Lighting running costs
EIA data · June 20265 appliances, ranked by what they cost over a year at the U.S. average of 18.34¢ per kilowatt-hour. Run together at the default usage shown on each page they come to about $188 a year.
What drives cost in this category
Lighting stopped being a meaningful share of a household bill when LEDs replaced incandescents. An 800-lumen LED draws about 9 W where the bulb it replaced drew 60. The category is now measured in dollars per year, not per month.
The change with the most leverage
The remaining exceptions are outdoors and seasonal. A legacy 400 W halogen floodlight on dusk-to-dawn control can cost more per year than every bulb inside the house, and swapping it for a 30 W LED on a motion sensor is the single largest lighting saving available.
What people get wrong
Buy on lumens, not watts. Wattage describes what a bulb consumes, not what it produces, and the two stopped correlating the moment lighting technology changed.
Lighting ranked by yearly cost
| Appliance | Typical W | Duty | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grow light | 150 | — | $141 |
| Outdoor security light | 30 | — | $20.08 |
| Christmas lights | 40 | — | $16.07 |
| LED strip lights | 24 | — | $8.03 |
| Light bulb | 9 | — | $3.01 |