An Enbridge Gas bill has three structural halves, not five lines that all behave the same. Commodity moves every quarter. Delivery and storage move annually. Tax is just HST. Once you see the split, every confusing thing on the bill becomes navigable.
The gas supply line. Resets every three months under the Quarterly Rate Adjustment Mechanism. Currently 10.1745¢/m³ in the EGD zone, 17.641¢/m³ in Union South.
Set annually by the OEB through multi-year rate orders. Customer charge near $23/month, distribution roughly 7.5¢/m³, storage roughly 1.5¢/m³.
A flat 13% HST on the subtotal. The federal carbon charge has been phased out and is no longer on current bills, though older invoices may still show it.
The QRAM trick: Enbridge makes zero profit on the gas itself. Their regulated return comes entirely from the delivery and customer-charge lines. The commodity rate is pass-through and is currently dropping as North American gas prices fall.
Most gas-bill confusion comes from two specific mistakes:
None of these are dumb mistakes. The bill is genuinely structured around two clocks running at different speeds.
"A gas marketer fixed-rate beats the QRAM."
Almost every gas marketer pitch in Ontario builds itself around the same sentence. Lock a fixed price for three to five years and you are protected from the volatility of the wholesale market. It sounds prudent. Over the actual length of a contract, the math has rarely worked out that way for ordinary households.
The fixed rate you sign is set against the wholesale forward curve at the moment of signing, which by definition prices in expected volatility plus a margin for the marketer. The QRAM, by contrast, is a pure pass-through: each quarter the OEB trues up Enbridge\'s forecast against actual wholesale costs, with no profit margin layered on top. On a long-term average a pass-through usually beats a forward-curve plus margin. The exception is a household that signed during a wholesale trough, which is precisely when marketer offers go quiet. Most contracts get signed during or just after a winter spike, which is the worst possible timing.
How the Quarterly Rate Adjustment Mechanism works
Four times a year, on January 1, April 1, July 1 and October 1, Enbridge Gas files a new QRAM application with the OEB. The application forecasts the wholesale cost of gas for the upcoming quarter, indexed to AECO and Dawn Hub forward curves. The OEB reviews the forecast against independent benchmarks, applies a true-up from the prior quarter\'s Variance Account (the gap between forecast and actual wholesale costs), and approves a new commodity rate in cents per cubic metre.
The headline number changes each quarter but the mechanics never do. In the most recent reset, EGD Rate 1 (covering the GTA, Niagara and eastern Ontario) moved down from 13.7599¢/m³ to 10.1745¢/m³. Union South Rate M1 (London to Windsor) moved down from 20.4037¢/m³ to 17.641¢/m³. Union North also decreased. The driver is the broader fall in North American gas prices over recent quarters, not anything specific to Ontario regulation.
Forecast reflects winter wholesale demand. Variance Account trues up the prior fall.
Forecast drops as winter heating demand ends. Variance Account trues up the prior winter.
Typically the year's lowest commodity rate. Storage injection drives summer wholesale pricing.
Forecast rises ahead of winter heating season. Storage withdrawal begins.
There is one important consequence of the Variance Account. Each quarter\'s rate is partly a forecast for the upcoming period and partly a correction for the previous one. A cold winter that pushes wholesale costs above forecast does not appear immediately on your bill: it lands in the following spring or summer QRAM as a small true-up adder. The smoothing protects you from monthly shock, at the cost of leaving you slightly behind real wholesale conditions.
Every line on an Enbridge Gas bill, explained
A residential Enbridge invoice has roughly six cost components plus tax. Each one is set by a different body, on a different cycle, and has a different relationship to your contract choice.
| Bill line | Who sets it | Approx ¢/m³ or $ | Resets when? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gas supply (commodity) | OEB-approved QRAM (Enbridge as default supplier) or your marketer | 10 to 18¢/m³ | Every quarter (Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct) |
| Delivery | OEB-approved (Enbridge rate order) | ~7.5¢/m³ | Annually |
| Customer charge | OEB-approved (fixed monthly) | $23/month | Annually |
| Transportation | OEB-approved (TransCanada and intra-Ontario pipelines) | small ¢/m³ | Annually |
| Storage / load balancing | OEB-approved (Enbridge storage assets) | ~1.5¢/m³ | Annually |
| Federal carbon charge | Government of Canada | $0 (phased out) | Phased out April 1, 2025 |
| HST | Federal + provincial | 13% | Statutory |
Approximate residential values for the EGD rate zone. Union South and Union North use the same line structure with different OEB-approved figures. Commodity reset dates are universal across zones.
Where Ontarians actually get confused
Five recurring patterns show up in OEB consumer complaints and customer-service tickets every winter.
Households compare a marketer's fixed offer against the customer-charge or the delivery line instead of the commodity line. The only line a marketer can lock is gas supply. Delivery is OEB-fixed and identical no matter what contract you sign.
The federal carbon charge was phased out in 2025. Current Enbridge bills do not include it. Older bills you kept for budgeting will still show the line, which throws off any year-over-year comparison.
Ontario has three gas rate zones (EGD, Union South, Union North), each with its own OEB-approved commodity rate. A neighbour in a different zone sees a different ¢/m³ for the same time period. That is geography, not a different contract.
