Natural gas customer counts by state: where the numbers live

Exactly one record in the 16-dataset gas utilities slice carries billed consumer numbers: EIA Natural Gas Consumers, Deliveries and Prices by State (dnav), rated quality 9 and refreshed monthly. It is the published face of Form EIA-176, the annual report that natural gas companies file with the U.S. Energy Information Administration, aggregated into state-level series rather than company rows.

The consumer tables split each state into three sectors - residential, commercial and industrial - and track three kinds of measure for each: the number of consumers, sales volumes versus volumes transported for others, and average consumption per consumer. Series run one per measure per state per sector, annual on the main pages with monthly companions on parallel pages.

Context series stretch back further still if you want them. EIA's historical price library runs US wellhead prices from 1922 and most state series across 1967-2023 in nominal dollars per thousand cubic feet, while the supply-and-disposition dnav tables cover roughly 45 measures across 52 areas from 1973, adding underground storage capacity from 1989 and shale gas wells from 2007.

A repeatable pull takes about five steps:

For revenue-per-customer arithmetic, pair the counts with the state price histories - remembering every EIA dnav price series is nominal dollars per thousand cubic feet, so deflation stays your job.

Not directly, anywhere in this slice. Europe's records measure molecules, not meter accounts: Eurostat Natural Gas Supply Statistics publishes EU-27 and member-state inland demand, production and import dependency under commercial delivery terms 4.0, with provisional 2024-2025 balances and the underlying nrg_cb_gas series reaching back to the 1970s.

The UK comes closest at subnational level. A natural gas search on data.gov.uk returns 10,067 catalogue results, including London borough and local authority gas consumption series that generally begin in the 2000s. Operationally, the National Gas Transmission Data Portal streams Great Britain NTS flows refreshed every two minutes across roughly 12,300 documented data items, down to individual LDZ offtakes - throughput again, not customer counts.

Rate analysts are the heaviest users: benchmarking residential, commercial and industrial customer counts and sales-versus-transported volumes by state from the Form EIA-176 tables is a standing workflow in rate cases, stretching back to that 1967 commercial baseline.

Market sizing teams arrive on this exact query too - the gas utilities guide notes market researchers searching "natural gas customer counts by state" to size addressable service territories. Their companion workflows live on the dedicated market researchers page for gas utilities. Local distribution companies round it out, reading citygate-versus-end-use spreads off the price histories that start nationally in 1922.

Yes, by leaving the aggregated tables. State dnav rows sum every Form EIA-176 respondent operating in an area; the EIA Natural Gas Data Portal also exposes the underlying company-level filings, so a single utility's residential accounts can be isolated instead of inferred from the state total.

Below that, geography thins out. No dataset in this slice publishes customer counts by county, city or census tract. The nearest proxies are throughput-based: the supply-and-disposition dnav tables give deliveries by area across roughly 45 measures and 52 areas, and UK local authority gas consumption series on data.gov.uk offer district-level volumes for Great Britain rather than account counts.