Average Household Electricity Consumption – 2023

Introduction – Electricity Used By A Home

Do you know how much electricity your home uses per day, per month or per year? More exactly how many kWh does a house use? What about the electricity consumption of all households combined? These questions are important as we move toward a cleaner electricity grid, and as we grapple with energy issues that have impacted the world since the start of 2022.

Electricity Consumption of A Single American Household – Average kWh Per Day, Month and Year

We answered this question by updating all the statistics on the electricity used in households. In fact since this article was originally written many years ago, electricity consumption estimates have doubled for Americans. The recent figures, as of 2021, show that the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer is 10,632 kilowatthours (kWh). If you divide that by 12 months, the average monthly electricity consumption is 886 kWh per month. What about in a single day? That would be 10,715 KWh divided by 365, or 29 kWh. Then the average daily electricity consumption is 29 kWh.

Let’s get the instantaneous electricity usage. The number of hours in a year is 365 times 24 = 8760 hours. Then on average, at any one time, your house is using 10,715 divided by 8760 hours, which is 1.22 kilowatts. The power needs of a house at any instant then is on average 1.22 kilowatts. But to be fair, there are heavy and light load fluctuations. And most of the energy use is happening during waking hours. A better approximation is to say that energy use is happening only during the day. That boosts the instantaneous power consumption up to 2.44 kilowatts.

Frequency	Usage per household (kWh = kilowatt hours)
Daily	29 kWh
Monthly	886 kWh
Yearly	10,632 kWh
Instantaneous	1-3 kW (kilowatts)

Electricity Consumption of Combined American Households

Using the numbers for a single household, we will calculate the electricity consumption of all American households combined. That will be a big number. From the EIA, we note that the total number of residential customers is 138,308,772. Customer for a utility company means a household. So there are 138,308,772 households. In aggregate then, the enormous electricity usage would be the following.

Frequency	Usage for all households combined (kWh = kilowatt hours)
Daily	4.03 billion kWh
Monthly	122 billion kWh
Yearly	1470 billion kWh
Instantaneous	123 million kW (kilowatts)

A good sized power plant like Hoover Dam generates 2 gigawatts. So if each household requires 1 kilowatt, then Hoover Dam on average is able to supply power to 2 million households.

The daytime power needs will fluctuate further. The fluctuations are caused by high load devices like washers, dryers. We’ll ignore that for now. Read on to know how that breaks down by state for the U.S.

Source of Data

All data comes from the EPA data store on residential electricity providers. We used the file collected in 2021, which gives all providers in a state, the number of residential customers which presumably means number of households, the total electricity provided in MWH (megawatt hours) and the revenue generated. This enables calculating the amount of electricity used by each household and how much they were paying per megawatt hour.

Household Electricity Use By State, Average Electricity Bill, and Cost Per KWH

After processing the data, the results are below for household monthly electricity use and monthly cost, and the cost on a per kilowatt hour basis. The averages hide a lot of variation in the states. Surprisingly, Louisiana had the highest monthly electricity consumption at 1200 kWh per residential customer, and equally surprisingly Hawaii had the lowest at 537 kWh. So the highest is more than twice as high as the lowest! Remember that the US average is 900 kWh.

