Winter Heating Cost Calculator: Gas vs Propane vs Oil vs Electric

At EIA’s outlook prices natural gas is the cheapest heat at $14.32 per MMBtu delivered, a heat pump $24.62, propane $29.00, heating oil $45.02 and electric resistance $53.43.

Updated September 2026 · Source: EIA STEO September 2026, Natural Gas Monthly, SHOPP · EPM Table 5.6.A (July 2026 data) · next: EIA Winter Fuels Outlook Oct 6, weekly SHOPP prices from October

By SolarCostData Data Desk · Reviewed September 2026 · Corrections log

On this page: CalculatorTableHow we calculatedSources

National cost per MMBtu this winter: EIA’s September 2026 outlook

Each row is the STEO’s national residential price for October 2026–March 2027 (a simple average of its six monthly forecasts, read from the published workbook), converted with the heat contents and efficiencies in the arithmetic section below. The heat pump rows use the NEEP median COP for the 3-ton ducted cold-climate class. The last-winter column is the same calculation on the STEO’s October 2025–March 2026 actuals, so the two columns differ only by price.

Twenty cold states, fuel by fuel

Dollars per MMBtu delivered at each state’s own EIA average prices for October 2025–March 2026 — electricity from the Electric Power Monthly, gas from the Natural Gas Monthly, propane and heating oil from the weekly SHOPP survey. “(regional)” marks a state SHOPP does not survey, filled from its PADD region; “(US)” marks a fuel with no state or regional series at all, carried at the national STEO average and labelled as such on the state page. Each state page adds the latest readings, EIA’s forecast direction applied to that state, the division’s degree-days and the heat-pump crossover temperature.

The delivered fuels are the volatile half of the table. The weekly heating oil and propane tracker carries every EIA SHOPP survey reading by state — season averages, first and final weeks, lows, highs and trend lines — and refreshes each Wednesday once the October–March survey resumes.

Fuel versus fuel: six comparisons with break-even rules

• Propane vs Oil Heat Cost: Which Is Cheaper This Winter? — $29.00 vs $45.02 per MMBtu at EIA’s national outlook.
• Propane vs Electric Heat Cost: Which Is Cheaper This Winter? — $29.00 vs $53.43 per MMBtu at EIA’s national outlook.
• Oil vs Heat Pump Cost: Which Is Cheaper This Winter? — $45.02 vs $24.62 per MMBtu at EIA’s national outlook.
• Gas vs Heat Pump Heating Cost: Which Is Cheaper This Winter? — $14.32 vs $24.62 per MMBtu at EIA’s national outlook.
• Propane vs Heat Pump Cost: Which Is Cheaper This Winter? — $29.00 vs $24.62 per MMBtu at EIA’s national outlook.
• Electric vs Gas Heat Cost: Which Is Cheaper This Winter? — $53.43 vs $14.32 per MMBtu at EIA’s national outlook.

The arithmetic, in full

Every fuel goes through the same two steps: convert the price into dollars per 100,000 Btu of fuel — a therm-equivalent — then divide by the fraction of that energy the appliance actually puts into the house.

Natural gas. A therm is 100,000 Btu, so a million Btu is ten therms of gas, of which the AFUE fraction reaches the rooms:

Natural gas $/MMBtu = 10 × ($/therm) ÷ AFUE

Gas billed by the CCF. A hundred cubic feet of pipeline gas carries roughly 103,800 Btu, slightly more than a therm. Convert first, then use the formula above:

$/therm = ($/CCF) ÷ 1.038

Propane. A gallon holds 91,452 Btu, so it is 0.91452 of a therm:

Propane $/MMBtu = 10 × ($/gal ÷ 0.91452) ÷ AFUE

Heating oil. A gallon of No. 2 oil holds about 138,500 Btu, or 1.385 therms:

Heating oil $/MMBtu = 10 × ($/gal ÷ 1.385) ÷ AFUE

Electric resistance. One kWh is 3,412 Btu, so a million Btu of heat is 293.07 kWh. Resistance heat converts electricity to heat at a COP of exactly 1.0 — every watt in, one watt of heat out, no more and no less — so there is no efficiency term to divide by and no such thing as a more efficient baseboard:

Electric resistance $/MMBtu = 293.07 × ($/kWh)

Heat pump. Identical, except the pump moves heat rather than making it, so it delivers a COP multiple of what it draws:

Heat pump $/MMBtu = 293.07 × ($/kWh) ÷ COP

That last division is the whole argument for heat pumps, and it is also why their ranking on this page moves so much: a COP of 3.2 on a mild day and 1.9 on a design-day morning are the same machine, and they land in different places in the list.

Use the marginal price, not the customer charge

Every one of those formulas takes the marginal unit rate — the price of the next therm, the next gallon, the next kilowatt-hour. The fixed monthly customer charge stays out.

This is not a rounding decision. Gas utilities generally levy the largest fixed charge of the four fuels, and folding it into a per-MMBtu figure makes gas look worse than it is for a comparison that is genuinely about running cost. Since you pay that charge whether the furnace fires or not, it cannot change which fuel is cheaper per unit of heat.

There is exactly one decision where the standing charge belongs in the math: whether to disconnect from gas altogether. Removing the meter removes the charge, so a full electrification comparison should count it. Choosing which system to run tonight should not.

