Electricity Cost of Common Appliances — 2026 Data

Key findings

• Heat dominates. Heating and cooling appliances are 8 of the 40 rows but use 2,146.8 kWh a month — 61% of the dataset's energy — and cost $389.86 a month.
• Three appliances tie at 360 kWh. A space heater at 1,500 W for 8 hours, a heat pump at 2,000 W for 6 hours and a water heater at 4,000 W for 3 hours all land on the same monthly energy and cost. Watts tell you speed; hours decide the bill.
• The top 10 use 81% of the energy. They total 2,838 of 3,492.9 kWh and $515.39 of $634.26 a month. Effort spent outside the top 10 is mostly housekeeping.
• Always-on beats high-power. Five devices that never switch off — refrigerator, chest freezer, Wi-Fi router, cable modem and security light — use 229.2 kWh and cost $41.62 a month. A router alone beats a 55-inch TV.
• Gadgets are cheap to run. The eight electronics rows together use 119.4 kWh and cost $21.67 a month. Streaming, charging and gaming are visible habits with a small energy footprint compared with heating.
• Lighting is a rounding error. All six lighting rows together use 33.5 kWh and cost $6.07 a month. Swapping bulbs is worth doing, but it will not move a bill dominated by heat.

All 40 appliances, ranked by monthly running cost

Every row uses the typical watts and daily hours shown, a 30-day month and 18.16¢/kWh. The ranking is by monthly cost. Running hours are averages, not the hours an appliance is plugged in, and heating or cooling appliances use conservative full-output hours.

The spread is enormous: the central air conditioner costs 715 times as much per month as the laser printer. That does not mean the printer is free — it means a ranked list is more useful than a label-by-label comparison. Put your effort where the bar is long.

Category totals

Adding the rows in each category shows where a typical home's appliance energy concentrates. Figures use the rounded monthly costs in the table above, so they can differ by a cent or two from unrounded arithmetic.

The total is not a realistic household bill: it runs a central air conditioner, a space heater, a heat pump and a water heater at the same time. It is a catalogue total — what one of everything would cost under identical assumptions. Use the rows that match your home in the calculator instead.

What the ranking actually says

Power is only half the story. The electric dryer has the highest wattage in the dataset at 5,000 W, but runs for one hour and lands at ninth. The refrigerator is 150 W and lands at tenth because it never stops. The central AC runs for six hours at 3,500 W and wins by a wide margin. Cost is watts × hours, and hours are easier to change.

Heating and cooling are the bill. Eight rows account for 61.5% of the catalogue's energy. That is why advice that focuses on phone chargers and standby lights, however tidy, rarely changes a winter bill. Thermostat setbacks, insulation, filters and closing off unused rooms act on the largest bars.

Always-on devices accumulate quietly. The router, modem, freezer, security light and refrigerator total 229.2 kWh and $41.62 a month. Individually each looks trivial; together they are a sixth of a 1,400 kWh household. A second refrigerator in a garage is often the single easiest always-on saving to find.

Small appliances are cheap in total, not just per hour. The kettle is 1,500 W — the same as a space heater — but it runs for 15 minutes a day. It costs $2.04 a month against the heater's $65.38. The lesson is not that the kettle is efficient; it is that short duty cycles keep totals low.

How to read the table without fooling yourself

The ranking is only as good as its three inputs: watts, hours and rate. Change the hours and the order moves. The central air conditioner drops from first to below the water heater if it runs two hours a day instead of six: 210 kWh and $38.14 a month instead of 630 kWh and $114.41. The space heater at two hours a day falls to 90 kWh and $16.34, landing outside the top ten entirely.

That is not a flaw in the dataset; it is the point. A catalogue cannot know how long your compressor runs or how warm you keep the house. It can only show what a stated assumption produces, with the assumption written next to the number. If your routine differs by a factor of three, the ranking can differ by a factor of three too.

The electric dryer is a good example of how quickly hours change a verdict. One load every day is 150 kWh and $27.24 a month. Every other day is 75 kWh and $13.62. Four loads a week is roughly 86.7 kWh and $15.74. The appliance did not change; the habit did.

