Unplugging everything saves you $1.62 a year
The tip is real and the arithmetic is honest. It is also about one seven-hundredth of what the state line does to the same bill, and nobody puts that on a sticker.
by The editors · · 7 min read
A device drawing one watt around the clock uses 8.8 kilowatt-hours a year. At the average American residential price of 18.44 cents[3] that is $1.62. Not per month. Per year, for the whole year, for that device.
This is not an argument against pulling the plug. Free is free, and a power strip with a switch costs nothing to flip. It is an argument against believing you have done something about your electricity bill, because you have moved eight hundredths of one percent of it.
What an American home actually buys
The average U.S. residential utility customer bought 10,791 kilowatt-hours in 2022, roughly 899 a month[1]. At today's average price that is about 1,990 dollars a year, or 166 a month. That is the number the plug is eight hundredths of one percent of.
The two states that break every rule of thumb
Louisiana households bought the most electricity in the country that year, 14,774 kilowatt-hours. Hawaii bought the least, 6,178[2]. That is the part most articles stop at, and stopping there gets it exactly backwards.
Because the price is not the same either. In May 2026 the residential rate was 14.15 cents in Louisiana and 52.00 cents in Hawaii[4] – 3.7 times as much. Multiply it out and Louisiana pays about 2,091 dollars a year while Hawaii pays about 3,213. Hawaii uses 42 percent of Louisiana's electricity and pays 1,122 dollars more for it.
Hold that against the plug. The gap between those two households is roughly seven hundred times what you save by unplugging a one-watt device for a year. Nobody in Hawaii can conserve their way to a Louisiana bill, and nobody in Louisiana needs to.
What we cannot tell you
How many watts your devices actually draw on standby. No U.S. agency publishes a current per-device average we could cite, and the honest reason is that it stopped being one number: a smart speaker listening, a console in rest mode and a phone charger with nothing attached are three different things. One watt above is an example, not a measurement. The only way to know is a plug-in meter, which costs about as much as two years of the thing it measures.
Run your own device
Per year
8.8 kWh
Of that, running
$0
Of that, standby
$1.62
Standby is 100.0% of the cost. Unplugging it saves $1.62 a year – and you have to plug it back in every day.
| Power draw when running | 0.00 |
| Hours a day | 0.00 |
| Kilowatt-hours a year, running | 0.00 |
| Kilowatt-hours a year, standby | 8.80 |
| Kilowatt-hours a year | 8.80 |
| That is what it costs per year | $1.62 |
Assumptions behind this calculation
- Days per year: 365
- The remaining hours of the day count as standby. If you actually unplug it, enter 0 watts there.
- The wattage comes from you. We keep no appliance list – those figures vary by an order of magnitude, and a maintained list would be a collection of claims within two years. It is on the rating plate, or on a plug-in meter.
Loaded with one watt of standby, no running time, and the national average price. Put in the rate from your own bill – it is printed on it, and if you live in Hawaii or Connecticut it is nothing like 18 cents. Then add the running load: a device that draws 100 watts for four hours a day costs far more while it is on than it ever will while it is off, and that ratio is the whole point of the calculator.
The share the calculator shows for standby is the number worth looking at. When it is close to 100 percent, the device is genuinely doing nothing and you have found a plug worth pulling. When it is under ten, you have found something that needs a different decision: use it less, or replace it, not unplug it.
Two years, one sum
The consumption figures are from 2022, the prices from May 2026, and we have multiplied one by the other. That is deliberate: it answers what those households would pay at today's prices, which is the question you have. It is not a statement about what anyone paid in 2022, and if American homes have since used less – they have been trending down for years – the totals are a little high.
What you can do about it
-
Read the rate off your own bill before anything else
Every input in this article is an average of a country where the same kilowatt-hour costs 14 cents in one state and 52 in another. Your bill prints the rate you actually pay. One number, thirty seconds, and every calculation on this page becomes yours instead of a stranger's.
-
Chase the running load, not the standby load
Anything with a heating element or a compressor – dryer, oven, water heater, air conditioner, space heater – costs more in an hour than most standby devices cost in a year. If you want a smaller bill, that is where it is. Standby is where the folklore is.
-
Borrow a meter instead of buying one
Many public libraries lend plug-in power meters, and so do some utilities. A week with one settles every argument in your house about what is worth unplugging, and it settles them with measurements rather than opinions. If yours does not lend one, they are inexpensive and you only need it once.
-
Do pull the plug on the ones that are genuinely idle
This article argues the number is small, not that it is zero. A second fridge in the garage that is half empty, a games console left in a mode that keeps the network alive, a printer nobody has used since last year: those are real, and they are switch-off decisions rather than lifestyle ones. Just do not expect the bill to notice a phone charger.
Frequently asked
Is one watt a fair figure for standby?
It is a round example, chosen because it makes the arithmetic checkable in your head: one watt is 8.8 kilowatt-hours a year, near enough nine. Real devices sit anywhere from a fraction of a watt to several watts, and the ones that talk to your network sit at the top of that range. Double the watts and you double the dollars, which is why the exact figure changes the conclusion so little.
Why compare Louisiana and Hawaii rather than typical states?
Because they are the two ends, and the ends show the size of the thing. If the gap between the extremes were fifty dollars, the plug would be a reasonable place to look. It is more than a thousand, which tells you the bill is decided mostly by where you live and what you heat and cool with, and only at the margin by what you switch off.
So is unplugging pointless?
No. It is small. Those are different words, and the difference matters: a tip that saves a dollar and a half is worth doing if it costs nothing, and it is worth being honest about if it is offered as a way to bring down a two-thousand-dollar bill. The problem was never the advice. It was the sense of proportion around it.
Sources
- How much electricity does an American home use? In 2022 the average annual amount of electricity sold to a U.S. residential electric-utility customer was 10,791 kilowatthours, about 899 kWh per month, U.S. Energy Information Administration, retrieved August 24, 2026.
- Same page: Louisiana had the highest annual electricity purchases per residential customer at 14,774 kWh, Hawaii the lowest at 6,178 kWh, U.S. Energy Information Administration, retrieved August 24, 2026.
- Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3: average residential price 18.44 cents per kilowatthour in May 2026, 16.78 cents as the 2025 annual average, U.S. Energy Information Administration, retrieved August 24, 2026.
- Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A: residential price in May 2026 of 14.15 cents per kilowatthour in Louisiana and 52.00 cents in Hawaii, against 18.44 cents for the U.S. total, U.S. Energy Information Administration, retrieved August 24, 2026.
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