What is the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker?
The CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker is a free, cloud-based online map that gives customers in Greater Houston and Southwestern Indiana real-time information about power outages, estimated restoration times, and affected service areas. Relaunched on August 1, 2024, it refreshes every five minutes and works on any mobile or desktop device.
If you live in the Houston area or Southwest Indiana, you have probably experienced a power outage that left you wondering when the lights would come back on. The CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker was built specifically to answer that question. As a customer, you gain instant visibility into outages, restoration timelines, and affected neighborhoods — making it easier to stay prepared when severe weather strikes. For background on how overlapping outages spread through Houston neighborhoods, see our explainer on power outages in the Houston area.
The platform was completely rebuilt after the original tracker failed during the May 2024 derecho and the catastrophic July 2024 Hurricane Beryl outages that left more than two million customers without power. The relaunched system reflects a proactive grid-reliability strategy similar to initiatives explained in this energy system inspection guide. Since the rebuild, CenterPoint has added further improvements including a February 2026 Community Progress Tracker that layers visible grid-hardening work on top of outage data.
Key Terms You Need to Know Before Using the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker
CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker
The cloud-hosted interactive map at CenterPointEnergy.com/OutageTracker that shows live outage locations, restoration times, and affected customer counts.
Estimated Restoration Time (ETR)
The projected time when power is expected to be restored to a specific outage, based on crew assessments and historical restoration data.
Nested Outage
A localized secondary outage (damaged line fuse, transformer, or service line) that persists after the wider area has been restored, sometimes invisible on the main map.
Cloud-Based Platform
The auto-scaling hosting architecture that allows the tracker to handle massive traffic spikes during hurricanes without crashing, a direct response to the May 2024 failure.
Weather Integration Layer
An optional map overlay that shows active storms, radar, and warnings so you can connect current outages to the severe weather causing them.
Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI)
CenterPoint’s multi-year grid-hardening program that has installed 56,000+ new poles and undergrounded 430+ miles of lines, now visible on a companion Community Progress Tracker.
What Is the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker and Why Was It Relaunched?
The CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker is the utility’s primary public-facing tool for communicating outage information during severe weather and routine service disruptions. The current version launched on August 1, 2024, replacing a legacy tracker that collapsed under traffic during the May 2024 derecho storm and remained unreliable through Hurricane Beryl two months later.
CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells committed to the August 1 deadline during testimony before Texas lawmakers after widespread criticism of the company’s Hurricane Beryl response. Tony Gardner, CenterPoint’s Chief Customer Officer at the time, framed the relaunch as “part of our overall commitment to improve our customer and public communications” and emphasized that the new CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker was “designed to meet greater demand and provide more timely updates.”
As a Houston homeowner, this means you now have a dependable resource that will not crash when you need it most. As a small business owner in the service territory, you can verify outages quickly and make staffing or closure decisions without guessing. As a property manager juggling multiple addresses, you can monitor every location from a single dashboard.
The tracker covers CenterPoint’s full electric service territory, which includes Greater Houston (a 12-county area) and Southwestern Indiana. Customers in Texas who are separately served by other retailers still benefit from the tracker because CenterPoint owns and operates the distribution wires regardless of who sells the electricity.
Understanding what the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker actually does, versus what it does not do, saves frustration. The tracker is designed to visualize outages that CenterPoint’s grid monitoring system has detected at the circuit or substation level. It does not show individual meter-level problems, customer-owned equipment failures, or outages inside a building’s own electrical panel. If your neighbor has power and you do not, the tracker alone will rarely explain why. That is why customer-submitted reports through the red REPORT button are essential: they feed localized intelligence that the automated system cannot pick up on its own.
The August 2024 rebuild also changed how CenterPoint communicates restoration progress. The legacy tracker issued static updates that were often hours behind field reality. The new platform instead pulls live data from distribution management systems, automated reclosers, and field crew check-ins, then consolidates that data into map pins that update on the same five-minute cycle regardless of event size. That architectural shift is what makes the modern tracker useful during a Category 1 hurricane instead of going dark like the previous one did.
7 Key Features of the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker
The rebuilt tracker includes seven features that make it more useful than the version it replaced. Each was specifically designed to address a complaint from the Beryl response.
- Cloud-based architecture: Auto-scales to handle traffic spikes during major storms, eliminating the crashes that plagued the original platform.
- Five-minute refresh cycle: New outage data flows into the map every five minutes, giving you near-real-time visibility into changing conditions.
- Mobile-friendly interface: Works cleanly on smartphones and tablets without requiring a separate app download.
- Weather integration layer: Toggle on radar and severe weather warnings to see how storms are driving outages in real time.
- Summary reporting: Filter outages by county, city, or ZIP code to focus only on the areas relevant to you.
