Ohio's Standard Choice Offer (SCO): Why Your Gas Default Rate Changes Every Month
Electric shoppers in Ohio get a tidy benchmark — the Price to Compare, one number, printed on the bill. Gas shoppers get something squirmier: the Standard Choice Offer (SCO), a default rate that changes every month. Understanding how it moves is the whole game in Ohio gas shopping.
What the SCO actually is
If you've never chosen a gas supplier, your utility passes you to a default supplier at the SCO rate (on some utilities' bills it appears as the GCR — gas cost recovery — but the shopping logic is the same). The SCO formula is simple and honest: the NYMEX month-end settlement price for natural gas — the openly traded national market price — plus a fixed retail adjustment set by auction. Columbia Gas's current adjustment, for example, is $0.225 per Ccf on top of the market price. When the market is calm, the SCO is one of the fairest default rates in the country: you're basically buying gas at wholesale plus a small, competitively-bid markup.
Why "fair" doesn't mean "predictable"
The catch is volatility. Natural gas is a seasonal commodity — winter demand spikes, storage swings, cold snaps — and the SCO passes every wiggle straight to you, with your highest rate months often landing exactly when your furnace is working hardest. A typical Ohio home might use five times more gas in January than in July, so a winter price spike multiplies against peak usage. That's the scenario fixed-rate offers exist to prevent.
Fixed offer vs. SCO: the honest framework
- The SCO wins on average. Over multi-year stretches, staying on the market rate has historically beaten most fixed offers, because fixed rates embed an insurance premium — the supplier charges extra for absorbing winter risk.
- Fixed wins on bad winters — and on peace of mind. If a polar-vortex January doubles wholesale prices, fixed-rate customers sail through. Whether that insurance is worth ~10–20% extra in calm months is a personal budgeting question, not a math error.
- Variable supplier offers are the worst of both. A supplier's variable rate floats like the SCO but without the auction discipline — they can drift far above it. If you want market pricing, the SCO itself is usually the better float.
- Teasers still tease. Gas offers marked "Intro" or "Promo" undercut the SCO briefly, then convert. Our tables hide them by default.
How to compare when the benchmark moves
Find your current SCO/GCR rate on your bill (it's on the supply line, in $/Ccf or $/Mcf depending on your utility — our tables match each utility's unit). Compare it against the fixed offers on your utility's page here, remembering that today's SCO is one month's snapshot: a fixed offer slightly above the current SCO can still be a rational winter hedge, and one far above it is just expensive insurance. The utilities also publish their SCO history — a year of past rates tells you what "normal" looks like for your territory.
The takeaway
Ohio's gas default isn't a trap — it's a transparent market rate with a small markup, and doing nothing is a legitimate strategy. Fixed-rate offers are winter insurance, worth buying when the premium is small and skipping when it's fat. What's never rational: a supplier's variable rate above the SCO, or an expired fixed contract silently rolling into one. Check your bill's supply line twice a year, and the switch — or the return to default — takes minutes either way.