How To Avoid The Increase That Arrives In May?

The Energy Regulatory Commission has made the bad news official: the benchmark gas sales Price will rise by 15.4% on May 1, 2026. This is the highest bill ever recorded in France. In ten years, the annual bill for a household heated with gas has increased from 747 euros to 1,750 euros. Welcome to the world after the Iran War…

The good news, if you can call it that, is that Households having subscribed to a fixed price offer will not experience any price change during the duration of their contract. The bad news is that they only represent 27% of residential gas subscribers. The remaining 73%, or around 7.5 million households, have subscribed to an indexed offer and will therefore drink.

Why is it exploding now

The May grid reflects the market panic during the peak of the Iranian crisis, when prices occasionally doubled. It is a latency period of almost two months which is creating this violent shock wave today. Clearly, the CRE smoothes prices over several weeks, which protected consumers at the most acute moment of the conflict, but the bill always ends up arriving.

And it’s not over yet. Projections until December 2026 outline a high trajectory for the entire second half of the year, with no return to pre-outbreak levels. For homes heating with gas, the increase even reaches 20.3% on the heating kWh, or up to 254 euros more on the annual bill.

The only real solution to avoid big increases is moving to a fixed price

There is a shield, and it is called the price lock offer. The principle is simple, by signing a fixed price contract today, you lock in your kWh rate for a period of 1 to 3 years, regardless of what happens on the markets.. Among the offers available, some suppliers block the kilowatt hour at €0.108, or 14% below the future May benchmark price, with the price maintained until 2028. Others offer fixed offers over 3 years, with an annual bill estimated around 2,000 euros for a heating profile.

Another advantage and not the least: changing supplier takes less than ten minutes, does not generate any power outages, and it is the new supplier who takes care of all the termination procedures with the old one. To compare the available offers, the national energy mediator’s comparator is free, independent, accessible in a few clicks and will not ask for your email after completing the entire process to access the results.

But wait, it could drop again in June…

Some analysts anticipate a pronounced drop in prices from June 1, 2026provided that the recently negotiated ceasefire is maintained over time and that maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remains open. This optimistic scenario exists, yes. But betting on it is like playing roulette with your bill.

It could take up to five years for production to return to normal, and experts agree that the price floor will be permanently higher than before the crisis. The fact that Trump is expected to be in power for a while must also be a layer of unknowns and instability to take into account. Suffice to say that the hope of a rapid return to the pre-war situation is slim. You have until April 30 to act. Afterwards, it’s too late for May, and potentially for many more months.