- Estimated Restoration Times (ETRs): Each outage pin displays a projected restoration window based on crew assessments and historical patterns.
- Street and satellite views: Switch to satellite imagery to see vegetation density and environmental context around affected equipment.
A Spanish-language toggle is also available, addressing a major accessibility gap in the original tool. Customer-submitted outage reports through the red REPORT button feed directly into CenterPoint’s dispatch system, which helps close the gap when a nested outage affects a single home after surrounding power is restored.
Data Highlight
Every 5 Minutes
That is how often new outage data is pushed to the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker map — a pace fast enough to show restoration progress during an active event without overwhelming customers with noise.
Where to Find and Access the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker
You can access the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker directly at CenterPointEnergy.com/OutageTracker, which redirects to the current map application hosted at tracker.centerpointenergy.com/map/. Both URLs work on desktop browsers and mobile devices. No login or account is required to view public outage information, though reporting an outage requires either your service address, phone number, or meter number.
The tracker is linked prominently from the CenterPoint homepage during active weather events and is embedded in local news broadcasts and emergency management communications across Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, and surrounding counties. If you are struggling to pay your electric bill after an extended outage, check our guide to utility assistance programs in Houston, TX for relief options.
Beyond the outage map itself, CenterPoint publishes educational resources to help you prepare for hurricane season, winter freezes, and grid disruptions. Bookmarking the tracker on your phone’s home screen before a storm approaches is one of the fastest preparedness steps you can take.
How to Use the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker Effectively
Getting the most out of the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker takes less than a minute once you know the workflow. Follow these five steps during any outage:
- Visit CenterPointEnergy.com/OutageTracker from any browser. The map loads centered on Greater Houston by default.
- Enter your street address in the “Find a location” search bar to zoom to your neighborhood and see localized outage data.
- Click any colored outage circle to open a pop-up showing the outage start time, affected customer count, cause (if known), and Estimated Restoration Time.
- Use the red REPORT button in the lower-right corner to submit your own outage using your phone number or meter number if your outage is not already visible.
- Toggle overlays using the layer controls to add satellite imagery, street view, or live weather radar depending on what context you need.
As a renter in an apartment complex, zooming tightly on your building is the only way to distinguish a building-wide outage from a unit-specific electrical problem. As a caregiver for an elderly parent, keeping their address saved in your browser makes it easy to verify their power status during a storm. As a business owner with perishable inventory, setting up bookmarks for every location lets you triage decisions quickly.
Author’s Pro-Tip: The “Nested Outage” Trap
If your power is still out but the tracker shows no outage at your address, you are likely experiencing a nested outage — a localized failure of the line fuse, transformer, or service drop feeding just your home after the main circuit has been restored. Do not assume the tracker is wrong. Click the REPORT button immediately and submit a ticket so a dedicated crew can be dispatched. Nested outages are invisible to the main grid-monitoring system and will not be fixed until someone reports them.
Power Out? Do Not Wait to Know When It Will Come Back.
Every minute counts during a severe weather event. Open the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker now, bookmark your address, and get real-time restoration updates on any device.
Advanced CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker Features for Power Users
Satellite View for Vegetation Context
Switching the map to satellite view shows the tree canopy and vegetation density around affected equipment. This context helps you understand why certain neighborhoods experience repeated outages during storms and which lines are candidates for the tree-trimming work CenterPoint has been accelerating across Greater Houston.
Weather Overlay Correlation
Enabling the weather overlay lets you watch severe weather cells move across the service territory in real time. When you see a thunderstorm cluster approaching and outage pins starting to appear in its path, you get several minutes of warning that your area may be next.
ZIP Code and County Filters
Filtering by ZIP, city, or county is the fastest way to summarize outages across a large area. Property managers overseeing portfolios in multiple ZIP codes, municipal emergency managers, and journalists covering storm impact all rely on this view.
Community Progress Tracker Integration
In February 2026, CenterPoint launched a companion Community Progress Tracker that displays the location of more than 56,000 new storm-resilient poles, more than 8,000 miles of tree-trimmed lines, and more than 500 new grid automation devices installed under the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative. Cross-referencing the outage tracker with the Community Progress Tracker gives you a sense of where reliability is improving most.
“We relaunched our outage tracker as a cloud-based solution, so that has autoscaling abilities. As part of our overall commitment to improve our customer and public communications, the new tool is designed to meet greater demand and provide more timely updates. Future enhancements and updated functionality will be guided by customer feedback.”
CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker vs. Texas Retail Provider Portals
The CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker is not the same as the customer portals run by your retail electricity provider. CenterPoint is the transmission and distribution utility that owns the wires in Greater Houston, while companies like Reliant Energy, TXU Energy, and Gexa Energy sell the electricity that flows through those wires. When the wires go down, CenterPoint restores them. When you need payment help, you call your retailer.
