Heating and Cooling Costs by Climate Zone, for 12 Cities

EIA's Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) is the best public source on what households spend to heat and cool, and it puts a house in Chicago and a house in Fairbanks in the same row. Its coldest climate group covers four IECC zones whose heating demand differs by more than a factor of two, and it has no cell that crosses house size with climate. For anyone weighing candidate towns, that row is the one that needs splitting.

This article splits it with an estimate built from RECS's own numbers, NOAA degree-day normals and EIA's state fuel prices, with every step shown so you can rerun it. One result is worth knowing before you reach the table: for the same gas-heated house of about 2,200 square feet, an Atlanta address comes out at roughly $1,120 a year for heating and cooling and a Chicago address at roughly $1,060, although Chicago has more than twice Atlanta's heating degree days. Most of that reversal is fuel price. Georgia households paid an average of $20.42 per thousand cubic feet of natural gas in 2025 and Illinois households $11.25, according to EIA's annual state price table (released 30 September 2026, read 24 October 2026).

Below: what RECS actually says, how one of its rows becomes a per-degree-day rate, a twelve-city table covering all eight IECC zones, where that table is probably wrong, and a sheet you can run on your own shortlist.

What RECS publishes, and the four zones it folds into one row

The table that matters is RECS 2020 Table CE3.6, "Annual household site end-use expenditures," released June 2023 and revised March 2024. I downloaded the spreadsheet on 24 October 2026. The averages are dollars per household that uses the end use, so the air-conditioning column leaves out homes without AC.

Look at the first two rows. The coldest group and the mixed-humid group (think Nashville, Atlanta, Washington D.C.) land on exactly the same $870 total. The cold climate spends more on heat, the mixed one more on cooling, and the totals meet.

That is already a useful finding for a move comparison, but the row hides two things. The first is in the table's footnote, which says the regions come from DOE's Building America program and adds: "We combined climate regions for this publication. The Subarctic region is included with data for Very-cold and Cold." DOE's own county guide (Volume 7.3, August 2015) defines those regions by heating degree days: Cold is 5,400 to 9,000, Very cold is 9,000 to 12,600, Subarctic is 12,600 or more. It maps Cold to IECC zones 5 and 6, Very cold to zone 7, Subarctic to zone 8. One RECS row, four IECC zones, and a heating demand that more than doubles from one end to the other.

The other catch is size. There is a row for 2,000 to 2,499 square feet and a row for each climate region, but no cell where they meet. You can, however, back out the average home size inside each region from Table CE1.1, which gives consumption both per household and per square foot. Divide one by the other:

• Very cold and Cold: about 1,980 sq ft
• Mixed-humid: about 1,860 sq ft
• Hot-humid: about 1,680 sq ft
• Marine: about 1,600 sq ft
• Mixed-dry and Hot-dry: about 1,550 sq ft
• The 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft group: about 2,215 sq ft

So the regional rows describe smaller houses than the one in this article's title, and the gap is biggest in the dry West. The "2,000 sq ft" house below is really the RECS 2,000 to 2,499 group, which averages a little over 2,200.

A per-degree-day rate from one row of the survey

The method treats energy use as proportional to weather. Heating degree days (HDD) count how far, and for how long, the daily mean temperature sits below 65°F; cooling degree days (CDD) count the same thing above it. A day with a mean of 35°F is 30 HDD, which is the example DOE's guide uses.

Three numbers set the rates:

1. Heating energy. RECS Table CE3.1 gives the 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft group an average of 43.1 million Btu of site energy for space heating in 2020.
2. Cooling energy. The same row shows 9.3 million Btu for air conditioning. At EIA's standard 3,412 Btu per kWh, that is about 2,726 kWh.
3. The weather RECS measured. 2020 was a warm year. EIA's Monthly Energy Review Table 1.11 puts U.S. heating degree days for 2020 at 3,914, and Table 1.12 puts cooling degree days at 1,519 (both read 24 October 2026).

Divide energy by weather:

• 43.1 ÷ 3,914 = 0.0110 million Btu per HDD for heating
• 2,726 ÷ 1,519 = 1.79 kWh per CDD for cooling

Then multiply by a town's long-run normals instead of 2020's weather. NOAA's 1991-2020 annual normals publish one CSV per station, and the fields are ANN-HTDD-NORMAL and ANN-CLDD-NORMAL, both on a 65°F base.

