Heating is the largest single energy expense in most American homes that have a winter, and the choice between fuels is usually made once and then lived with for fifteen years. It is worth doing the arithmetic properly.
The arithmetic is not complicated, but it contains one term that people routinely omit, and omitting it produces the wrong answer by a factor of three.
The three ways to heat with energy you buy
Electric resistance
Baseboard heaters, wall heaters, electric furnaces, space heaters. Electricity passes through a resistive element and becomes heat. It is 100 per cent efficient in the narrow sense that all the electricity becomes heat, and this sounds good until you compare it with the alternative.
Resistance heating is the most expensive common way to heat a home in the United States at almost any electricity price. It is also extremely common, particularly in the South and in older apartments, because it is cheap to install.
Heat pump
A heat pump does not make heat. It moves heat from outside to inside, the same way a refrigerator moves heat from inside the box to your kitchen. Because moving heat takes far less energy than creating it, a heat pump delivers more heat energy than the electrical energy it consumes.
The ratio is the coefficient of performance, or COP. A typical air-source heat pump runs at a COP between 2.5 and 3.5 across a heating season, meaning it delivers roughly three units of heat per unit of electricity. Cold-climate models hold useful performance well below freezing; ground-source systems do better still, at much higher installation cost.
That multiplier is the term most comparisons leave out. A heat pump on 20¢ electricity costs about the same to run as resistance heating on 7¢ electricity.
Natural gas
A gas furnace burns fuel and delivers somewhere between 80 and 97 per cent of its energy content as useful heat, depending on whether it is a condensing model. Gas is priced per therm rather than per kilowatt-hour, which is why the comparison requires a conversion and why most people never make it.
Putting them on the same scale
One therm of gas contains about 29.3 kilowatt-hours of energy. That single conversion is what lets you compare a gas rate with an electricity rate.
The cost of delivering one million BTU of actual heat into your house works out as:
| System | Efficiency | Cost per million BTU delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Electric resistance | 1.0 | Rate in ¢/kWh × 2.93 |
| Heat pump | 2.5 to 3.5 | Rate in ¢/kWh × 2.93 ÷ COP |
| Gas furnace | 0.80 to 0.97 | Gas price per therm × 10 ÷ efficiency |
At the U.S. average electricity rate of 18.44¢, resistance heating costs roughly $0.54 per million BTU. A heat pump at COP 3.0 costs about $0.18. Gas at $1.20 a therm in a 90 per cent furnace costs about $13.30.
Work it out for your own state
The calculator below uses the current average electricity rate for the state you pick and lets you enter your own gas price, which is on your gas bill in dollars per therm or per hundred cubic feet.
Heating cost comparison
Electricity rates are the May 2026 state averages. Your gas price is on your gas bill, usually as dollars per therm. If it is quoted per hundred cubic feet (Ccf), the two are close enough to use interchangeably here.
A season of 60 million BTU is a rough mid-range for a detached American home; a small, well-insulated home in a mild climate may use half that and a large one in a cold climate twice it. Running cost only, excluding equipment, installation, incentives and fixed monthly charges.
What the answer usually is
Three patterns hold across most of the country.
Resistance to heat pump is almost always worth it. Cutting the same heating load by roughly two thirds is the largest single saving available to a household on electric resistance heat, at any state rate. This is why so many of the state pages on this site mention it: resistance heating is common in the South and in older housing stock, and it is expensive everywhere.
Gas to heat pump depends on where you are. In low-rate states such as Idaho at 12.35¢ or Missouri at 13.68¢, a heat pump competes well with gas on running cost. In high-rate states such as Massachusetts at 28.82¢, gas usually remains cheaper to run, and the case for a heat pump has to be made on cooling, incentives or emissions rather than on heating cost alone.
The equipment you were going to buy anyway changes everything. A heat pump provides air conditioning as well as heat. If you were replacing a failed air conditioner regardless, the marginal cost of getting heating with it is small, and the comparison shifts sharply.
Things that quietly change the answer
- Fixed charges. If you drop gas entirely you also drop the gas fixed monthly charge, which can be $10 to $25. Keeping a gas connection for one appliance is often the worst of both.
- Your electricity tariff. On a time-of-use rate, heating that runs mostly overnight is cheaper than the state average implies. On a tiered rate, adding a large new load may push you into a higher tier, so the marginal rate is what matters rather than the average.
- Envelope quality. Insulation and air sealing reduce the load for every system equally, and are usually cheaper per unit of saving than changing equipment. Do this first if the building is leaky.
- Backup resistance heat. Many heat pump installations include resistance strips for very cold conditions. If the system is undersized or badly controlled, those strips run more than they should and the effective COP collapses. This is the most common reason a heat pump underperforms its promise.
Before spending anything, check what your state's efficiency programme will pay. You are already funding it through a charge on your bill, and in states such as Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Vermont the rebates frequently exceed the federal credits.
Your state's current rate is on its rate page, along with what drives it and which programmes exist locally.