What Appliances Use the Most Electricity? 40 Appliances Ranked

The One Rule That Explains the Whole List

Almost everyone guesses wrong about which appliances cost the most, and it's always the same mistake: confusing power with consumption. A kettle or a hair dryer pulls a huge amount of power — 2,000 to 3,000 watts — so it feels expensive. But it runs for minutes. Meanwhile a fridge sips a fraction of that power and never, ever stops.

The number that actually lands on your bill is energy = power × time, measured in kilowatt-hours. That single equation is why the top of this ranking is dominated by two kinds of appliance:

• →Things that heat (water heaters, showers, space heaters, ovens): heat is expensive because it needs enormous power and sustained time.
• →Things that never switch off (fridges, freezers, routers, standby devices): individually small, but 8,760 hours a year adds up.

The appliances people fret over — the microwave, the toaster, the TV, a single LED bulb — sit near the bottom precisely because they're low-power, short-use, or both.

The 5 Biggest Electricity Users — and What They Cost

These five appliances, where a home has them, typically account for the lion's share of controllable electricity spend. Costs shown update with the country switcher above.

Notice what's not here: nothing you plug into a kitchen socket. If your bill is high, the answer is almost always in hot water, heating, cooling, or an EV — not the appliances you switch on and off by hand. That's also where the biggest savings live: a heat-pump or solar upgrade attacks the top of this list, not the bottom.

The Always-On Trap: Small Watts, Big Hours

Here's the counter-intuitive one journalists love. A broadband router draws just 10 watts — nothing. But it runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year: 8,760 hours. That's about 90 kWh a year ($16), which beats the microwave (55 kWh) and more than doubles the toaster (20 kWh) — appliances that feel far more "powerful".

Add up every always-on device in a typical home — router, TV and streaming boxes, smart speakers, consoles in rest mode, chargers left plugged in — and standby load reaches 200–400 kWh a year. It's real money, but the lesson isn't "unplug the toaster". It's that a handful of devices running all the time can quietly out-cost the ones you actually notice using.

How the Cost Changes by Country

The ranking is universal — physics doesn't care where you live — but the bill very much does. The same appliance costs almost twice as much to run in Australia as in the US, purely because of the electricity rate:

This is why the same solar panel or heat-pump upgrade pays back years faster in Australia or the UK than in the US — the electricity it offsets is simply worth more. Within a country the gap is just as wide: see our 2026 map of electricity prices by US state and UK region to find where your rate lands.

How We Calculated These Figures

Every number on this page follows one transparent method, so you can check or reproduce it:

1. 1Each appliance is given a typical annual electricity use in kWh, from a representative power rating and a stated everyday usage pattern (both shown in the table). For cycling appliances like fridges and ovens we use measured annual-consumption figures rather than nameplate wattage.
2. 2Annual cost = annual kWh × the national-average unit rate for the selected country.
3. 3Rates: 17.45¢ (US, EIA), 26.11p (UK, Ofgem price cap Jul–Sep 2026), 14¢ (Canada, NRCan) and 32¢ (Australia, AER) per kWh.

These are typical estimates, not a reading of your specific home. A large family, an old appliance, or a high regional tariff can push a figure well above the number shown; efficient models and light use fall below it. To price your appliance at your rate, that's exactly what our calculators are for.