For prices, the cooling side uses EIA's Electric Power Monthly Table 5.6.B, the residential year-to-date average for January through August 2026 (values for 2026 are preliminary). The heating side assumes a gas furnace and uses EIA's 2025 residential natural gas price by state, in dollars per thousand cubic feet. To turn that into dollars per million Btu, divide by 1.036, because EIA's conversion calculator puts delivered gas at 1,036 Btu per cubic foot.

Before trusting this, I checked whether size alone scales the way the method assumes. Take the national average home (34.4 million Btu of heating, roughly 1,820 sq ft) and scale it up to 2,215 sq ft: you get 41.9 million Btu. RECS measured 43.1 for that group. Cooling does the same: 2,315 kWh scaled to 2,819, against 2,726 measured. Close enough to use; too loose to quote to the dollar.

Twelve cities across eight zones, estimated

This table is an estimate built from the steps above; RECS publishes none of these numbers. The zone and Building America region for each city are the county assignments in DOE's 2015 guide. Degree days are NOAA 1991-2020 normals for the airport station named. Everything else is the arithmetic above.

Zones 2 through 5 each get two cities because the letter matters: 2A is humid Houston and 2B is dry Phoenix, 4A is Nashville and 4C is marine Seattle. The prices are statewide averages, which is a real weakness and the subject of the next two sections.

Duluth and Minneapolis share Minnesota's prices. Duluth is in St. Louis County, which the DOE guide lists as Very cold, zone 7; Hennepin County is Cold, zone 6.

Price moved the result as much as weather did

Sort the table by total and the order has little to do with the zone numbers. Leave Fairbanks aside, and the most expensive house in the table is Phoenix at about $1,490. The cheapest is Los Angeles at about $705, despite California having the highest electricity price in the table at 32.58 cents. LAX's station logs only 720 cooling degree days a year, so the expensive kilowatt-hours are few.

Three patterns worth carrying into your own comparison:

Gas in the South is expensive per unit. Florida's 2025 average was $25.48 per Mcf, Georgia's $20.42, Texas's $19.42, against $10.98 in Minnesota. One likely reason: the state figure is an average across all residential gas sold, so fixed monthly customer charges get spread over however much gas customers in that state actually buy. Warm-state customers buy little, so the fixed part would weigh more per unit. For a house in Atlanta, what you would actually pay depends on the utility's tariff (fixed charge plus a per-therm rate) far more than on a statewide average.

Seattle costs more to heat than its mild reputation suggests. It has no real summer, but 4,376 heating degree days is more than Nashville's 3,364, and Washington gas averaged $17.62 against Tennessee's $11.84. The two cities finish within a dollar of each other at about $888 and $887, from completely different bills: almost all heat in Seattle, a near even split in Nashville.

Inside the cold row, the spread is large. RECS gives one figure, $684 of heating, to every home from Chicago to Fairbanks. The estimate puts Chicago's heating at about $714 and Duluth's at about $1,064. Duluth and Minneapolis are priced identically, so the $200 heating gap between those two is entirely weather, and it is invisible in the published survey. (Duluth's cooler summer gives most of it back, which is why their totals end up only $31 apart.)

For calibration against the 2020 dollars in the first table, prices have risen since. EIA's Monthly Energy Review Table 9.8 shows the U.S. average residential electricity price at 13.15 cents per kWh in 2020 and 17.3 in 2025, up about 32%. EIA's separate annual residential natural gas price table gives the U.S. residential gas price as $10.78 per Mcf in 2020 and $15.34 in 2025, up about 42%. A 2020 RECS dollar figure quoted without that adjustment understates a 2026 bill.

Where this sheet runs high, and where it runs low

The method has one assumption that is plainly false: that a house in Duluth is built like a house in Houston and simply sees more cold. The energy code sets stricter insulation and air-sealing requirements as zone numbers rise, so a cold-climate house should burn less per degree day than the national average house. Linear scaling should therefore overstate heating in the coldest zones.

