Minnesota bars a utility from shutting off your heat unless it caps your payment plan at 10% of income

Whether your heat can be shut off in Minnesota if you cannot pay the bill

If you live in Minnesota and want to know whether your heat can be shut off if you cannot pay the bill, state law gives a direct answer for most utility customers. Minnesota Statutes section 216B.096, called the Cold Weather Rule, runs every year from October 1 through April 30. During that window, a utility covered by the law cannot disconnect, and must reconnect, the heating service of a household at or below 50% of the state median income, so long as that household sets up and keeps a payment plan. The plan itself is capped by law. The utility cannot require more than 10% of the income of that household toward current and past heating bills.

Which Minnesota utilities the 10% cap actually covers

This site read the statute text directly rather than relying on a summary of it, and found the 10% cap applies only to investor owned utilities, companies such as Xcel Energy, CenterPoint Energy and Minnesota Energy Resources, under section 216B.096. A separate law, section 216B.097, covers municipal utilities and cooperative electric associations, and it sets no fixed percentage. It requires only a payment plan that considers the financial resources of the household. A customer served by a municipal utility or a rural electric cooperative does not get the same guaranteed 10% ceiling as a customer of an investor owned utility.

The bills are astronomical this season.

Tammy Alto, Director of the Energy Assistance Program for Hennepin County. Source 4.

How much worse this winter has gotten

This winter has made that protection matter more. A Minnesota Public Utilities Commission analysis, reported by MinnPost, found involuntary disconnections by the state investor owned utilities rose 27.43% from September through November 2025 compared with the same 3 months a year earlier. The same analysis found the number of Minnesota households seeking Cold Weather Rule protection rose by more than 25% over the same stretch. Both figures describe the same investor owned utilities covered by the 10% cap, so more households are losing heat and asking for the protection at the same time this season.

A lot of households don't have the credit to negotiate.

Tammy Alto, Director of the Energy Assistance Program for Hennepin County. Source 4.

The protection is not automatic

None of this makes a Minnesota winter automatically shutoff proof. The Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota, an independent ratepayer advocate, directly corrects a common misunderstanding, that utilities are not allowed to shut off service during the winter at all. A covered customer still has to set up a payment agreement and keep making payments to keep the protection, and a utility still cannot disconnect an occupied home earlier than 10 working days after mailing the required notice. Nationally, utilities reported 13,400,000 residential electric disconnections and 1,700,000 natural gas disconnections to the federal government in 2024, with no Minnesota specific breakdown in that report.

The gap between eligible and helped in Hennepin County

That gap between a legal cap and actual relief shows up clearly in Hennepin County, where about 80,000 households are eligible for the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, but only about 28,000 who apply actually receive it, according to the director of the county Energy Assistance Program. This is a Hennepin County figure only, not a statewide Minnesota count, and it shows that a legal cap on what a utility can demand does not by itself get help to every household that qualifies for it.