State	Average Electricity Use Daily	Average Electricity Use Monthly	Average Electricity Use Yearly	Average Monthly Bill	Average Electricity Cost
Alabama	37 kWh	1,145 kWh	13,737 kWh	$144	$0.13
Alaska	18 kWh	552 kWh	6,628 kWh	$125	$0.23
Arizona	36 kWh	1,114 kWh	13,364 kWh	$137	$0.12
Arkansas	34 kWh	1,060 kWh	12,720 kWh	$110	$0.10
California	20 kWh	605 kWh	7,259 kWh	$120	$0.20
Colorado	23 kWh	711 kWh	8,533 kWh	$88	$0.12
Connecticut	23 kWh	703 kWh	8,433 kWh	$154	$0.22
DC	20 kWh	631 kWh	7,567 kWh	$74	$0.12
Delaware	30 kWh	935 kWh	11,214 kWh	$116	$0.12
Florida	37 kWh	1,142 kWh	13,698 kWh	$129	$0.11
Georgia	35 kWh	1,081 kWh	12,974 kWh	$130	$0.12
Hawaii	17 kWh	537 kWh	6,446 kWh	$163	$0.30
Idaho	31 kWh	955 kWh	11,463 kWh	$95	$0.10
Illinois	23 kWh	698 kWh	8,376 kWh	$89	$0.13
Indiana	30 kWh	938 kWh	11,259 kWh	$120	$0.13
Iowa	28 kWh	865 kWh	10,380 kWh	$108	$0.12
Kansas	28 kWh	883 kWh	10,598 kWh	$114	$0.13
Kentucky	35 kWh	1,073 kWh	12,878 kWh	$117	$0.11
Louisiana	39 kWh	1,201 kWh	14,407 kWh	$116	$0.10
Maine	18 kWh	567 kWh	6,802 kWh	$93	$0.16
Maryland	31 kWh	964 kWh	11,570 kWh	$122	$0.13
Massachusetts	20 kWh	610 kWh	7,323 kWh	$126	$0.21
Michigan	22 kWh	676 kWh	8,107 kWh	$110	$0.16
Minnesota	25 kWh	775 kWh	9,298 kWh	$102	$0.13
Mississippi	37 kWh	1,146 kWh	13,756 kWh	$128	$0.11
Missouri	33 kWh	1,028 kWh	12,333 kWh	$115	$0.11
Montana	28 kWh	858 kWh	10,299 kWh	$96	$0.11
Nebraska	33 kWh	1,013 kWh	12,156 kWh	$109	$0.11
Nevada	31 kWh	971 kWh	11,648 kWh	$110	$0.11
New Hampshire	20 kWh	622 kWh	7,469 kWh	$115	$0.18
New Jersey	22 kWh	673 kWh	8,079 kWh	$107	$0.16
New Mexico	22 kWh	670 kWh	8,039 kWh	$87	$0.13
New York	19 kWh	600 kWh	7,197 kWh	$107	$0.18
North Carolina	34 kWh	1,041 kWh	12,490 kWh	$118	$0.11
North Dakota	35 kWh	1,085 kWh	13,023 kWh	$113	$0.10
Ohio	29 kWh	888 kWh	10,656 kWh	$109	$0.12
Oklahoma	35 kWh	1,078 kWh	12,938 kWh	$109	$0.10
Oregon	30 kWh	916 kWh	10,995 kWh	$102	$0.11
Pennsylvania	27 kWh	822 kWh	9,863 kWh	$106	$0.13
Rhode Island	19 kWh	599 kWh	7,187 kWh	$130	$0.22
South Carolina	35 kWh	1,081 kWh	12,968 kWh	$138	$0.13
South Dakota	33 kWh	1,037 kWh	12,441 kWh	$122	$0.12
Tennessee	38 kWh	1,168 kWh	14,020 kWh	$126	$0.11
Texas	37 kWh	1,132 kWh	13,583 kWh	$133	$0.12
Utah	25 kWh	769 kWh	9,226 kWh	$80	$0.10
Vermont	18 kWh	567 kWh	6,806 kWh	$111	$0.20
Virginia	35 kWh	1,095 kWh	13,143 kWh	$132	$0.12
Washington	31 kWh	969 kWh	11,634 kWh	$96	$0.10
West Virginia	34 kWh	1,051 kWh	12,615 kWh	$124	$0.12
Wisconsin	22 kWh	694 kWh	8,331 kWh	$99	$0.14
Wyoming	28 kWh	869 kWh	10,432 kWh	$97	$0.11

We also created graphical versions of these tables to make them easier to refer to for the electricity per day, month, and year. Because electricity costs varied between states, we pulled them from EIA for easy look-up.

What’s also interesting is that the rates paid by households in each state was wildly different. At the low end paying close to $0.10 per kWh are Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington. And at the high end, paying about three times more is Hawaii at $0.30 per kWh. Alaska is a distant second highest paying $0.23 per kWh.

