How electricity pricing works in Denmark
Denmark is the one country we cover where the cheapest wholesale hour is often not the cheapest hour to actually use electricity — because the grid tariff itself changes through the day.
Two price areas
DK1 covers Jutland and Funen; DK2 covers Zealand and Copenhagen. They are separate bidding zones connected by a limited interconnector, and their prices routinely diverge. DK1 is strongly influenced by Danish and German wind output; DK2 is more coupled to Sweden.
Time-differentiated grid tariffs
Most Danish network operators charge a higher tariff during peak hours, typically 17:00 to 20:00, with lower rates overnight. This is unusual in Europe and it matters a great deal: the evening grid peak stacks on top of the evening wholesale peak, amplifying it. It also means that ranking hours purely by spot price, as many sites do, gives the wrong answer for a Danish household. We rank by total cost, which sometimes produces a visibly different list.
Elafgift is temporarily almost zero
This is the single most important fact about Danish electricity pricing right now. The electricity tax was cut from about 72.7 øre per kWh to the EU minimum of 0.8 øre per kWh, effective 1 January 2026, under law no. 1775 of 29 December 2025 as part of the 2026 Finance Act. For a household using 4,000 kWh a year that is a saving of roughly 3,600 kroner annually. Note that the cut is temporary and runs through 31 December 2027, after which the rate is expected to return to around 90 øre unless extended.
Because taxes fell, timing matters more
There is a counterintuitive consequence. When taxes made up half your bill, a swing in the wholesale price barely moved the total. With the tax at essentially zero, the wholesale price and the grid tariff dominate — so the percentage difference between a cheap hour and an expensive one is now much larger than it was in 2025. Load shifting is worth more in Denmark today than it was a year ago.
Per-address accuracy
Denmark is the only one of our six markets where grid tariffs are published as open data, through Energinet's Datahub price list. Today we use the national time-banded shape - peak, high and low - which is the right pattern but not your own operator's exact numbers. A per-address lookup built on that dataset is the next thing planned for Denmark; until it ships, treat the Danish grid component here as an estimate like every other market.
Spot a figure that looks wrong? Tell us. Corrections and the sources behind every tax and grid assumption are listed on the methodology page.