18th September 2026 - 3 min read
If your home uses between 600 and 800 kWh of electricity a month, your TNB bill is about to get smaller. From September through December, households using up to 800 kWh won’t pay the Automatic Fuel Adjustment (AFA), the RM10 retail charge or SST. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim announced the change on 17 September after a meeting with TNB and the Energy Commission. Until now the limit was 600 kWh.
Anwar said the haze and hotter weather had pushed some homes over 600 kWh, resulting in unusually higher electricity bills.
Three charges are waived once you’re under the limit. The AFA is set every month by the Energy Commission, and for September it’s a surcharge of 3.67 sen per kWh. The retail charge is a flat RM10 a month. SST is 8% on the part of your usage above 600 kWh. This is roughly what that adds up to.
| Monthly usage | AFA at 3.67 sen/kWh | Retail charge | SST (8% above 600 kWh) | Total saved |
| 700 kWh | RM25.69 | RM10 | about RM3.85 | about RM39 |
| 800 kWh | RM29.36 | RM10 | about RM7.70 | about RM47 |
The SST column is an estimate. TNB works SST out on the energy, capacity, network and AFA charges for the units above 600 kWh, so the amount on your bill will be a ringgit or two different. If you use 600 kWh or less, nothing changes. You weren’t paying these charges before and you still won’t.
Under the old 600 kWh rule, going just 1 kWh over the limit could mean paying the charges on your full usage. Use 601 kWh and you pay AFA on all 601 units, not just the one unit over. TNB hasn’t said whether the 800 kWh limit works the same way. If it does, a home at 801 kWh pays about RM47 more than a home at 800 kWh. If you’re anywhere near the limit, keep an eye on the kWh usage on your bill or in the myTNB app for the next three months.
The announcement came on 17 September, so some households may already have received their September bill. TNB hasn’t said yet whether those bills will be corrected or the difference taken off the October bill. We’ll update this article when it does.
TNB said on 15 September that consumers had received RM3.1 billion in AFA rebates since the mechanism started in July 2025, against RM800 million in surcharges. Both figures are right, but the rebates were mostly in the first year.
The AFA has also become more expensive in recent months. It was a 1.38 sen per kWh surcharge in May, rising to 3.67 sen in September. TNB’s latest quarterly projection puts December at 5.48 sen per kWh, although that’s only a forecast.
The exemption ends on 31 December, and there’s no word yet on what happens in January.
If the limit goes back to 600 kWh and the AFA stays near September’s level, a 700 kWh home would pay about RM39 more a month again. Our TNB bill explainer breaks down every charge on the new bill format, and if your usage sits near the limit, TNB’s Time-of-Use tariff shows what moving some of it to off-peak hours can do.
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Christina writes about personal finance with an eye for making the complicated feel straightforward. She is drawn to the everyday money decisions people face and genuinely enjoys finding the clearest way to explain them. Between articles, she is probably napping, on a hiking trail, or terrorising her sister’s cats.
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