Reducing the carbon footprint from your home’s power use is a theme we will post a lot on in the future.  As a primer for these posts we are going to look at how much electricity households use around the world, and what per person use is in different countries.

Average Household Electricity Use Around The World

About 80% of people in the world have access to electricity.  This figure has increased in the last decade, mainly due to increasing urbanization.  But despite the fact that more and more people are getting access to electricity we use very different amounts of it.

Using data from the World Energy Council we can compare how much electricity the average electrified household uses in different countries.

We also present data from IEA.org updated for 2023. This is in tabular form instead of a chart so you can copy and paste it. Note we’ve ordered it as the chart so its ranked in “kWh per household”. What should stand out is that the numbers haven’t moved too much. Canada and United States really stand out. We included also the number of households. You can see that Sweden is a much smaller country but uses more electricity than Australia or France which are larger. Notably Sweden’s electricity is very low in carbon because of hydro and nuclear.

Country	Number of households	kWh per Household (annual)
Canada	15,618,491	11,305
US	132,736,055	11,156
Sweden	4,776,239	8,914
New Zealand	1,906,474	6,754
Australia	10,220,186	5,919
France	30,217,950	5,344
Hong Kong	2,646,107	4,900
Ireland	1,799,221	4,857
Japan	55,704,949	4,749
Malaysia	7,176,812	4,456
Spain	17,565,288	4,169
UK	29,486,179	3,658
Netherlands	7,874,258	3,130
Germany	40,624,971	3,127
Russia	56,771,478	2,879
Italy	25,020,120	2,646
South Africa	17,733,119	2,614
China	522,689,264	2,180
Indonesia	69,855,344	1,720
Philippines	25,893,157	1,324
India	299,727,860	1,005

Across the countries we chose to compare household electricity use varies enormously.  The average American or Canadian household in 2010 used about twenty times more than the typical Nigerian household, and two to three times more than a typical European home.

Comparing The US, France, UK and China

In the US typical household power consumption is about 11,700 kWh each year, in France it is 6,400 kWh, in the UK it is 4,600 kWh and in China around 1,300 kWh.  The global average electricity consumption for households with electricity was roughly 3,500 kWh in 2010.

There are numerous things that drive these differences, including wealth, physical house size, appliance standards, electricity prices and access to alternative cooking, heating and cooling fuels.

Factors That Explain Why Consumption In China Is Low And India Is Even Lower

Perhaps the most surprising thing in this chart is that the global average is as high as 3,500 kWh/year, given that the figures for India and China are so low.  Two things explain this, household size and electrification rates.

In China about 99% of people have electricity and average household size is around 3.  In India these are 66% and 5 respectively  and in Nigeria 50% and 5.  Average household size in most wealthy countries is closer to 2.5 people.  As a result the distribution of electrified households is more skewed towards wealthy countries than population in general.

Home Electricity Use Per Person

By taking residential electricity use and dividing it by population we can look at how much electricity the average person uses at home in each country.  Unlike in our previous graph this chart takes in to account all the people in each country, so for places where electricity access is not universal the figures are lower.

Although the graphs look very similar there are some striking differences.

Americans use 5x more power than global average

Each American uses about 4,500 kWh per year in their home.  This is about six times that of the global average per capita, or more than five times the average for those who have electricity access.

The variation between developed countries is also quite stark.  While the US and Canada are up around 4,500 kWh per person the UK and Germany are below 2,000 kWh.  In Brazil, Mexico and China per person use is just 500 kWh, but growth is very different.  In Brazil residential use per person has been stable over the last 20 years, whereas in Mexico it is up 50% and in China it has increased 600%.

Where Is Yours Like?

Our household electricity use has been 2,000 kWh each of the last few years, which means it is about 700 kWh per person.  We benefit from not using electricity for heating or cooling, although our electric oven is a big source of demand.

That makes us a Brazilian family, but global people 😉

How do you stack up?