Member States shall ensure that final users receive all their bills and billing information for energy consumption free of charge and that final users have access to their consumption data in an appropriate way and free of charge.

Notwithstanding paragraph 1 of this Article, the distribution of costs of billing information for the individual consumption of heating, cooling and domestic hot water in multi-apartment and multi-purpose buildings pursuant to Article 9b shall be carried out on a non-profit basis. Costs resulting from the assignment of that task to a third party, such as a service provider or the local energy supplier, covering the measuring, allocation and accounting for actual individual consumption in such buildings, may be passed onto the final users to the extent that such costs are reasonable.

In order to ensure reasonable costs for sub-metering services as referred to in paragraph 2, Member States may stimulate competition in that service sector by taking appropriate measures, such as recommending or otherwise promoting the use of tendering and/or the use of interoperable devices and systems facilitating switching between service providers.