What Happens When Your Electricity Gets Cut Off in Mexico (And How to Get It Back On)

This one’s from personal experience — and hopefully it saves someone some time if it happens to them.

I’d been back in Australia for a couple of months. While I was gone, my electricity bill came due. Normally my landlord sends it to me, I send him the money, he pays it — simple. This time he didn’t get it to me until a couple of days before the cutoff date and I sort of just left it.

I tried to pay it online from Australia. The CFE website wouldn’t let me access it from outside Mexico. I looked for other ways to pay. Nothing worked.

So my power got cut off.

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What to Do If Your Power Gets Cut Off

When I got back to Oaxaca, my first stop was the OXXO with my bill in hand (PDF). Standard move — you can pay CFE bills at any OXXO, and it’s usually the easiest option and was closet to my house.

But here’s the thing: once your power has actually been cut off — not just overdue, but physically disconnected — OXXO can’t process it anymore. You have to go directly to a CFE office and use their payment machine in person.

The late fee was 80 pesos. Not the end of the world.

Once paid, I was told reconnection would happen somewhere between 1 and 24 hours. And here’s the part worth knowing — it’s not done remotely or digitally. Someone from CFE physically has to come to your house and reconnect the power at the meter. There’s no way to speed that up.

I paid the bill at 9am. Spent the first night without electricity. Woke up the next morning and it was back on.

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The Takeaway

If your power gets cut off in Mexico:

• Don’t go to OXXO — they can’t help once it’s been disconnected
• Go to your nearest CFE office and pay at their machine
• Expect a late fee — 80 pesos in my case, may vary
• Plan for up to 24 hours without power after you pay — someone needs to come to your house physically to reconnect it
• Morning payments give you the best chance of same-day reconnection

And if you’re leaving Mexico for a while — sort your bills before you go, or make sure whoever is handling them actually handles them. No big deal, but lesson learned 😊

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