What actually differs between the four fuels

The unit conversions are the easy part. What makes winter budgeting hard is that the four fuels do not behave alike.

Two are metered, two are delivered. Gas and electricity arrive continuously and are billed after the fact at a regulated or contracted rate. Propane and heating oil arrive on a truck, are paid for up front by the tankful, and are priced by the dealer rather than a utility commission. That is why the delivered fuels swing hardest in a cold snap: a supply squeeze shows up in next week’s delivery price, not in a rate case a year later.

Efficiency ranges differ, and they matter more than people expect. The spread between an 80% atmospheric furnace and a 97% condensing one is worth more than a 15% swing in the gas price. Oil equipment clusters lower, 80-90%, which erodes some of oil’s Btu-per-gallon advantage. Getting the AFUE right in the calculator above changes the ranking more often than getting the price right.

Only one of them has an efficiency above 100%. A heat pump is not burning anything, so the COP is not bounded by 1.0 the way AFUE is — but it falls as the outside air gets colder, exactly when demand peaks. Comparing a heat pump on its 47°F rating against a furnace that performs identically at every temperature is the single most common way these comparisons get rigged.

The failure modes differ too. Run out of propane and the tank has to be re-pressurized and the system leak-tested before it restarts. Run out of gas and you have a billing problem, not a service call. That is not a cost per MMBtu, but it is a real difference between the columns.

Where the heat pump COP figures come from

The COP in the calculator is not a rule of thumb. Each class carries the median of real listed products from the NEEP cold-climate air-source heat pump database , filtered to ENERGY STAR Cold Climate models and deduplicated on outdoor unit number — the same outdoor unit appears once for every indoor unit it can be matched with, so a raw read of the listing badly over-weights whichever manufacturer publishes the most combinations. After deduplication, 1,418 distinct outdoor units remain, and each figure is the median for its class at the 47°F, 17°F and 5°F points the database requires, using maximum-compressor-speed COP.

Two independent checks say those medians are sane. ENERGY STAR’s v6.2 Cold Climate specification requires COP ≥ 1.75 at 5°F, and every class here sits between 1.90 and 2.00 — above the floor, as a filtered set should be. Field measurements published by PNNL found a median COP near 1.9 in the 0-5°F range, which is effectively the same answer from real houses rather than a test chamber.

If you want the temperature at which your own heat pump stops beating your own furnace, the dual-fuel switchover calculator solves that against the full COP curve instead of one rating point.

The EIA September 2026 outlook, month by month

The September 2026 edition of the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (released September 9, 2026; forecast completed September 3) carries monthly national residential price forecasts through 2027. Averaging its monthly values across the heating season — a simple average of the STEO monthly figures, October 2026 through March 2027, computed directly from the published workbook — gives this winter’s national picture against last winter’s:

Month by month, the forecast for this winter runs:

Two honest caveats. These are national averages — the state table above shows how far a single state sits from the national line. And the heating-oil jump is a crude-price story (the STEO’s Brent path averages about $91 for 2026 against $69 in 2025), so oil-heated homes in the Northeast are the households this forecast actually warns. The official household-level Winter Fuels Outlook arrives October 6, 2026 and replaces none of these numbers — it adds the expenditure and consumption layers on top of them.

What arrives on October 6

The EIA Winter Fuels Outlook is published as a supplement to the October Short-Term Energy Outlook, covering the October–March heating season. It reports, per household and by Census region, how much of each fuel a typical household burns, what it is expected to spend, and how that compares with the winter before. The same week, the weekly SHOPP survey of state heating-oil and propane prices restarts for the season.

Worth knowing before that lands: the Outlook’s headline is an expenditure forecast, which blends price with weather. A winter can be forecast cheaper because prices fell or because it is expected to be milder, and those are very different pieces of news for someone deciding what to install. The per-MMBtu figures on this page separate the two, because they never touch the weather term at all — the degree-day tables on each state page carry it separately.

Weighing a heat pump specifically? Three purpose-built tools: sizing estimator , gas-vs-electric crossover temperature and the post-install performance check . If a specific month’s electric bill spiked and you want to know how much was the cold itself, the bill jump calculator splits your increase into weather, rate and usage using the same degree-day data.

The 2026-27 tax position

State and utility rebates were untouched by that change, and in many states they are now the larger of the two anyway. DSIRE lists them by state, and your own utility’s rebate page is worth reading before you sign anything. The 2026 energy tax credit guide has the full federal position. Nothing here is tax advice.

Related

Find your heat pump’s balance point with the dual-fuel switchover calculator , compare whole-season running costs in the heat pump vs furnace calculator , check what electricity costs in your state , size a unit with the heat pump sizing estimator , find the crossover temperature for a named NEEP unit, verify an installed one with the performance check , split a bill spike with the bill jump calculator , or price anything else in the house with the electricity cost calculator .

Cost to heat a home, state by state

Twenty cold states, each from its own EIA prices — gas, propane, heating oil, heat pump and resistance per MMBtu, plus the crossover temperature and the division's degree-days.

Fuel-versus-fuel pages

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Winter Fuels Outlook, Natural Gas Monthly, State Heating Oil and Propane Program and Electric Power Monthly · NEEP cold-climate ASHP database · DSIRE incentive records. Figures are modeled estimates, not quotes or tax advice. See our methodology.