Form Eia-176 Company Level Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

Form EIA-176 is the Annual Report of Natural and Supplemental Gas Supply and Disposition, the survey instrument behind most official US downstream gas statistics. The companies required to file it span the three parts of the midstream-to-retail chain: natural gas distribution companies, transmission companies and storage operators. Each return captures what that specific company did during the year - gas it supplied, delivered, sold or transported for others, and the customers it served by end-use sector.

That company-level origin is why the form matters to analysts. When you pull a state's residential customer count from an EIA Natural Gas Consumers, Deliveries and Prices by State table, you are looking at the sum of individual Form EIA-76 returns for that state and sector. EIA's own Definitions, Sources & Notes page names the form explicitly as the source, along with its formal title.

The filing is annual. What confuses first-time users is the release rhythm: EIA distributes the annual survey returns into monthly releases on its publication calendar - the consumer table carried a verified Release Date of 7/31/2026 with the next release set for 8/31/2026 - so the underlying data are yearly even though the page refreshes monthly.

The consumer-side tables built on the form track three sectors - residential, commercial and industrial - and four kinds of measure within each:

Each row carries a Sourcekey following the pattern <mnemonic>_<area>_<freq> - NA1501_NUS_8 is the US residential consumer-count series - plus a dated observation period stamped mid-year (1987-06-30 for the 1987 value) in the history workbook. The sales-versus-transported split is the form's distinctive contribution: it separates bundled utility customers from customers who bought gas elsewhere and had it shipped, which is the cleanest published read on retail choice penetration by state.

Scale-wise, that structure produces roughly 11 measures across 51 areas (the US total, all 50 states and DC) times three sectors - several thousand series once the companion price tables join, each downloadable as a multi-decade Excel history.

History depth varies by measure, not by form:

• Commercial average consumption per consumer starts in 1967 - the deepest series in the family.
• Industrial averages begin in 1973.
• US residential consumer counts start in 1987.
• Sales versus transported splits begin in 1997-1998, tracking the restructuring era rather than the survey itself.

EIA documents two structural breaks that will corrupt any naive multi-decade aggregation of customer counts:

1. The 1996 agricultural reclassification. Beginning with that reference year, agricultural gas use moved from the commercial sector to the industrial sector, so pre- and post-1996 commercial series are not like-for-like.
2. Post-1999 double counting. EIA expects some double counting in residential and commercial customer counts reported from 1999 onward because companies report both bundled customers and transportation-only relationships - the same physical premises can appear under more than one relationship type.

Both caveats come straight from the Definitions, Sources & Notes documentation attached to the consumer tables, and both argue for pulling the underlying definitions alongside the numbers rather than after the fact. A third practical caveat is revision behavior: the annual survey values can be revised after their initial publication year, and the table page does not state the survey cycle timing, so snapshot-based analyses should record the release date they pulled from.

Footnote conventions follow EIA standards across these tables: - = No Data Reported, W = Withheld, NA = Not Available. Treat withheld cells as suppressed disclosures rather than zeros when summing across states.

Rate analysts use the consumer tables to benchmark residential, commercial and industrial customer counts, sales versus transported volumes, and average consumption per customer by state for rate cases and market sizing - the sales/transported split doubles as a state-by-state read on retail competition. Market researchers size addressable utility markets from the same counts, joining them to citygate and end-use price histories from the EIA Natural Gas Prices - Wellhead, Citygate and End-Use tables, where US wellhead series start in 1922 and most state series in 1967, all in nominal dollars per thousand cubic feet.

Quant researchers take the longer view: the same form-derived panels sit beside roughly 45 measures across 52 areas in the dnav supply, disposition and prices by area tables, whose histories run from 1973 with storage capacity from 1989 and shale-gas well detail from 2007. And the monthly flagship wraps the whole picture - the EIA Natural Gas Monthly Report carries 25 tables and 6 figures per issue in XLS and PDF with state breakouts for production, storage, deliveries and prices.

The workflow reality: nobody consumes Form EIA-176 raw unless they work inside EIA. Analysts consume its published projections into dnav tables, the Natural Gas Monthly, and the portal's topic sections - which is exactly why the access routes above, not the form itself, determine how much company-level signal survives into a model.