Many clustering algorithms are guided by certain cost functions such as the widely-used kmeans cost. These algorithms divide data points into clusters with often complicated boundaries, creating difficulties in explaining the clustering decision. In a recent work, Dasgupta, Frost, Moshkovitz, and Rashtchian (ICML'20) introduced explainable clustering, where the cluster boundaries are axis-parallel hyperplanes and the clustering is obtained by applying a decision tree to the data. The central question here is: how much does the explainability constraint increase the value of the cost function?Given d-dimensional data points, we show an efficient algorithm that finds an explainable clustering whose k-means cost is at most k 1−2/d poly(d log k) times the minimum cost achievable by a clustering without the explainability constraint, assuming k, d ≥ 2. Combining this with an independent work by Makarychev and Shan (ICML'21), we get an improved bound of k 1−2/d polylog(k), which we show is optimal for every choice of k, d ≥ 2 up to a poly-logarithmic factor in k. For d = 2 in particular, we show an O(log k log log k) bound, improving exponentially over the previous best bound of O(k).