There is a particular unfairness in how energy costs fall on a holiday property, and 2026 has made it sharper.
Your electricity bill has two halves. One is what you used. The other is what it costs to keep you connected, network charges, meter charges, fixed monthly components. An occupied house pays both, and the consumption half dominates. An empty house pays almost entirely the second half, and it pays it for twelve months in exchange for using the property for three.
Which means that when the fixed side goes up, it goes up disproportionately for you.
What actually changed
Croatia’s energy regulator, HERA, approved a new set of electricity transmission and distribution fees taking effect on 1 January 2026, with network usage charges rising across all customer categories and tariff models. The regulator publishes its decisions and tariff documents on its own site.
For a household with ordinary consumption the change reads as a modest amount per month. For a property consuming almost nothing, the same increase is a much larger proportion of the total bill, because there is no consumption for it to be diluted against.
More broadly, housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels have been the largest single contributor to Croatian inflation over the past year, rising by around a tenth. The official figures come from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, and they are the reason a cost estimate from your purchase year is no longer a useful guide.
There has also been a government cap on electricity prices, introduced to soften the effect on households. Caps are temporary by design and are extended or ended by decision. If you are budgeting for next year on this year’s bill, that is the assumption most likely to be wrong.
The three questions worth asking about your own connection
Is the tariff still the right one? Tariff models are built around consumption patterns. A property that draws almost nothing for eight months and then runs air conditioning flat out for six weeks does not have a normal pattern, and the model chosen when the house was occupied year-round may no longer be the sensible one. This is a conversation with your supplier, and it is free to have.
Is anything running that does not need to? The classic list on an empty Dalmatian property: an immersion heater keeping a tank hot for nobody, a dehumidifier left on a permanent cycle, an outside light on a timer that never got changed, a fridge running empty. None of these is dramatic. Together they are frequently the entire consumption half of the bill.
Is the meter being read, or estimated? Estimated readings on an unoccupied property tend to drift, and they drift in the supplier’s favour more often than yours. A photograph of the meter on each visit, with a date on it, settles any argument later. It costs nothing and it is the kind of thing that only works if somebody is actually there.
What not to do
Do not disconnect for the winter. It is the obvious saving and it is usually a false one. Reconnection charges, the risk of an unheated and unmonitored building, and the loss of any ability to run a dehumidifier or trace heating generally outweigh eight months of standing charge. An unheated house through a Dalmatian winter is how you get the damp problems described in winterising a holiday home.
Do not assume water works the same way. Water and sewerage also carry fixed elements, and in several coastal municipalities the sewerage component is charged on the property rather than on volume. Turning the stopcock off saves you the consumption and none of the rest, though it is still worth doing, for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
Where this sits in the wider bill
Utilities are one of the fixed items in the annual cost of a Croatian holiday property, alongside the annual property tax, the communal charge and insurance. We set the whole structure out in what a holiday home costs in a year it stands empty.
The pattern is consistent across all of them: the costs of an unused property are mostly not usage-based, and therefore mostly not reducible by using it less. Which is worth saying plainly, because the instinct of an owner looking at a rising bill is to try to use less, and there is very little left to give.
How we handle it
For properties under contract we read and photograph the meters on each visit and pass the readings on with the report, so estimated billing can be challenged with a dated record rather than a memory. Bills and municipal demands that arrive at the property are opened, translated and forwarded the day they are found rather than waiting for the next owner visit, authorities and post.
And on the winterising round we go through the list above: what is running, what does not need to be, what should be switched off and what emphatically should not.
We do not renegotiate contracts or act as your representative with a supplier. Where that is worth doing, we will point you at somebody who can.
This article describes Croatian utility costs in general terms and gives no figures for individual properties. Tariffs, network charges and any price-cap measures are set by regulation and by decision and change; what governs is your supplier’s current tariff and the published decisions of HERA.