What It Costs to Run a Space Heater This Winter, in Every State

Every electric space heater turns electricity into heat at the same rate, so a 1,500 W heater costs the same to run whatever brand it is. What changes the bill is the price of electricity where you live, and that varies almost fourfold across the US. This page puts every state side by side, updated from EIA’s price data, and prices the other ways to keep warm next to it.

Every state, most expensive first

Why the cost varies so much

The heater is the same everywhere; the price per kilowatt-hour is not. DOE notes that electric resistance heating, which every space heater uses, converts all the electricity it uses into heat, so no brand or type of resistance heater does it more cheaply than another. A 1,500 W heater on high uses 1.5 kWh every hour, so its hourly cost is simply 1.5 times your price per kWh.

The other half of the bill is how long it runs. A heater with a thermostat cycles off once the room is warm, so a well-insulated room, a mild night or a lower setting all mean fewer hours at full power. The figures here assume it runs flat out for the hours you choose, which makes them the most it should cost.

Five ways to cut it

1. Use fewer watts. A heater on its 750 W low setting costs half as much an hour. Our guide to low-wattage space heaters compares the options.
2. Let a thermostat and a timer do the work. They stop the heater running at full power once the room is warm; see energy-efficient space heaters.
3. Warm yourself, not the room. A 100 W heated blanket costs about a fifteenth as much an hour as a 1,500 W heater; see heated blankets and mattress pads.
4. Stop the heat leaking out. Draft stoppers and window film are cheap; see draft stoppers and window insulation kits.
5. Consider a heat pump. For heating more than one room through the winter, a heat pump gives the same heat for about a third of the electricity; the heat pump cost calculator works out the payback in your state.

Whatever you use, plug a space heater straight into a wall outlet and keep it 3 feet from anything that can burn; our guide to the safest space heaters has CPSC’s full advice.

Our picks: ways to spend less

Each of these cuts one of the numbers in the table: fewer watts, fewer hours at full power, less heat escaping, or warming you instead of the room. They are the picks from our guides, from established brands whose listings state the power and safety features, in stock on 10 October 2026.

For more choices and how each was checked against its listing, see the guides to heated blankets, energy-efficient space heaters, the safest space heaters and draft stoppers and window kits.

How we calculated it

Cost an hour = the appliance’s rated watts ÷ 1,000 × your state’s average residential electricity price. A month is 30 days and a winter is 151 days (November to March), both at the hours a day you choose (8 in the table).

• Prices: each state’s average residential price for January to July 2026, from EIA’s Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.B. The table and calculator update when we load EIA’s next figures.
• Appliance power: the rated figures used in our guides: 1,500 W for a space heater on high or an electric fireplace with the heat on (the most a standard 120-volt plug-in heater draws), 750 W on low, at most 300 W for a fireplace’s flame alone (Dimplex’s published figure), 100 W for a heated blanket and 5,000 W for a 240-volt garage heater.
• Heat pump: the same heat as the 1,500 W heater, divided by a typical ducted heat pump’s heating efficiency: the mean HSPF2 of 9.2 for ducted heat pumps installed through Massachusetts programs in 2024, a coefficient of performance of about 2.7. Real performance falls in very cold weather.

These are the most each appliance should cost: thermostats, lower settings and shorter runs all bring the real figure down.

Using this data

Journalists, bloggers and energy advisers are welcome to quote these figures or republish the state table, with a link to this page. The electricity prices are EIA’s, which are in the public domain; the calculation is ours. Cite it as: GreenCalculus, “What It Costs to Run a Space Heater This Winter, in Every State”, using EIA residential electricity prices for January to July 2026.

Sources

• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.B: average price of electricity by state, year to date
• U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Saver: Electric Resistance Heating (archived copy)
• NMR Group for the Massachusetts Program Administrators and EEAC, 2024/2025 Residential Heat Pump Pricing Study (March 2026), Table 65: ducted heating efficiency (HSPF2)
• Dimplex, Electric fireplace technical support (flame power)
• U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 7 Highly Effective Portable Heater Safety Habits (PDF)

How we pick products for every buying guide: our buying guide standards.

Frequently asked questions