RECS lets you test this, roughly. The Very cold and Cold region averaged 54.0 million Btu of space heating at about 1,980 sq ft. Scaled to 2,215 sq ft that is about 60.3. The estimate gives Chicago 65.8 and Minneapolis 81.5. Unless that region's households average well above Chicago's 5,974 degree days, those figures look high, though by how much is hard to say because RECS does not publish the region's average degree days.

Cooling shows the same direction in hot places. The Hot-humid region averaged 14.2 million Btu for air conditioning, about 4,160 kWh, at about 1,680 sq ft; scaled to 2,215 sq ft, about 5,480 kWh. The estimate gives Houston 5,899, which is in range, and Miami 8,355, which is well above anything the regional average supports. Treat Miami's and Phoenix's cooling figures as a ceiling.

The fuel assumption cuts the other way in places.

• Heat pumps and electric resistance. RECS's 43.1 million Btu is site energy averaged across every fuel, and electric heat counts only the kWh at the meter, which drags the average down. Across all climates, households heating mainly with natural gas used 46.7 million Btu for space heating in 2020; those heating mainly with electricity used 11.7 (Table CE3.1). Part of that gap is climate, since electric heat is more common where winters are mild, but it means a gas-furnace house will likely use more heating energy than the estimate shows. In dollars the gap is smaller: $519 against $396 (Table CE3.6).
• Fuel oil and propane. Households heating mainly with fuel oil or kerosene averaged $1,164 for space heating nationally, propane households $1,010. If the candidate house is in a rural area without a gas main, the gas column in the table does not apply to it at all.
• Fairbanks. Alaska's statewide gas average may not describe what a Fairbanks address can buy, or whether it can get piped gas at all. Ask the local utility before using that row for anything.

Weather variation is the last limit. Normals are thirty-year averages. The national heating figure moved from 4,317 degree days in 2019 to 3,914 in 2020 and 3,692 in 2024, according to the same MER table, a swing of about 15% in five years. Any single winter can miss the normal by that much in either direction.

None of this makes the table useless for a move decision. It is built for comparing two towns, and for that job the bias matters less: it runs the same direction for both candidates in a pair, and the price and weather inputs are real.

Your own pair of towns, one row each

The same calculation fits on a single sheet row per candidate. These steps take about twenty minutes for two towns.

1. Find the zone. PNNL's 2021 IECC building assemblies tool looks up the climate zone by county or ZIP. The 2015 DOE guide used for the table above predates the 2021 code edition, so check your county there. I could not retrieve DOE's 2021 update to the county guide when writing this.
2. Pull degree days. Open the NOAA normals folder linked above, find the nearest station's CSV, and copy ANN-HTDD-NORMAL and ANN-CLDD-NORMAL. Station IDs like USW00013874 (Atlanta) are in the file names; NOAA's station search will give you the ID for a smaller town. If the nearest station is at a very different elevation or on the coast while the house is inland, note it.
3. Replace the state price with the tariff. On the utility's website, find the residential rate schedule. Write the fixed monthly charge and the per-kWh or per-therm rate separately. For gas, one therm is 100,000 Btu, so the per-MMBtu rate is the per-therm rate times ten.
4. Ask the listing agent or landlord one question: what fuel heats the house. Gas furnace, heat pump, baseboard, oil or propane changes which column you use.
5. Fill the row.

Line i is the one the table above leaves out on purpose, because it depends on the utility. It matters most in warm towns, where a gas connection used only a few months a year can cost more in fixed charges than in gas.

Line k goes into the energy line of the cost sheet from the seven numbers that decide whether a move pays. It is also the number to compare against whatever utilities figure a cost-of-living calculator gave you; why those calculators disagree explains what that figure was built from.

For a house that heats with something other than gas, keep line c but replace the price in line d. Electric resistance turns each million Btu into about 293 kWh at the meter (1,000,000 ÷ 3,412). A heat pump needs fewer kWh than that, and how many fewer depends on the equipment and how cold the town gets, so a heat-pump house in a cold zone is the case this sheet handles worst.

Start with line a for both towns tonight. It is two numbers from one NOAA folder, and the ratio between them tells you, before any price lookup, how many times more heat one house will need than the other.