By the Home Savings Calculator team · 29 August 2026 · 6 min read
As a rough guide for a UK home on mains gas, with gas heating and gas hot water, annual electricity use lands somewhere around 1,800kWh for one person, 2,700kWh for two, 3,300kWh for three and 4,100kWh for four. Those are wide brackets and the overlap between them is enormous.
The moment heating, hot water or a car moves onto electricity, these numbers stop applying entirely. A two-person home with a heat pump and an EV can use more than double a four-person home on gas.
Put your own annual kWh into the electricity cost calculator. It compares you against the typical household for your region and splits your bill into usage and standing charge, which decides which half of the advice below applies.
Occupancy affects the things that scale with people — laundry loads, dishwasher cycles, showers, screen time. Those matter, but they are rarely the largest items on a bill. The fixed load of the house, and whether it makes heat electrically, dominates.
This is why two households of the same size can differ threefold. One has gas heating, a modern fridge and no dryer; the other has an immersion heater, a tumble dryer running four times a week and an electric shower.
In rough order: anything that makes heat, anything that runs constantly, then everything else. Electric heating and hot water sit at the top, followed by tumble dryers and ovens, then the always-on base load of fridges, freezers and networking kit.
The appliance running cost calculator ranks these for your own rate and usage. It usually reorders people's assumptions — the fridge that runs all year often costs less than the dryer used twice a week.
If you heat with electricity, compare it honestly against the alternatives in the heating cost calculator before concluding your usage is simply high.
Take an annual statement rather than a single month — winter and summer differ enough that one bill tells you very little. If you only have monthly bills, add twelve of them.
Then separate the two halves of the bill. A large standing charge relative to your usage means you are a low user, and switching tariff will do more than switching things off. The reverse means your usage is the lever. Our guide to cutting an energy bill works through that decision in order.
Being above the benchmark is not automatically a problem — an EV alone adds around 2,000–3,000kWh a year, and that electricity is replacing petrol you are no longer buying. The EV charging cost calculator shows that trade honestly.
High usage does change the case for generation, though. The more you use during daylight, the better solar looks, because self-consumed units are worth roughly three times exported ones — see is solar worth it or run the numbers in the solar panel calculator.
