Egypt govt to freeze electricity prices increase until January 2024

In its weekly meeting on Thursday, the Egyptian cabinet announced it approved postponing increasing electricity prices for another six months (until 1 January 2024). 

The government will have thus deferred the predetermined increases in electricity prices for 18 months. Electricity prices were last increased in July 2021. 

Egypt had planned to eliminate power subsidies by the end of the fiscal year  2021/22 before extending them to 2025.

The government postponed the increases in electricity for the first time in June 2022 following the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The Egyptian president had then announced that the state was keen to keep fuel and electricity prices unchanged, stressing that the government had done everything in its power to "tamp down price jumps and consider the conditions of low-income citizens." 

El-Sisi also said that 17 million households pay for electricity 50 percent lower than its production cost. 

Egypt’s headline annual inflation rate reached a record 38.2 percent in July 2023, up from 14.6 percent in the same month of 2022.