A comparative study between simulated residential electricity demand data and metered data from the UK Household Electricity Survey is presented. For this study, a high-resolution probabilistic model was used to test whether this increasingly widely used modelling approach provides an adequate representation of the statistical characteristics the most comprehensive dataset of metered electricity demand available in the UK. Both the empirical and simulated electricity consumption data have been analysed on an aggregated level, paying special attention to the mean daily load profiles, the distribution of households with respect to the total annual demands, and the distributions of the annual demands of particular appliances. A thorough comparison making use of both qualitative and quantitative methods was made between simulated datasets and it's metered counterparts. Significant discrepancies were found in the distribution of households with respect to both overall electricity consumption and consumption of individual appliances. Parametric estimates of the distributions of metered data were obtained, and the analytic expressions for both the density function and cumulative distribution are given. These can be incorporated into new and existent modelling frameworks, as well as used as tools for further analysis. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.