Space heating dominates Ontario gas consumption. A February bill of $200 followed by a July bill of $35 is the normal seasonal pattern, not a billing error. Annualise before judging a contract.
The OEB gives you a 10-day cooling-off after signing plus a second cancellation window after the first bill. After those windows close, breaking a marketer contract usually triggers an exit fee. Most people miss both.
Estimate your annual gas bill, by line
Pick your rate zone and home size. The estimator breaks the annual cost into commodity, delivery, storage and HST using current QRAM and OEB-approved values. Numbers are blended residential approximations, not a quote.
Bill estimator
Answer 2 quick questions. We use current QRAM and OEB delivery rates.
Watch: winter months run three to five times higher than summer months because space heating dominates. A typical detached EGD winter month is around $110 to $130 all-in; July is closer to $30 to $40. Annualise before judging a contract.
Pick a rate zone and a home size to see your estimated annual bill broken down by line.
Uses current QRAM commodity rates and approximate OEB-approved delivery values for residential customers. Union North uses a placeholder value pending the latest quarterly filing. The federal carbon charge has been phased out and is no longer included.
Most fixed-rate contracts signed in the last winter spike are now well above QRAM
Wholesale North American natural gas prices peaked during the 2022 winter and have fallen sharply over the year that followed and again over the most recent quarters. The QRAM has tracked that decline almost in real time, because it is a pass-through with a quarterly true-up. EGD Rate 1 has nearly halved from its winter-spike high. Union South has dropped by more than a quarter in the last single reset alone.
Multi-year marketer contracts signed during that same period locked in a rate based on the forward curve at the time, which priced in a continuation of high prices plus a marketer margin. Many of those contracts are now sitting 50% to 100% above the present QRAM commodity rate, and they will keep paying that premium for the remaining years of the term. The OEB-protected cancellation windows have long since closed for most of those signers, which leaves only one remedy: wait out the contract, then return to system gas.
| Commodity option | ¢/m³ | Annual commodity | vs current QRAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current QRAM (system gas) | 10.1745¢ | $244 | baseline |
| Prior-quarter QRAM | 13.7599¢ | $330 | +$86 |
| Fixed marketer contract (typical 5-year, signed mid-spike) | 22.0¢ | $528 | +$284 |
| Door-to-door "saver" rate (typical 3-year offer) | 19.5¢ | $468 | +$224 |
Commodity-only comparison. Delivery, customer charge, storage and HST add the same amount on top of all four options. The QRAM advantage is structural: pass-through pricing with no marketer margin layered on top.
The takeaway is not that fixed contracts are always wrong. Over a 30-year window there are winter quarters when locking a low rate would have beaten a future QRAM. The problem is that those troughs are precisely when marketer offers go silent. By the time a marketer is at your door with a fixed rate, you are almost certainly being offered a price set against an elevated forward curve, not against a depressed one.
What to actually do, in order
- Pull out your last Enbridge Gas bill. Identify your rate zone (EGD, Union South or Union North) and confirm whether the gas-supply line names Enbridge or a separate marketer. If it names a marketer, you are on a contract and not on system gas.
- Check the current QRAM rate at enbridgegas.com. Compare the headline ¢/m³ on the page against the gas-supply ¢/m³ on your bill. Any gap of more than two or three cents means you are likely on a marketer contract priced above current system gas.
- Confirm the carbon line is zero. If you see a federal carbon-charge line on a current bill, contact Enbridge: that line should have been removed.
- If you have a marketer contract, find your end date. Marketer contracts run 3 or 5 years. The end date is on the contract you signed and on the marketer\'s renewal letter. Mark it on the calendar.
- Request to switch back to sales service. If your contract has ended or you are inside an OEB-protected cancellation window, you can return to Enbridge sales service (system gas) at the current QRAM rate by contacting Enbridge directly. There is no signup, no contract and no exit fee on system gas.
- Decline future door-to-door pitches. The OEB Code of Conduct for Gas Marketers requires a separate verification call before a contract is binding. You can simply not return that call. The contract is not in force until verification completes.
A consumer-friendly structure that quietly outperforms
The Ontario gas bill is structured in a way that is unusual among North American jurisdictions. Delivery is a regulated monopoly, which means no one can compete on that line. Commodity is a pass-through with a quarterly true-up, which means Enbridge earns nothing on the gas itself. The federal carbon line, which used to be the most contentious part of the bill, has been removed entirely.
That structure quietly outperforms most marketer contracts over a long enough horizon, because a pass-through with no margin will, on average, beat a forward-curve plus margin. The OEB\'s Variance Account ensures that the true-up is automatic and visible, rather than buried inside a retailer\'s pricing model. The consumer-friendly side of this is not loudly advertised, which is why most Ontarians do not realise it is the default they already have.
The risk is in the other direction. Wholesale gas prices are likely to remain volatile for structural reasons (LNG export growth from the US Gulf Coast, weather extremes, AECO basis differentials). Each quarter\'s QRAM reset absorbs that volatility for you. Each marketer contract pushes it onto you, in the form of a forward-curve-locked rate set at the moment of signing. The choice is between smoothed volatility and locked volatility, and the smoothed path is almost always cheaper over the term of a typical contract.