How your electricity rate changes every number

The ranking itself does not depend on the rate, as long as every appliance pays the same price per kWh. Raising the rate multiplies every row by the same factor, so the order stays put. What changes is the size of the prize. The central air conditioner's 630 kWh costs $75.60 a month at 12¢/kWh, $114.41 at 18.16¢, $157.50 at 25¢ and $220.50 at 35¢.

The formula is simple enough to do mentally: monthly cost = kWh × your rate. Take any kWh figure in the table and multiply it by the effective rate on your own bill. The dollar columns are convenient, but the kWh column is the part that travels. It is also the part to use if your bill is in pounds, euros, rupees or another currency, because no conversion is involved.

Time-of-use pricing is the exception to the “ranking stays the same” rule. If you run the dryer at 2 a.m. at half the daytime rate, its effective cost falls relative to appliances that must run when you are awake. A flat-rate table cannot capture that, which is why the calculator accepts a blended average rather than pretending to model every tariff.

What the dataset does not include

Every model has edges. This one excludes standby and phantom loads from chargers, set-top boxes and smart speakers; electric vehicle charging; power tools and lawn equipment; multiple units of the same appliance; and anything powered by gas. It also excludes fixed service charges, taxes and riders, and it does not attempt to model duct losses, insulation quality, thermostat schedules, appliance age or climate.

Those omissions do not invalidate the comparison, because they apply unevenly in a real home and cannot be known from a catalogue. They do explain why the total will not match a bill. Use the table to identify the large loads and the calculator to replace typical hours with yours; do not use either as a prediction of the amount due.

Three checks before you act on a row

First, confirm the appliance is actually yours. A pool pump at $32.69 a month is irrelevant if you do not have a pool. A well pump is irrelevant on municipal water. The biggest row in your life may not be the biggest row in the table.

Second, check whether the appliance is already efficient. Replacing a modern refrigerator with a slightly newer one rarely pays back quickly. Replacing a second, older garage refrigerator often does, because it runs around the clock and is usually the least efficient unit in the house.

Third, compare the change to its cost. A thermostat setback costs nothing and can cut heater runtime by a quarter, which is worth about $16.35 a month on the space-heater row. A new appliance has a purchase price that must be recovered from a monthly saving. The table tells you where the saving is; it cannot tell you whether the purchase is worth it.

Method and assumptions

The formula for every row is the same as the Appliance Electricity Bill Calculator:

kWh per month = watts × hours per day × 30 ÷ 1,000
cost per month = kWh per month × 0.1816
cost per year = unrounded monthly cost × 12

The rate is the U.S. average residential price for August 2026 — 18.16¢/kWh — from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A. It excludes fixed charges, taxes and time-of-use differences. Your effective rate is probably different; the method section below shows how to translate the table.

Typical wattages are representative running figures compiled from rating labels, manufacturer documentation and public energy guides. They are not a specification for any particular model, and nameplate maximums are often higher. Hour assumptions are stated in the table and repeated with notes in the CSV. Heating, cooling and dehumidification use conservative continuous-output hours, so thermostat cycling means real use is often lower.

For background, see the Department of Energy's appliance energy-use guide and the EIA's explanation of how electricity is measured. The calculator's step-by-step guide works through a space heater, a four-appliance bill and an LED swap.

Download the data and use it at your own rate

The full dataset is available as a CSV with the exact columns used here, plus a note for every appliance explaining the hours assumption:

Download appliance-running-costs-2026.csv

Columns: appliance, category, typical_watts, assumed_hours_per_day, assumed_days_per_month, kwh_per_month, cost_per_month_usd, cost_per_year_usd, rate_assumption, notes.

To translate a row to your own rate, ignore the dollar columns and multiply its kWh by your price. At 30¢/kWh the central air conditioner's 630 kWh becomes $189.00 a month; at 12¢/kWh it becomes $75.60. The CSV is free to reuse with attribution to Daily Utility Lab.

Maintained by Daily Utility Lab. Last updated October 25, 2026. No sponsorship, affiliate link or utility-company payment influenced these figures. The dataset is a comparison tool, not a prediction of any individual bill.