Ohio
HVAC in Ohio: where the running-cost math points at the gas furnace
In Ohio a typical heat pump costs more to run than a gas furnace. The cause is the price ratio, not the climate.
Written by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Primary-source research and analysis
Audited by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Fact check against eCFR, EIA, NOAA and the US DOE Building Energy Codes Program
The short answer
Ohio pairs above-average electricity (15.99¢/kWh) with some of the cheapest gas in the country (EIA 2024).
So a heat pump must reach a seasonal COP of 3.35 just to break even with a 95% gas furnace. At a typical COP of 3.0 it costs about $86 a year more. The DOE regional AC standard does not apply in Ohio.
What COP does a heat pump need to beat gas in Ohio?
A seasonal COP of about 3.35 on average prices. What sets that bar is the price ratio, not the weather.
Source fact: EIA’s 2024 residential averages put Ohio electricity at 15.99 cents per kilowatt-hour — 18th of 51 jurisdictions, above the middle — and natural gas at $13.77 per thousand cubic feet, 29th of 51, near the cheapest.
On a common energy basis that is $46.85 against $13.28 per million Btu — a ratio of 3.53 to one against 3.45 nationally.
HYRE calculation: A heat pump beats a gas furnace on running cost only once its seasonal coefficient of performance exceeds that price ratio divided by the furnace’s efficiency.
For Ohio that threshold is a seasonal COP of 3.35, derived for all 51 jurisdictions in our electricity-to-gas price ratio study.
Delivered heat costs about $13.98 per million Btu from the 95% furnace and about $15.62 from a heat pump at a seasonal COP of 3.0.
Over a full Ohio heating season that is roughly $86 a year against the heat pump.
HYRE HVAC Research Desk analysis: 3.35 is a demanding but not impossible figure. It is above what a conventional single-stage air-source heat pump delivers over an Ohio winter.
It is within reach of a well-specified cold-climate variable-capacity machine in a well-insulated house — provided the auxiliary resistance heat rarely engages, because every hour of strip heat runs at a COP of 1 and drags the seasonal average down fast.
So the Ohio answer is genuinely conditional, and anyone giving you an unconditional one in either direction is not doing the arithmetic.
What would change it: Three things, none of them the climate.
Your own tariff rather than the state average; a specific machine’s published seasonal performance rather than a nominal COP of 3.0; and whether the comparison is heat-only or a heat pump replacing a furnace and an air conditioner at once, which is a different capital question.
Ohio ranks 33 of 51 on our Heat Pump Readiness Index — mid-table, and held back by economics rather than by physics.
Recommendation: If you are considering a heat pump in Ohio, ask for the specific model’s rated seasonal performance and its capacity at your design temperature, and ask what the auxiliary heat lockout will be set to.
Then compare that against 3.35. If the honest answer is below it, a heat pump may still be the right choice for other reasons — it also gives you cooling, and it changes your emissions — but it will not be the cheaper bill, and it should not be sold to you as one.
Does the DOE regional efficiency rule apply in Ohio?
No. Source fact: 10 CFR § 430.32(c)(6) sets a national minimum for split-system air conditioners of 13.4 SEER2 for equipment manufactured on or after January 1, 2023, and then adds a higher floor — enforced at installation — in two regions only.
The Southeast requires 14.3 SEER2 under 45,000 Btu/hr; the Southwest requires the same plus an EER2 floor of 11.7/9.8. Ohio is in neither.
It sits in the North region, where the only applicable figure is the national one and it binds the manufacturer rather than your installer.
Source fact, and the correction that matters most: The regional standard reaches air conditioners only — the split and single-package classes. Heat pumps carry no regional installation standard anywhere in the United States.
Their floor is the national 14.3 SEER2 and 7.5 HSPF2, in Ohio and in Arizona alike. Our study of the regional split reads this out of the full CFR text.
HYRE analysis: The practical consequence for an Ohio buyer is that the federal floor is low and does almost nothing useful.
7.5 HSPF2 is a minimum, not a target, and in a state with 5,223 heating degree days the seasonal heating efficiency is the entire argument.
Equally important and not federally regulated at all: rated capacity at low outdoor temperature. A heat pump’s output falls as it gets colder, and in Ohio that is where the decision lives.
Our cold-climate performance study covers what that data looks like and where to find it.
How cold is Ohio, and which energy code applies?
Source fact: EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey 2020 puts Ohio at 5,223 household-weighted heating degree days and 977 cooling, across 4.7 million households — the highest heating load of the eight states this site covers. 64.0% heat with natural gas and 93.5% have air conditioning.
Source fact: NOAA’s 1991–2020 county normals show Ohio to be climatically uniform. Across 88 counties, heating runs from 4,950 degree days in Hamilton County to 6,328 in Geauga County, and cooling from 1,112 down to 531 — a cooling spread of only 2.1 times. The county median is 5,759 heating and 826 cooling degree days.
HYRE analysis: That uniformity is genuinely useful and rare: unlike North Carolina, California or Texas, a sizing intuition formed in Cincinnati broadly travels to Cleveland.
