Comparison
Gas vs electric furnace
Both blow warm air through ducts. They differ in fuel, venting and what each unit of heat costs you.
Written by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
The short answer
Gas vs electric furnace is mostly a fuel-price decision. An electric furnace converts close to all of its electricity into heat with no flue and no combustion.
A gas furnace loses some heat up the vent, but in most places gas costs less per unit of heat than electricity.
Electric furnaces are simpler and cheaper to install; gas furnaces are usually cheaper to run where gas is available.
How do they make heat?
A gas furnace burns natural gas or propane in a sealed heat exchanger. Combustion gases go out through a vent or flue, and a blower pushes house air across the hot exchanger. Its efficiency is rated as AFUE. Federal standards and ENERGY STAR criteria set minimums, and condensing models recover extra heat from the exhaust.
An electric furnace passes current through resistance coils, like a large toaster, and a blower moves the heat. There is no combustion, no flue and no carbon monoxide from the furnace itself. Nearly every unit of electricity becomes heat inside the house.
A heat pump is the third option: also electric, but it moves heat instead of making it, so it can deliver more heat than the electricity it draws.
Gas vs electric furnace at a glance
| Gas furnace | Electric furnace | |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel | Natural gas or propane | Electricity |
| Venting | Required (flue or PVC vent) | None |
| Carbon monoxide risk | Yes; needs CO alarms and combustion checks | Not from the furnace |
| Efficiency rating | AFUE, below 100% because some heat leaves via the vent | Close to 100% at the unit |
| Running cost driver | Local gas price | Local electricity price |
| Install complexity | Gas line, venting, combustion air | High-amperage circuit, often a panel question |
| Maintenance | Burners, ignitor, flame sensor, heat exchanger checks | Elements, relays and the blower |
How do you compare running costs?
Convert both fuels to the same unit of heat. Divide your price per therm of gas by the furnace’s AFUE, and your price per kilowatt-hour by about 0.0293 (one kWh is roughly 3,412 Btu, so 29.3 kWh is one therm).
Whichever gives the lower cost per delivered therm wins on running cost. Our heat pump vs furnace tool does this with your own prices.
Install cost depends on whether a gas line and vent already exist, the size of the unit, and whether the panel can carry an electric furnace.
We publish no prices here: we do not yet hold enough sourced, dated quotes to state one honestly. Use the cost hub and the HVAC cost calculator with your own quotes.
Which one fits?
A gas furnace fits when
Gas is already piped to the house and your gas price is low relative to electricity.
Winters are long and heating hours are high, so running cost dominates.
You want a backup for a heat pump in a dual-fuel setup.
An electric furnace fits when
There is no gas service and running a line is impractical.
Winters are short or the space is small, so the heating bill stays modest.
You want no combustion appliance in the house. In that case also look hard at a heat pump.
What about the cost of the electrical or gas work?
An electric furnace needs a large dedicated circuit. In older homes with small panels, that can mean a panel upgrade, which changes the whole comparison.
A gas furnace needs a gas line, a properly sized vent and a source of combustion air. If those already exist from an old furnace, a gas replacement is often simple.
If they do not, a new gas service and vent run can be a large job.
Ask each installer to spell out what is included in the quote: circuit, panel, gas piping, venting and permits.
Safety and code points
If you smell gas, leave the house and call the gas utility or 911 from outside. Do not operate switches.
CPSC advises CO alarms on every level and outside sleeping areas.
Circuit and panel work is for a licensed electrician or HVAC contractor.
Questions
Is an electric furnace 100% efficient?
Which is cheaper to run, gas or electric?
Are electric furnaces safer?
How long do they last?
Can I switch from gas to electric?
Written and audited by
HYRE HVAC Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the federal microdata file, the statute or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify.
The counts below are generated from the published pages themselves, last counted November 12, 2026, and they are what we have actually published rather than what we intend to.
- 18
- studies published
- 15
- federal sources read and cited
- 15
- studies published with their full dataset as CSV
- 51
- jurisdictions reproduced against EIA’s own tables
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Federal data comes from the agency that collects it, in the file that agency publishes. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we download the source and compute the figure ourselves.
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- Every estimate carries its uncertainty. These are survey figures, not counts. Standard errors are computed from the replicate weights the federal file supplies and printed beside the estimate. An estimate too imprecise to publish is reported as such rather than printed.
- Nothing is typed by hand. Prose, tables and charts all read from one dataset built by script, so a number in a sentence and the same number in the table below it cannot disagree.
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Data as of October 26, 2026. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
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