If an outage has pushed your bill higher than you can manage, review your TXU Energy assistance options or request a Reliant payment extension before the due date on your disconnection notice.
How the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker Helps You During Severe Weather
Severe weather is when the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker earns its value. During Hurricane Beryl, the failure of the previous tracker left more than two million customers with no visibility into when their power would return. The rebuilt system solves that specific failure mode through its cloud architecture, and it adds several weather-specific capabilities.
When a named storm approaches the Texas Gulf Coast, CenterPoint activates enhanced staffing and additional data feeds into the tracker. You will typically see outage ETRs switch from precise timestamps to broader daypart windows (for example, “Evening of the following day”) because restoration estimates become less accurate in catastrophic conditions. That change is a signal to shift to storm-recovery mode rather than waiting at home for a specific hour.
For ice storms and winter freezes, the tracker behaves slightly differently. Outages tend to cluster along specific tree-lined corridors rather than across wide zones, and ETRs are often longer because crews cannot work safely in icing conditions. The weather overlay becomes especially useful here because it lets you correlate outages with freezing precipitation bands. If the freeze also spikes your electric bill, review the information you would need before deciding between a hurricane-related payment assistance program and a standard deferred payment plan.
Before hurricane season, use the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker proactively rather than reactively. Bookmark the tracker URL on every device in your household. Test the page load a few days before a named storm is forecast to ensure your browser is caching correctly. Screenshot your neighborhood at a baseline state so you have a reference for comparison. Charge backup battery packs so you can keep loading the tracker even if home internet is disrupted — cellular data will usually still work for map access.
During an active hurricane, do not refresh the tracker obsessively. The refresh cycle is five minutes, so checking every thirty seconds tells you nothing new and can slow your device’s performance. Instead, glance at the tracker once every fifteen to twenty minutes, and pay attention to whether the number of outages in your ZIP code is trending up (storm still active) or down (restoration underway). Combine this with your local National Weather Service forecast so you know whether crews can actively work or are sheltered until conditions improve.
After the storm passes, the tracker becomes your most reliable source for restoration ETRs because crews are reporting real progress. If your address still shows an outage 48 hours after widespread restoration, re-submit a report through the REPORT button — that second report flags a likely nested outage or customer-equipment issue that requires a targeted truck roll rather than a circuit-level fix.
Frequently Analyzed Topics About the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker
How often is outage data on the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker updated?
New outage data is pulled into the tracker every five minutes. Your specific outage status may not change that often because it only updates when CenterPoint’s systems have new information about your address, such as a crew arrival or repair completion.
Can I receive outage alerts from CenterPoint without checking the tracker?
Yes. Enroll in Power Alert Service through your CenterPoint online account to receive text, email, or voice notifications when an outage is reported at your address and when power is restored. Alerts work alongside the tracker and do not replace it. Enrolling takes about two minutes and requires your account number from a recent bill plus the mobile number or email address where you want alerts delivered. You can set different notification channels for different types of events, so for example you might get a text for a new outage but an email for a planned maintenance notification.
How accurate are the Estimated Restoration Times shown on the tracker?
ETRs are based on a mix of real-time crew assessments and historical restoration patterns for similar outage types. They are reliable during routine outages but should be treated as rough estimates during major storms, when scope and conditions can change hourly. If you see an ETR move backward (further into the future) several times in a row, that is usually a sign crews have discovered more damage than initially expected at the site. Plan around the broadest reasonable window rather than the specific timestamp, especially if you depend on refrigerated medication or medical equipment.
Is the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker mobile-friendly?
Yes. The tracker is fully optimized for smartphones and tablets and does not require a separate app. Saving the page to your phone’s home screen gives you one-tap access during an outage.
Why does the tracker show no outage when my power is still out?
You are likely experiencing a nested outage, a localized issue such as a damaged line fuse, transformer, or service line that feeds only your home. Customer-owned equipment problems (weatherhead, meter box, or a tripped breaker) can also cause this. Report the outage through the red REPORT button so CenterPoint can dispatch a crew.
Does the CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker cover customers outside of Houston?
Yes. In addition to the 12-county Greater Houston electric service area, the tracker covers CenterPoint’s Southwestern Indiana electric customers. Gas-only customers in other states do not use this specific tracker because the outage map is designed for electric service disruptions.
Take Control of the Next Outage Before It Takes Control of You
The CenterPoint Energy Outage Tracker gives you live restoration data, ZIP-level filtering, storm overlays, and a direct channel to report nested outages. Bookmark it today so you are not scrambling when the next hurricane, freeze, or thunderstorm rolls through.
- Real-time updates every five minutes
- Accurate Estimated Restoration Times
- Less uncertainty during severe weather