Some places in the US offered "level billing". In this case, they take the total bill for the last year and divide it by twelve, so that every month you pay the same amount. At the end of the billing year they decide what the new amount would be (higher or lower) based on usage (based on your usage) and the cycle repeats. This means that the amount you pay every month is the exact same for a whole year - it makes budgeting and planning much easier (e.g. if it is a hot summer and you are running the air conditioning all the time, you could easily have $400 electric bills in the summer months and only $50 electric bills in winter, you'd pay $144 each month all year.

I just use direct debit to pay utility and communication bills so I never have to think about it. I do receive PDF invoices by E-mail but never read them as I have a hard limit on how much each company can charge and my bank denies any transaction that exceeds the limit. I have a smart meter for electricity, a dumb meter for water that is checked twice a year by an employee of the water company, and still use bottled gas.

I'm in Portugal, but just Googled for direct debit for utilities in the UK and it seems to be an option there too.

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I thought you'd be interested to hear how it is done in the US, at least at my house.

I rent, and landlords here can choose if they'll pay for the heat and electricity or if tenants will. My landlord pays for heat and I pay for electricity.

I don't know if we have gas heat. I think it's electric heating but I'm not sure

Our electricity meters don't need to be read if we don't want to because you can go into the website for the company and it'll tell you how much electricity is being used broken down by the hour, day, week, or month, how much you owe. So we could just use a screenreader.

we pay per month here for the amount we used the previous month. So for electricity we used Jan 15th-Feb 15th we get billed Feb 20th. Feb 15th-March15th we get billed March 20th.

We can get a paper bill sent to us if we want it but we can opt out and pay online too.

A smart meter if fully set up and compatible with your supplier will automatically send readings to your supplier without you doing anything. The remote display unit that lets you see your readings and usage is a nice extra to this.

As u/retrolental_morose points out an accessible display unit is available and you can find out more here https://www.rnib.org.uk/rnibconnect/accessible-smart-meter

pre-payment metres are not as common as they used to be, so running out doesn't tend to happen. Obviously if I were on a pre-payment metre I'd want to be able to top it up accessibly somehow!

Smart metres themselves come with a plug-in or battery-powered thing which is generally useless. SMETS2 metres can work with a display unit that also speaks. Talk to your supplier. I've refused to move to a smart one until they assure me the display unit will be accessible, so I just submit readings every month or so

Smart meters are actually accessible: https://www.rnib.org.uk/rnibconnect/accessible-smart-meter

From Northern Ireland here, I’ve had quarterly bills for electric in the past, and now gas. I now use a Keypad+ which is a bluetooth keypad top-up. You buy your top-up from your app then it bluetooths the code to the keypad. My meter is inside, but a meter man from the electric company calls a handful of times in the year to check the reading