Right now, legislators in Boston are working on a law that would make daily life even more expensive for everyone in Massachusetts. If this year’s version of the Climate Superfund Bill adopts the same language as when legislators tried and failed to pass it last year, then it will create a massive new retroactive fee for Massachusetts companies—up to $75 billion dollars. Even if some of that fee is paid by companies outside of the Commonwealth, it will still raise prices for Massachusetts residents, who already face a higher cost of living than almost anyone else in the country.

The exact size of the new fee is still not determined in this year’s bill, but we took a look at what the impact would be on Massachusetts households for every billion dollars in fees that end up being levied against companies doing business in the state. We’ve included more on methodology below – but here are the numbers:

For every billion dollars in fees, each Massachusetts household could pay:

• $167 more in transportation costs.
• $61 more in pass-through costs from other affected businesses.
• $41 more in electrical bills.

For a total of $276 more per household.

And that’s at the very lowest end of the spectrum.

If the full $75 billion envisioned in last year’s bill is assessed against companies, and if all of those companies were in Massachusetts, the costs would be far larger. With $75 billion in fees, this is what each Massachusetts household could face, on average:

• $12,528 more in transportation costs.
• $5,114 more in pass-through costs from other affected businesses.
• $3,040 more in electrical bills.

For a total of $20,682 per household.

That said, even supporters of a $75 billion fee would insist that some of that figure would be billed against companies outside Massachusetts, and that the cost might be spread out over years. What isn’t in doubt, however, is that any scenario where Massachusetts companies are tagged with massive surprise fees will cause Massachusetts households to face higher costs.

A Note on Methodology

Because the model of assessing Superfund fees and resulting costs is not yet clear in S.588 (and indeed, S.588 exists in part to determine that model), we looked at the version of this legislation that was proposed in 2024, S.481. That legislation proposed to assess $75 billion in fees against a range of companies based on their historical emissions, with the exact amount of fees per company depending on their contributions to emissions within a set period.

Anticipating that the current legislation might eventually reflect last year’s bill, we attempted to gauge the cost to Massachusetts households in two scenarios for illustrative purposes – one in which only $1 billion in fees were charged to Massachusetts companies and another, admittedly unlikely scenario in which the full $75 billion in fees were charged to Massachusetts companies.

To calculate that impact, we divided the cost input among major sectors (commercial, electric power, industrial, transportation) in Massachusetts according to those sectors’ proportional contribution to carbon emissions in the Commonwealth, per the Energy Information Agency’s latest assessment. We assumed no fee would directly target the residential sector. We then further divided the resulting figure by the number of Massachusetts households.