Wisconsin does not have a year round shutoff ban, after a bill raising protection from 250% to 300% of poverty guidelines failed to pass

Whether Wisconsin has a year round shutoff ban

If you are asking whether Wisconsin has a year round shutoff ban, the answer is no. Senate Bill 780, introduced in the Wisconsin Senate on December 12, 2025 by Senator Larson, would have created one. State legislative records mark the bill failed to pass under Senate Joint Resolution 1 on March 23, 2026, about 6 months before this article was written, when the 2025 to 2026 legislative session closed. Its identical companion in the Assembly, Assembly Bill 785, failed the same day. This site read the record of the bill directly on the Wisconsin Legislature site, rather than relying on announcement coverage that described a bill still being decided, and confirmed that failed status from the record itself.

What the bill would have changed

Right now, Wisconsin Administrative Code PSC 113.0304 bars a utility from disconnecting a household for nonpayment only from November 1 through April 15 each year, and only for a household whose gross quarterly income is at or below 250% of the federal poverty guidelines, the income limits the federal government publishes every year. Senate Bill 780 would have removed that season limit entirely, so protection would run all year rather than only in winter, and would have raised the income line to 300% of the federal poverty guidelines. Neither change ever took effect. The rule Wisconsin has today remains the seasonal one, narrower than what the bill proposed.

Who the bill defined as burdened

Senate Bill 780 also defined 2 tiers of household by how much of income goes to utility bills. A severely energy burdened household was any household paying 4% or more of annual income on electricity and gas, or any household with no income at all that still pays a utility bill. An energy burdened household was one paying between 2% and 4%. For both tiers, the bill would have required the Public Service Commission, the state agency that regulates utilities, to cap the actual monthly cost, after assistance, at 2% of annual income divided by 12, and to enroll eligible households automatically, starting within 13 months of the law taking effect and continuing for 36 months.

Each month we choose between paying the electric bill or filling our prescriptions.

Jill Sexton, Wausau resident who receives disability assistance. Source 4.

What running the program would have cost

A fiscal estimate prepared by the Public Service Commission put the cost of running this program at 826,100 dollars a year, covering 7 new staff positions starting July 1, 2026. All of that money would have come from a new fund filled by the existing gross revenues tax on public utilities, a tax utilities already pay, not from general state tax revenue. The bill drew bipartisan cosponsors in both chambers. Neither Senate Bill 780 nor Assembly Bill 785 ever received a floor vote before the session closed.

Rising energy rates are becoming an unsustainable burden on regular people in Wisconsin.

Representative Darrin Madison, Democrat of Milwaukee, sponsor of Assembly Bill 785. Source 4.

The scale behind the push

Nationally, utilities reported 13,400,000 residential electric disconnections and 1,700,000 residential natural gas disconnections to the federal government in 2024, with no Wisconsin specific count in that report or in any other source checked for this article. The scale behind proposals like this one is national, even where the count for one state is not available. Wisconsin protection remains what it was before Senate Bill 780 was ever introduced, seasonal, and capped at 250% rather than 300%.