A switch-hold is a flag on an address that stops any other electricity provider from taking over the meter. While it is in place, a switch request is rejected, and so is a move-in. Texas rules allow a hold in exactly two situations: you owe your provider money and have entered a payment plan for it, or the delivery utility has found meter tampering at the premise. Each has its own way off, and neither turns your power off.
Reason one: a payment plan on a past-due balance
If you fall behind and your provider lets you pay the balance over time, through a deferred payment plan or a level or average billing plan, Public Utility Commission rules allow it to place a switch-hold until the debt is cleared (rule 25.480). It can’t do this quietly. Before you agree, the provider has to tell you, in these words: “A switch-hold means that you will not be able to buy electricity from other companies until you pay the total deferred balance.” If you signed a deferred payment plan, that sentence was in it.
The hold comes off when you pay the deferred balance in full. If you keep the installment plan instead, it also comes off once you have met the plan’s terms and paid 12 consecutive bills with no more than one late payment.
Reason two: meter tampering
The second kind doesn’t come from your provider. When the delivery utility, Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, TNMP or Lubbock Power & Light, determines that the meter at a premise has been tampered with, it places a switch-hold the same day (rule 25.126). It sits on the premise, not on a customer, which is how people with no part in the tampering run into it: a new tenant’s move-in is rejected until the new provider asks the utility to remove the hold, which it can do after confirming that the applicant is a new occupant unrelated to the old one. If the tampering was at a home you still occupy, the hold is between you and the utility; its number is on your bill.
How you find out
Usually the hard way. You enroll with a new provider, the switch is rejected, and the new provider tells you there is a hold on the address. Your current provider, or the utility, can tell you which kind. A hold attaches to the meter’s ESI ID, the identifier for the address, not to a person. That is why a new tenant can be stopped by a hold the previous occupant earned.
What a switch-hold doesn’t do
- It doesn’t cut off your power. Disconnection for nonpayment is a separate process with its own notice, below.
- It doesn’t stop you moving out. You can close the account and start service at a new address. You still owe the balance, but the hold stays with the old meter.
- It doesn’t change your plan or price. If your contract expired while you were on the payment plan, you are on the provider’s month-to-month default rate, and the hold keeps you there. That is the real cost of a hold.
The protections around it
- A late-payment penalty can be at most 5% of the overdue amount, charged once. It does not compound.
- During an extreme-weather emergency, a hard freeze or a heat advisory in your county, the provider can’t disconnect anyone in that county for nonpayment, and has to offer a deferred payment plan on request for bills that come due during it. That plan can carry a switch-hold too.
- Before any disconnection for nonpayment you get a separate written notice, and the disconnect date has to be at least 10 days after it is issued.
How to clear it
- Ask your current provider for the total deferred balance, in writing, and pay it. The hold has to come off.
- If you can’t pay it at once, keep to the plan: its terms, then 12 consecutive bills with at most one late payment.
- New at the address? Tell the new provider you are a new, unrelated occupant and ask it to request removal. A previous occupant’s debt is not yours to pay.
- Tampering at a home you still occupy: call the utility, not the provider.
Once the hold is off you are in the same position as anyone else; see when to switch and how to switch. Expect a credit check from the new provider; more than one late payment in the last 12 months can mean a deposit. See electricity deposits and how to avoid one.
WattaWatt can’t see or lift a hold. What it can do is tell you what the switch is worth once the hold is gone, priced on your own 12 months of usage.