Ways to Pay Your Bill – With and Without Processing Fees

Dear Customer,
We share the following information to provide you with cost-effective and time-efficient ways to pay your monthly Burlington Electric Department (BED) bills.

Without processing fee

BED provides the following ways to pay your monthly electric bill with no processing fee charged:

• Mail a check to BED, PO Box 5119, Burlington, VT 05402;
• Hand-deliver a check or cash to our Customer Care Team at 585 Pine Street on Mondays through Fridays between 8:30am and 4:30pm;
• Hand-deliver a check on any day and at any time to our drive-through drop box at 585 Pine Street on the east side of our building (please do not leave cash payments in the drop box); or
• Use your bank’s online bill pay feature to initiate either an electronic funds transfer (EFT) or preparation and mailing of a paper check from your bank to BED (different from BED’s online bill payment portal discussed below).

With $3.50 processing fee

BED also provides the following ways to pay your monthly electric bill that will now include a $3.50 processing fee. In years past, BED was able to cover the processing fees that were assessed by our third-party processing company (and initially were quite small in total cost) to avoid passing them along to our customers. Unfortunately, the total cost of these fees has risen with additional customer usage through the years to now account for more than $300,000 annually. During the fiscal year 2025 budget process, consistent with other City Department reviews of fees and expenses, BED analyzed these third-party processing fees. In fairness to those BED ratepayers who are not making use of these third-party services, BED determined that these fees should be paid directly by customers utilizing the services. For customers interested in the convenience of using the online bill payment portal with the new fee, the portal may be used from any location to pay your monthly electric bill in the following ways:

• Via automatic withdrawal from your bank account; or
• Via credit or debit card.

Please email or call 802.865.7300 the Customer Care Team with any questions.

Thank you.