What an electric blanket actually costs to run

The formula, in full

There is only one calculation and it is not complicated. Watts divided by a thousand gives kilowatts. Kilowatts multiplied by hours gives kilowatt-hours. Kilowatt-hours multiplied by your rate gives dollars.

Where the rate comes from, and why it matters

We use 18.34 cents per kilowatt-hour, the US Energy Information Administration's average residential retail price for June 2026, published in the Electric Power Monthly. It is linked at the bottom of every table that uses it.

Two reasons to be strict about this. First, most pages that answer this question either state no rate at all or pick one without saying where it came from, which makes their answer unverifiable. Second, and more practically, your rate is almost certainly not the national average. Residential rates in the US vary by more than a factor of two across states. Take our per-kWh figures and multiply by your own rate off your own bill, and the answer becomes exactly right for you rather than approximately right for everyone.

We also refuse to use UK figures. Several of the better cost-to-run pages on this subject are British, price in pence at the Ofgem cap, and are simply about a different country. Converting them would be worse than useless.

The problem: almost nobody publishes a wattage

This is the finding that shaped the whole site. We checked the listings of every product we track, on the day we built this page. Of 29 heated bedding products, 8 publish a rated wattage and seven of those eight are the same brand. Sunbeam, Sealy, Serta, Beautyrest and Biddeford between them cover most of the shelf, and not one of them states a figure anywhere on the listing or in the technical details table.

Which means that for most heated blankets on sale, nobody, including us, can tell you what they cost to run. We could invent a plausible number. Every aggregator page on this subject does; one of them prints a single 400 W figure for every blanket in every size, sourced to nothing. We would rather print the gap. The full ledger, published and unpublished side by side, is on the watts, by model.

Rated watts are a ceiling, not an average

One honest caveat about our own numbers. A thermostatic blanket does not draw its rated wattage continuously. Once the bed is warm the element cycles off and on to hold temperature, so the real overnight consumption lands below the rated-watt arithmetic, often well below.

We publish the rated figure anyway, for two reasons. It is the only number the manufacturer stands behind, and it is an upper bound: your actual bill cannot be higher than it. Estimating a duty cycle for a blanket we have not measured would be exactly the kind of invented number this site exists to avoid.

How it compares to heating the room

This is where the numbers stop being trivia. A 1,500 W space heater is the standard portable unit sold in the US. Eight hours of it is 12 kWh, about $2.20 at the same rate. A 100 W blanket over the same eight hours is $0.15. The heater costs roughly fifteen times as much, every night.

Over a 120-night winter that is the difference between about $18 and about $264. We work the whole comparison, including where the heater is genuinely the better choice, on electric blanket versus a space heater.