Yaka units calculator

Uganda’s electricity bands do not go up in a line

Almost every tariff in the world gets more expensive the more you use. Uganda’s does not. Units 81 to 150 are charged at a deliberately low rate, the cooking tariff, which is a little over half what units 16 to 80 cost. Then, above 150 units, the price goes back up to the higher rate.

It is not a mistake in the schedule. It is policy: the cheap band exists to make electric cooking competitive with charcoal, so it sits exactly where a household’s cooking consumption would fall. The practical effect is that the 81st unit you use in a month is cheaper than the 80th, and the 151st is expensive again.

This is also why simple online Yaka calculators disagree with each other. Anything written as a plain ascending block calculation, cheapest band first and most expensive last, gets the middle of the range wrong. This one walks the bands in the order the schedule actually sets them.

UEDCL, not Umeme

Umeme’s twenty-year concession expired on 31 March 2025. Since 1 April 2025 the Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited has distributed and retailed grid power, so if a bill, a blog or a calculator still says Umeme, it has not been updated since then.

The distributor does not set the price in any case. The Electricity Regulatory Authority approves tariffs quarterly and publishes them as a dated schedule. This calculator uses the Q3 2026 (July–September) schedule for domestic low-voltage single-phase supply on the main grid, meaning Kampala, Wakiso, Mukono and the rest of the national network. West Nile and the Kalangala island systems are separate distributors with their own tariffs, and these figures do not apply to them.

The rates change every quarter

This matters more than it sounds. The main domestic rate moved by roughly three per cent in the space of two quarters. A figure hardcoded into an article a year ago is simply wrong now. The tariff period this calculator is using is printed under every result, and after it expires the page will tell you so rather than quietly carrying on. Check era.go.ug for the current schedule if the date has passed.

The lifeline rate is not for everyone

There is a subsidised rate for the first 15 units of the month, but it only applies to domestic customers whose rolling average over the previous six months does not exceed 100 units a month. That is a genuinely low level of consumption: a small household with lights, a television and a fridge, and no electric cooking or water heating.

A typical rented unit in Kampala uses more than that, so it does not qualify, which is why the lifeline switch on this calculator starts off. Turning it on when your meter does not qualify will understate the bill. The lifeline units also have to be used in the month they are given: they are not carried forward, and anything unused is lost.

The service charge and VAT

There is a fixed monthly service charge on top of the units. On prepaid it comes out of your first purchase of the month, and if you skip a month it accumulates and is taken from the next purchase. That is why a token bought after a long gap gives you fewer units than you expected.

We have made that charge an editable field rather than fixing it, because the only published amount we could find for it sits on an undated page written before UEDCL took over. Check your own receipt and put the real figure in. If you have already paid it this month, set it to zero.

Every figure this tool shows excludes VAT. VAT is added on top of the published tariff rather than being included in it, but we could not confirm from a primary source which rate applies to domestic electricity, or whether the service charge sits inside the VAT base. Rather than multiply by a number we cannot stand behind, we leave it out and say so. Your receipt total will therefore be higher than the total here.

Why there is no “how many units will 50,000 buy me”

Because we cannot do it accurately. Working backwards from an amount of money needs three things: the exact service charge, the VAT rate on electricity, and the order the vendor applies them in, meaning whether VAT comes off before or after the service charge, and whether VAT is charged on the service charge at all. None of the three is confirmed by a primary source, and getting the order wrong puts the answer out by several units.

A wrong answer there is worse than no answer, because you would check it against your own token receipt within the minute. So this tool runs in one direction only: units in, shillings out. To sanity-check a purchase, enter the units the receipt gave you and see whether the cost lands near what you paid.

Checking a tenant’s meter reading

If you are a landlord reading a sub-meter, take the difference between this month’s reading and last month’s, put that number in above, and you have what those units cost. That figure is what you can recover, and no more. Charging above cost is selling electricity, which requires a licence.

If several units sit behind one shared meter rather than individual sub-meters, use the shared meter split calculator to divide the one bill between them at cost.