Uganda's quarterly tariff reset holds the lifeline rate while oil and the shilling push the rest up.

For a generator selling power into Uganda's grid, and for the industrial offtaker who pays the bill at the other end of it, the electricity tariff that applies from July to September 2026 is now fixed: the Electricity Regulatory Authority has approved the end-user schedule that Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited will bill against for the third quarter of 2026. Extra-large industrial users pay UGX 207.7 a unit and large industrial users UGX 308.1, against an average of UGX 779.4 for domestic customers and UGX 360.0 for public amenities.

Two protected rates were left untouched. Domestic customers whose rolling monthly average over the preceding six months stays at or below 100 kWh keep a lifeline rate of UGX 250 on their first 15 units, and the cooking rate holds at UGX 412 a unit across a 70 unit bundle running from the 81st to the 150th unit.

Three inputs pushed the determination upward. The shilling lost 4.22% against the US dollar between the two quarters, from 3,624.9 to the 3,777.81 the Bank of Uganda published on 29 May 2026, which lifts the cost of imported inputs along the whole chain. The OPEC reference basket reached USD 114.55 a barrel in May 2026, against USD 64.46 in November 2025, raising the annualised power purchase cost carried by the Namanve and Tororo thermal plants. Core consumer prices, as measured by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, rose to 140.52 in May 2026 from 137.23 in November 2025. Pulling the other way, the quarter's projected dispatch leans more heavily on the large hydro plants and less on costlier small hydro.

The determination was made under the Electricity Act and the "Electricity (Application for Permit, Licence and Tariff Review) Regulations, 2007", with the full schedule published by the regulator.

The implication is that a Ugandan buyer's price path is a quarterly question rather than an annual one: currency, fuel and inflation all reached the cost of supply inside three months. On this reading, hydro availability is the input a buyer budgeting the December quarter would watch most closely, since it is the one that held this schedule down and the one furthest from any single offtaker's influence.