A quality standard is a deadline or a value that the system operator or the electricity supplier has to meet towards a specific metering point. If it is missed, a compensation payment arises — a money payment whose amount, deadline and method of calculation are set by ÚRSO decree no. 236/2016 Z. z. as amended by decree no. 317/2024 Z. z. (Collection of Laws of the Slovak Republic; time version effective from 1 January 2025, verified in Slov-Lex).
This text reconstructs the mechanism from the decree and from the single annual report that measures its result. It is not a technical manual, not advice on filing a complaint, and it contains no calculation for a specific building: the amounts given below are those set by the decree, not an estimate of the damage caused by an interruption.
What a quality standard is and why a compensation payment exists
The decree divides the standards into three groups by regulated activity: § 2 for electricity transmission, § 3 for electricity distribution and § 4 for electricity supply. Every letter in those sections is one measurable obligation — restore distribution within a set number of hours, announce a planned interruption fifteen days ahead, replace a faulty meter within three working days.
The purpose of the mechanism is stated in the opening of the regulator’s annual report: the costs of compensation payments are not eligible costs entering the calculation of regulated prices and weigh only on the profit of the regulated firm (ÚRSO, Report on the evaluation of quality standards for 2025). A compensation once paid therefore does not return into the tariff.
The amendment effective from 1 January 2025 changed three things at once: it tightened part of the deadlines, introduced a minimum payment amount so that processing would not cost more than the sum itself, and abolished the upper limits on compensation payments. The year 2025 is therefore the first year running under the new wording.
Who triggers the mechanism and from which moment
The trigger is not the customer. Under § 7 para. 1 of the decree, an application from the entitled person is not a condition for the compensation payment to be made. The regulated firm records the events itself — from submissions by market participants and from its own activity — and itself evaluates whether the deadline was exceeded.
The year to which an event belongs is set by § 11 para. 1: events and submissions whose handling deadline had not expired by the end of the calendar year and which were not settled in that year are included in the evaluation for the year in which the deadline expires. The annual statistics are therefore not a list of the faults that occurred in a given year, but a list of the deadlines that ended in it.
The entitled person is the market participant whose metering point the breach relates to. For the standards under § 3 letters a) to i) the payment is made for every metering point affected by the breach, not once for the whole event. A single fault on a line can thus generate as many claims as there were metering points disconnected.
Step by step: from the event to the payout
The chain from the event to the publication of the result has six steps, each with its own deadline in the decree, and the deadline for the payout runs independently of the one for submitting the evaluation to the authority. The table below sets them out in the order in which they occur, with the provision of decree no. 236/2016 Z. z. that sets each deadline.
| Step | Deadline | Provision |
|---|---|---|
| Event arises and is recorded | continuously through the year | § 11 para. 1 |
| Cause of the breach is removed | per the individual standard | § 2 to § 4 |
| Payout to the entitled person | 30 days from removal of the cause | § 7 para. 5 |
| Payout where the breach is found later | 30 days from the finding | § 7 para. 6 |
| Evaluation submitted to the authority | by the end of February of the following year | § 11 para. 5 |
| Publication on the firm’s website | 12 months from the end of February | § 11 para. 4 |
If the identity of the entitled person is not known at the time the cause is removed, the thirty-day deadline runs only from the identification. If the metering point has no contractual relationship directly with the system operator, the payment goes to the account of the electricity supplier in whose balance group the point sits, together with the notice of compensation payment under § 7 para. 7.
Amounts under § 9: what the decree pays per day and per hour
The amounts are not an estimate of damage. The decree writes them as constants in formulas of the form KP = A + B × (N − threshold), where N counts the days or hours of the breach, begun ones included. The overview below lists the provisions of § 9 with a fixed sum or fixed constants, as effective from 1 January 2025 (time version of decree no. 236/2016 Z. z.).
| Standard | Amount under § 9 | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| § 3 letter a) — households | KP = 0,20 × N | per day |
| § 3 letter b) | A = 35, B = 7, threshold 5 | per day |
| § 3 letter c) first point | A = 28, B = 14, threshold 10 | per day |
| § 3 letter c) second point | 70 eur | per month |
| § 3 letter c) third point | 91 eur | per month |
| § 3 letter d) above 1 kV | 260 eur | per day |
| § 3 letter d) up to 1 kV | 35 eur | per day |
| § 3 letter g) | A = 18, B = 12, threshold 6 | per hour |
For § 3 letters e) and f), a coefficient C = 1,2 is added to the formula with the constants A = 28 and B = 14 for a customer with electric heating, over the period from September through May inclusive. For a non-household metering point under § 3 letter a), the distribution tariff and the volume of electricity distributed enter the calculation, so the result depends on the size of the offtake.
