The gas price brake and district heating brake are in the starting blocks. From March 1st, millions of people can hope for relief. Due to the jungle of tariffs for gas and district heating, the special heating gift varies. FOCUS online calculates and says how high the relief for your living space will be.
The gas price will be capped for millions of households from March 1st. Gas must then not cost more than 12 cents per kilowatt hour. The price cap applies retroactively to January 1st.
However, there is a catch: the price cap only applies to 80 percent of the previous year’s consumption. If households consumed 10,000 kilowatt hours in the previous year, the gas price brake applies to 8,000 kilowatt hours. For each additional kilowatt hour, you pay the set energy price.
Kilowatt hours, previous year’s consumption, energy price – households lose track of all the terms.
FOCUS online makes the checkout and says how high the savings per square meter are.
In order to determine the gas price brake, you need to know your previous year’s consumption in kilowatt hours and your supplier’s current energy price.
With these two pieces of data, you can already find out whether the gas price brake will save you a lot of money, at least give you a small relief, or get nothing.
On average, a household consumes a good 140 kilowatt hours per square meter and year. In order to calculate the savings per square meter, those affected must know the current working price.
The gas price brake only applies to 80 percent of the previous year’s consumption. Because a household consumes 140 kilowatt hours per square meter, the heating gift is 112 kilowatt hours per square meter. The regular working price is due for the remaining 28 kilowatt hours.
Due to the gas price brake, the table now looks like this from March 1st:
Case study: A 50 square meter apartment requires an average of 7000 kilowatt hours of gas per year. With a current working price of 14 cents, households will no longer pay 980 euros per year from March 1, but 868 euros.
A detached house (120 square meters) consumes an average of 16,800 kilowatt hours of gas per year. With a working price of 16 cents, households no longer pay 2,688 euros per year from March 1, but 2,150 euros.
In extreme cases, tenants will only be paid the discount in December 2024. After all, the price brake only flows into the next utility bill. And this must be received by the tenant for the annual period from January to December 2023 by December 2024 at the latest.
According to experts, today’s interest rate decision by the Fed has already been decided. It will be exciting to see how things will continue afterwards – for both investors and savers.
Anyone who has submitted their property tax information on time will soon receive a post. The tax office reports how the property was valued. If you find an error in the notification, you have to react quickly. Because the objection period is short.
It is definitely worth checking whether there is a cheaper gas tariff. This can either be with the same gas supplier or you can inquire online about possible alternatives. Note that basic suppliers often have lower tariffs than supposedly cheap providers.
Price comparisons on the internet, a call to the energy supplier or a tariff change service such as remind me can help.
“The prices in the basic gas supply are currently lower than the prices for special contracts,” explains Rico Dulinski from the Brandenburg Consumer Center in Potsdam.
Not every basic supplier is represented with its basic tariff in common comparison portals.
To be on the safe side, you can simply enter the keyword “basic provider” and the postal code of your location in the search engine. The energy providers – including municipal utilities and municipal utilities – would have to publish data sheets with their prices on their website.
