Comparison
Heating with electricity vs gas
The fair comparison is the cost of a unit of heat delivered to the room, after equipment efficiency.
Written by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
The short answer
Heating with electricity vs gas depends on two prices and one efficiency. Convert both to the cost of a delivered unit of heat: gas price divided by furnace efficiency, and electricity price divided by the heating equipment’s efficiency.
Electric resistance heat is usually the most expensive per unit of heat. A heat pump changes the math because it delivers more heat than the electricity it uses.
How do you compare the two fairly?
Prices come in different units: gas in therms or hundred cubic feet, electricity in kilowatt-hours. One therm is 100,000 Btu; one kWh is about 3,412 Btu, so about 29.3 kWh equal one therm of energy. Then divide by the equipment’s efficiency.
Gas: price per therm ÷ AFUE. A 95% AFUE furnace turns 95% of the gas energy into heat in the house.
Electric resistance: price per kWh × 29.3.
Nearly all of it becomes heat.
Heat pump: price per kWh × 29.3 ÷ COP. A COP of 3 means one unit of electricity delivers three units of heat, and COP falls as outdoor temperature drops.
The heat pump vs furnace tool runs this with your own prices. Our electric vs gas price ratio study shows how the ratio varies by state using EIA data.
The three main options at a glance
| Gas furnace or boiler | Electric resistance | Heat pump | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Efficiency | AFUE below 100% | About 100% at the unit | COP usually above 1, varies with temperature |
| Fuel price driver | Gas price | Electricity price | Electricity price |
| Cooling | No | No | Yes |
| Combustion | Yes: venting, CO alarms | No | No |
| Fixed charges | Gas service charge if gas is used only for heat | None extra | None extra |
What else belongs in the comparison?
Fixed monthly charges: if heat is the only gas appliance, the gas connection fee is part of the cost of heating with gas. Cooling: a heat pump also replaces the AC.
Equipment life and repair: there is limited field data either way. Climate: in very cold regions, heat pump output falls, and backup heat runs more.
Upfront cost depends on what is already in the house. Swapping gas for gas is usually simplest. Moving from gas to electric may need panel capacity; moving from electric to gas needs a gas line and venting.
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.
Where each one wins
Gas heat wins when
Gas is cheap relative to electricity and winters are long and cold.
The gas line and vent already exist.
You want backup for a heat pump (dual fuel).
Electric heat wins when
It is a heat pump, and your electricity price is moderate.
There is no gas service, or you want to drop the fixed gas charge.
You want cooling from the same system and no combustion indoors.
Safety comes first with gas
Leave, then call the gas utility or 911 from outside. Do not use switches, phones or the thermostat inside.
CPSC advises CO alarms on every level and outside sleeping areas in any home with fuel-burning appliances.
Gas pressure, burner combustion and heat exchanger checks are contractor work.
A quick worked example, without real prices
Suppose gas costs G per therm and your furnace is 95% AFUE: heat costs G ÷ 0.95 per therm delivered.
Suppose electricity costs E per kWh: resistance heat costs E × 29.3 per therm delivered, and a heat pump averaging a COP of 2.5 over your winter costs E × 29.3 ÷ 2.5. Plug in the prices on your own bills.
The cheapest option is whichever number comes out lowest, before fixed charges and upfront cost.
Questions
Is gas or electric heat cheaper?
How many kWh equal a therm?
Is electric heat safer than gas?
Should I switch from gas to electric?
Does the federal tax credit help?
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.
- We validate against the agency before we publish. First, we use each federal microdata file to reproduce the agency’s own published tables. Our cooling research reproduces EIA’s state estimates and standard errors for all 51 jurisdictions. That check caught a variance formula that was off by a factor of four.
- 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.
- We publish the data, not just the conclusion. 15 of our 18 studies offer the full computed table as a CSV download on the page, so you can check the analysis or disagree with it. A study without a row-level dataset gets no download link and claims none in its structured data.
- We correct in public. Where we have published a figure wrongly we fix the figure, rewrite any analysis that rested on it rather than patching the number underneath it, and leave a dated correction note on the page.
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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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