Where the mechanism stops
The decree has a closed list of grounds on which a deadline is not treated as breached. § 5 letters b) to i) name a natural disaster, damage to equipment by a third party, the removal of causes directly endangering life or health, access to the fault site made impossible by local weather conditions, war, a terrorist attack or an epidemic, an agreed different date, and a failure of the customer to cooperate.
The scope of that exception is measurable. For the year 2025 the distribution system operators recorded 2 516 such events, affecting 117 659 metering points (ÚRSO, Report on the evaluation of quality standards for 2025, table 9). Most of them fell on the removal of danger to life or health and on the failure to cooperate.
What the mechanism paid out for 2025
For electricity distribution, 131 regulated firms were required to submit an evaluation and 122 did so, that is 93,13 %. They recorded 8 033 023 events, of which 19 384 with a breached standard, which is 0,24 %, and paid out 410 714,74 €. Against 2024 that is a rise of 10,83 % with a fall in the number of events of 3,39 %.
For electricity supply, 205 firms were required to submit and 147 did so, that is 71,71 %; they paid out 68 550,33 € on 3 255 breaches. Transmission is carried out by a single firm, SEPS, a. s., which recorded 8 events, no breach, and paid 0,00 €. For electricity as a whole that comes to 479 265,07 € on 22 639 breaches and 15 036 326 recorded events.
Inside distribution the payouts concentrate into three provisions: § 3 letter g) with 164 573,80 €, § 3 letter h) with 124 511,00 € and § 3 letter i) with 72 219,48 €. Together that is 361 304,28 €, which is 87,97 % of all compensations paid for distribution. The new standard § 3 letter q) brought 16 517 events, 221 breaches and 3 185,00 €.
What this shows on the customer’s side
In 2025 21,17 € was the average compensation payment for a single breach. The denominator is one recorded breach of a standard, not one metering point and not one customer — and the difference between those three bases matters, since a single event can hit thousands of points at once.
The second thing the figures show is location. The SAIDIN parameter, the average duration of unplanned interruptions per metering point, reached in 2025 the value 85,86 at Stredoslovenská distribučná, 45,47 at Východoslovenská distribučná and 43,78 at Západoslovenská distribučná. The gap between the first and the last is 1,96-fold under the same decree and the same compensation amounts.
Conclusions
The claim arises without an application and attaches to the metering point. Under § 7 para. 1 of decree no. 236/2016 Z. z. an application is not a condition of payment; under § 7 para. 2 the payment is made for every affected metering point. The deadline is 30 days from removal of the cause or from identification of the entitled person.
The amounts are set by the decree, not by the size of the damage. § 9 works with fixed constants: 260 eur per day for a metering point above 1 kV under § 3 letter d), 35 eur per day for a point up to 1 kV, 91 eur per month for the third point of § 3 letter c). The upper limits were abolished by the amendment effective from 1 January 2025.
For 2025 the mechanism paid out 479 265,07 € on 22 639 breaches. Of that, 410 714,74 € fell on distribution and 68 550,33 € on supply; transmission paid nothing. The average per breach is 21,17 € — and the denominator is the breach, not the metering point.
The gap between systems is wider than the gap between years. SAIDIN of 85,86 against 43,78 means that the same decree lands unequally on two locations. The figures for the next year will be published by the series of annual reports of the regulator between April and June 2027.
All of it can be checked in two documents. The report for 2025 holds the counts of events, breaches and sums paid by individual provision; the overview of deadlines that the supplier and the distribution system operator have to meet sits on the authority’s page on quality standards, in the wording updated on 10 November 2025.
Analysis, not personalised advice. Before a transaction decision, verify the tariff value or the wording of the regulation directly with the network operator or the regulator.