Electricity price and climate, state by state

The running-cost columns are for a 12,000 BTU/h head at the ENERGY STAR thresholds, because holding the equipment constant is what lets a state-to-state comparison say something about states. Pick a different head size and efficiency tier on the running-cost worksheet. Prices are EIA’s May 2026 figures (historical, preliminary); degree days are NOAA’s for 2025. 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 usually cost 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 low-temperature capacity deserves a close look; where the cooling column dominates, the reverse holds. Whether a cold-climate unit is worth a higher price is not something this table calculates. 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, July 2026 issue, Table 5.6.A (May 2026 data, preliminary) — Historical figures — EIA Electric Power Monthly, July 2026 issue (archived), Table 5.6.A, May 2026 data, marked preliminary by EIA (read 2026-10-05 and saved that day). These May 2026 values were first read on 6 August 2026 from EIA’s rolling table page, which has since moved on to later months and no longer shows them. EIA marks these values preliminary. This is the average price 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 rate at some hours may be well above this average; check your tariff’s peak hours. EIA describes these as preliminary estimates based on a cutoff model sample^[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 heating degree days, January-December 2025 (read 2026-10-05 and saved that day) and NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Climate at a Glance, statewide cooling degree days, January-December 2025 (read 2026-10-05 and saved that day) (the same series on NOAA’s statewide map page). These are statewide totals for one calendar year, 2025, not a thirty-year climate normal, so a mild or severe year moves them, and NOAA revises its most recent years: the values first read on 6 August 2026 had changed in every state by 5 October 2026, so all of them were replaced from that day’s download. 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.