Every Ohio county on the chart below carries at least four times as much heating load as cooling, which means the Ohio equipment decision is a heating decision with a cooling afterthought — the exact inverse of the Sunbelt pages on this site.
Source fact: Ohio’s energy code is recorded by the Department of Energy’s Building Energy Codes Program as 2018 IECC with Amendments for residential buildings — adopted December 14, 2018, effective July 1, 2019 — and 2021 IECC and ASHRAE 90.1-2019 with Amendments for commercial, adopted August 11, 2023 and effective March 1, 2024.
HYRE analysis: Read those two dates together. Ohio’s commercial buildings moved to a 2021 model code in 2024; its houses are still built to a 2018 model code adopted in 2018 — a full generation and nearly five years apart, and one of the wider residential-to-commercial gaps in the country.
In the state with the highest heating load on this site, that gap falls squarely on envelope and duct requirements, which are exactly what decides whether a heat pump can reach the 3.35 it needs.
A code-minimum Ohio house is a harder house to heat efficiently than the code alone suggests, and insulation and air sealing are the spend that changes the equipment answer rather than merely trimming the bill.
What should you ask an Ohio HVAC contractor?
That is Ohio’s breakeven seasonal COP against a 95% gas furnace at EIA 2024 state prices. A nominal COP of 3.0 is below it. Ask for the machine’s own figures, not a general claim about heat pumps.
HSPF2 is a seasonal average and the federal floor of 7.5 is low. In a state with 5,223 heating degree days, capacity on the coldest days is what decides whether the auxiliary heat runs.
Electric resistance backup runs at a COP of 1 and pulls the seasonal average down fast. In Ohio, how often it engages is often the difference between a heat pump beating gas and losing to it.
A heat pump for the shoulder seasons with the gas furnace behind it for the coldest hours is a serious option in Ohio precisely because gas here is cheap. Ask why it was or was not proposed.
Ohio’s residential energy code baseline is 2018 IECC with Amendments, effective July 1, 2019 — a generation behind its own commercial code. Envelope work is the spend that can move a heat pump above the 3.35 threshold.
In Ohio, on state average prices, they are not. A nominal heat pump costs roughly $86 a year more than gas here. There may be excellent reasons to fit one; a lower bill is not automatically among them.
§25C and §25D both closed for property placed in service after December 31, 2025 under Public Law 119-21. A 2026 Ohio quote that prices in a federal credit is wrong.
What can we tell you about Ohio contractors?
Nothing verifiable yet. This site got that wrong once already, and it is worth explaining rather than quietly omitting.
HyreHVAC publishes no verified contractor count for Ohio. Our Ohio records were collected before the store required a register citation, so the issuing authority, the source URL and the retrieval date are all absent.
We hold records we cannot stand behind on a named register with a retrieval date, and the rule on this site is that such records are not counted, not ranked and not published as a roster.
That is a limitation of our store, not a statement about any Ohio contractor.
A correction we published rather than buried: Until September 5, 2026 our licensing study counted those Ohio rows as primary-verified while holding no register, no URL and no date for them — the table said “source not recorded” while the headline counted them anyway.
They are now reported as provenance not recorded and excluded, and the site’s verified total fell accordingly. Recovering the register would promote them back; asserting it would not.
This page therefore prints no Ohio contractor count, and the licensing study’s Ohio figures should not be leaned on either.
What to do instead: Ohio licensing sits with the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board at state level, and Ohio municipalities also operate their own permitting and, in some cases, registration requirements. Because we could not verify Ohio’s scheme to our own standard, we point you at the authorities instead.
Confirm the company’s standing with the state board. Then confirm separately with the city or county issuing your permit what it requires, since in Ohio those can be two different answers.
The standing rule on this site: Every national claim we publish rests on federal or state agency data — EIA, NOAA, the Code of Federal Regulations — never on our own contractor counts. Ohio is the case that proves why.
Questions
Is a heat pump cheaper to run than a gas furnace in Ohio?
Why does Ohio have such a low heat pump share?
Does the DOE regional efficiency standard apply in Ohio?
Which energy code applies to an Ohio home HVAC installation?
How many heating degree days does Ohio have?
How many verified Ohio HVAC contractors does HyreHVAC hold?
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 September 28, 2026, and they are what we have actually published rather than what we intend to.
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- studies published
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- 51
- jurisdictions reproduced against EIA’s own tables
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- 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.
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Data as of EIA 2024 prices; every source dated below. 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.
Sources & retrieval dates
Compare Ohio HVAC quotes on the number that actually decides it
Ask for the model’s seasonal performance against 3.35, its capacity at your design temperature, and the auxiliary heat lockout. The quote comparison worksheet lines three Ohio bids up on seasonal performance, capacity and lockout.
HyreHVAC does not install, service or sell HVAC equipment, holds no dataset of quotes or invoices, and takes no payment for placement or a favorable mention.
Contractor counts on this page are records our own store verified against the named state register on the date given — they are not a count of every licensed contractor in the state, and they are not a recommendation of any company.