Electricity price and climate, state by state

The running-cost columns are for a 12,000 BTU/h head certified to the ENERGY STAR thresholds, because holding the equipment constant is the only way a state-to-state comparison says anything about states. Swap in your own capacity and efficiency on the running-cost worksheet. Note the spread: the dearest state, Hawaii at 52.00 cents, is more than 4.2 times the cheapest.

The temptation is to scan the price column and stop. Do not. A state with a low price and eight thousand heating degree days will cost you more over a winter than an expensive state with two thousand, because degree days set the hours and the price only sets the rate. The pairing that matters is price multiplied by hours, which is exactly what the running-cost worksheet does and what this table deliberately does not do for you across fifty-one rows of wildly different equipment assumptions.

There is a second, subtler reading. Where the heating column dwarfs the cooling column, the HSPF2 figure on a quote matters more than the SEER2 figure, and the cold-climate certification is worth paying for. Where the cooling column dominates, the reverse holds and a cold-climate unit is a premium for capability you will use a handful of mornings a year. 43 of the 48 states with published degree days are heating-dominant on this measure.

The three jurisdictions carrying a price and no degree days — Alaska, District of Columbia, Hawaii — are a real limitation rather than an oversight. They have a genuine electricity price so their per-hour figures work exactly as well as anyone else’s, and they have no statewide degree-day series in the source we use, so the annual estimate simply does not exist for them here.

Price. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A (May 2026 data, released July 23, 2026). This is the average price actually paid by residential customers across the whole state, not a tariff you can look up, so it blends every utility and every rate plan in the state. If you are on a time-of-use plan, your marginal evening rate can be far above this average, and a heat pump running through a cold evening is squarely in that window. The agency publishes these as preliminary estimates from a sample and revises them^[1]; the national residential average on the same release is 18.44 cents.

Weather. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Climate at a Glance, statewide degree days (January-December 2025). These are population-weighted statewide totals for one calendar year, not a thirty-year normal, so a mild or severe year moves them. Using a single recent year is a deliberate choice — it is what the source publishes in a directly retrievable form — but it means a state that had an unusual 2025 will read unusual here. A state-wide figure also averages a mountain county with a coastal one, which for somewhere like California hides an enormous internal range.

Neither dataset says anything about your house. They set the outer envelope; the tools on this site turn that envelope into a figure for one piece of equipment, using 0.8 ^[2] and 0.3 ^[3] as our own labelled run-hour coefficients.