What energy costs where you live

Where you live moves the price of the same appliance

Electricity runs from 12.35 cents a kilowatthour in Idaho to 52 in Hawaii^[1], against a national figure of 18.44¢ (May 2026, marked preliminary by EIA). At the running-cost tool’s starting inputs the same electric tank costs $2,118 a year in Hawaii and $503 in Idaho, a $1,615 gap. That is larger in dollars than the gap between any two appliance types within one state (the largest is $1,378, electric tank against propane tank in Hawaii), so name a state before comparing water heaters.

Comparing across fuels needs one more step, because the units are incommensurable. A kilowatthour carries 3,412 British thermal units^[2], a cubic foot of natural gas about 1,037^[3], and a gallon of propane 91,452^[2]. Divide price by energy content and all three land on dollars per million Btu, which is what the third column above shows. On these figures electricity is the most expensive of the three per million Btu in 51 of the 51 rows, and propane is the cheapest in 1.

This is also the reason a heat pump changes the argument rather than merely improving it. Every other appliance on this site turns one unit of purchased energy into at most one unit of heat, so the dollars-per-million-Btu column is the whole story. A heat pump moves heat instead of making it and federal guidance says it can be two to three times as efficient as resistance heating, which can make expensive electricity cheaper in practice than inexpensive gas. Fuel price alone does not settle it; fuel price divided by efficiency does.

What is published, and what is not

Electricity is the May 2026 residential price for each state from EIA’s archived July 2026 Electric Power Monthly, which EIA marks preliminary. Natural gas is used at annual resolution: the 2025 annual average residential price for each state, from EIA’s release of September 30, 2026, retrieved 2026-10-05. Both are historical averages, not today’s rates.

In that gas release 45 states and jurisdictions have an annual residential gas price. 6 do not — Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina — and those rows say so. That release revised Louisiana and Mississippi by one cent from EIA’s July 31, 2026 release and added an Oklahoma figure. EIA’s page moves on at its next release (due October 30, 2026), and this site keeps the September 30 figures until it re-checks them. This site uses the U.S. residential propane price from EIA’s weekly series, so every state shows the same $2.674 a gallon^[4]. The national gas fallback, where it is needed, is $15.34 per thousand cubic feet^[5].

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