Why Your Energy Bill Is About to Get Dramatically Worse — And What Governments Are Hiding From You

The Iran war has sent European gas prices up 70% in a single month. Here is the full picture of what comes next for households across the continent.

The number that European energy ministers are most reluctant to say out loud is this: by some projections, average household energy bills across Western Europe could rise by between 35 and 60 percent before the end of 2026 if the Strait of Hormuz remains restricted beyond the current diplomatic window. That figure is derived from the combination of the TTF gas benchmark surge — from €38 to €54 per megawatt-hour in March alone, with Goldman Sachs projecting €72 by the second quarter — and the feed-through time between wholesale and retail prices that typically runs two to three months.

So why aren't governments saying this? Because they are in a genuinely impossible political position. If they tell citizens the full scale of what is coming, panic buying, demand spikes, and speculative market moves could accelerate the very crisis they are trying to manage. If they say nothing and the bills arrive in mailboxes in May and June looking nothing like what people expected, the political backlash will be severe.

Spain has taken the most aggressive domestic cushioning approach, halving VAT on most energy sources at an immediate cost to the Treasury of approximately €2 billion per month. Germany has reactivated its industrial energy subsidy mechanism. France has pre-positioned strategic gas reserves for priority release to household consumers. But across Central and Eastern Europe, where government fiscal positions are thinner and social safety nets less robust, the situation looks considerably more precarious.

In Romania, energy poverty advocacy groups estimate that nearly 3 million households — approximately 15 percent of the country — already spend more than 10 percent of their disposable income on energy, the threshold at which economists classify a household as energy-poor. At current wholesale prices passed through to retail, that number could exceed 5 million by autumn.

The key variable is the April 6 deadline that Trump has set for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. If energy flows normalize within the next two to three weeks, the price spike will be painful but manageable. If they don't, Europe is looking at an energy crisis that could dwarf the 2022 Russia shock in its retail price impact — because this time, storage levels entering the potential crisis are dramatically lower than they were then.