer — June 1 through September 30. Peaks are at their highest, because AC demand across the region hits hardest on hot evenings.
• Winter — October 1 through May 31. Every plan drops and the peak-to-off-peak gap narrows.

Two things follow. First, the shape of the day is flatter in winter, so the payoff from shifting a given load shrinks slightly — but on the plans with a steep peak (TOU-D-4-9PM, TOU-D-PRIME) it’s still worth automating year-round. Second, and more important: because summer and winter prices differ, the optimal schedule differs too. A pre-cool plan tuned for a steep summer peak is over-aggressive against the milder winter one. Getting this right by hand means re-tuning twice a year; automation just uses whichever season’s prices apply on the day it’s scheduling.

Where the savings are

The savings come from shifting flexible loads out of the evening peak and into the cheaper hours:

• EV charging during the overnight off-peak (or the super off-peak on TOU-D-PRIME) instead of the 4–9 p.m. peak. On a plan with a 6×-plus swing, a full charge in the trough versus the peak is a large recurring difference.
• Cooling your home. SoCal’s hottest hours overlap the peak window. If your AC does most of its work before 4 p.m. and the house coasts through the evening, you move a big block of usage into cheaper time.
• Water heating, laundry, and the dishwasher outside the 4–9 p.m. window — small per-load, easy to automate.

You’re not using less energy. You’re using it when it’s cheap.

How to capture it: by hand vs. automatically

By hand, the playbook is: pre-cool the house in the afternoon, set the EV charger to start late in the off-peak, and keep big appliances out of the 4–9 p.m. (or 5–8 p.m.) window. It works, but it’s a daily decision, and the right amount of pre-cooling depends on tomorrow’s weather. Over-cool on a mild day and you waste money; under-prepare on a hot one and you pay peak rates anyway.

Automatically removes the guesswork. Hungry Machines generates a fresh schedule for your HVAC, EV charger, water heater, and battery each night. It weighs SCE’s rate plan, the next day’s forecast, and a custom model of how your home actually holds temperature, then pre-cools just enough to coast through peak and times your EV and water heater for the cheapest hours. You set the comfort and charge limits; it does the scheduling.

For homes with an EV or central HVAC, that typically means 10–25% off the bill with no change in comfort.

Do peak rates apply on weekends?

Yes, on all three plans. TOU-D-4-9PM, TOU-D-5-8PM and TOU-D-PRIME all apply their peak window every day of the week. Saturday and Sunday evenings are priced exactly like weekday evenings, and SCE offers no weekend-exempt residential time-of-use plan.

This is worth knowing because SCE’s peak is steep. On TOU-D-4-9PM the spread runs roughly 37¢ off-peak against well over 60¢ on-peak — so the same load costs about 1.7× more at 6 p.m. Saturday than at noon Saturday. Running a dryer, a dishwasher and an EV top-up across a Saturday evening is the single most expensive hour block of the weekend.

The practical consequence is that there is one schedule, not two. Because the windows never shift by day of week, whatever you do on a Tuesday to stay out of 4–9 p.m. works unchanged on a Sunday — which is precisely what makes the whole thing automatable.

Common questions

Which SCE plan is best for an EV?

If your whole house is electric — heat pump plus EV, maybe a battery — TOU-D-PRIME is usually the winner, since it trades a fixed monthly charge for cheap super-off-peak energy that rewards overnight charging. If your loads are more modest, TOU-D-4-9PM or TOU-D-5-8PM may come out ahead by avoiding the fixed charge. Which one wins depends on your total usage; compare on SCE’s rate comparison tools. Whichever you land on, automation makes it perform closer to its best case.

Is TOU-D-5-8PM better because the peak is shorter?

It can be, and the trade is explicit. TOU-D-5-8PM gives you a three-hour peak instead of five, which is markedly easier to coast through — a pre-cooled house holds its temperature over three hours far more comfortably than over five. In exchange the peak price is a little higher and the off-peak rate is not quite as cheap, around 39¢ against TOU-D-4-9PM’s 37¢.

The deciding factor is whether you can actually vacate the window. If your household is genuinely out or idle from 5 to 8 p.m., the narrower peak is nearly free money. If you cook dinner at 6 p.m. every night regardless, you are paying the higher peak price for hours you were going to use anyway.

Compare a month of your own hourly usage against both. The best plan is a fact about your household, not about the plan.

Do I need solar to benefit?

No. Time-of-use savings come from when you draw grid power, with or without panels. On TOU-D-4-9PM the spread runs roughly 37¢ off-peak against well over 60¢ on-peak, and capturing that gap requires nothing on the roof.

Solar does change the shape of the problem rather than removing it. Panels tend to cover your midday load already — which is part of why midday is cheap on these plans in the first place — so the remaining opportunity concentrates in the evening peak and the overnight hours. Under NEM 3.0, export credits are low enough that self-consuming your production generally beats selling it, which makes shifting load into your own generation window more valuable, not less.

For solar and non-solar homes alike the lever is identical: move flexible load out of 4–9 p.m.

Next steps

Elsewhere in California? The same playbook covers PG&E’s time-of-use rates in the north and SDG&E’s in San Diego. And if your utility uses hourly pricing that changes day to day rather than fixed time-of-use blocks, see how ComEd’s hourly pricing works. For the software side, the part that actually generates the schedule, see our guide to home energy management systems.

To see the automatic version in action, check how Hungry Machines works and sign up now.

Still unsure when to run things? See the cheapest time to run your appliances and whether peak rates apply on weekends.