Last Updated on October 5, 2026 by Umar Farooq
How much does it cost to run a dryer comes down to one division and one multiplication: the weight of your load divided by the dryer’s Combined Energy Factor gives kilowatt-hours, and that times your own per-kWh rate gives money. On the US federal test load of 8.45 lb, that lands between roughly 1.1 and 3.9 kWh per cycle depending on the technology — a spread of more than three to one, which is why no single dollar figure can be true for everybody.
Every page ranking for this search gives you a number. The number is somebody else’s machine on somebody else’s tariff, and the sum underneath it takes about forty seconds.
The federal metric is pounds per kilowatt-hour, not kilowatt-hours
This is the part nobody explains, and it is the key to the whole calculation. US dryer efficiency standards are not written in energy per load. They are written as Combined Energy Factor, and the Department of Energy states the unit explicitly: CEF is “measured in pounds per kilowatt-hour (“lb/kWh”)” (DOE, 89 FR 18164, govinfo). It is a fuel-economy figure for laundry. A higher number means more dry washing per unit of electricity, exactly as more miles per gallon means more road per unit of fuel.
Which means the arithmetic runs backwards from the rating, and DOE spells out its own method for doing it: the per-cycle energy was “back calculated from the test procedure results by dividing the weight (lb) of clothes dried per-cycle (i.e., 8.45 lb for standard and 3 lb for compact consumer clothes dryers)” by the CEF. That is the sum. Load weight, divided by CEF. You can run it on any machine whose rating you can find.
Two honest caveats before you use it. The 8.45 lb figure is DOE’s standardised test load, not your laundry basket, so weigh one real load if you want a figure that describes your house. And weight ÷ CEF gives the active part of the cycle; DOE adds standby and off-mode consumption on top of it, so treat the result as a floor rather than a total.
How much does it cost to run a dryer: three lines of arithmetic
Here are the three CEF figures that bracket the US market, all from the same DOE rulemaking. The baseline electric standard dryer — electromechanical controls, the cheapest machine on the shop floor — tests at 2.20 lb/kWh. The minimum that will be legal for a new standard electric dryer from 1 March 2028 is 3.93 lb/kWh. And the most efficient machine in DOE’s own technology ladder, listed as “Heat Pump Dryer (Max-Tech)”, reaches 7.39 lb/kWh.
Divide 8.45 lb by each and you get the per-cycle energy. Multiply by a rate and you get money. The rate below is the US average residential price of electricity for July 2026, 18.31 cents per kilowatt-hour, from the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3 (EIA, average price of electricity to ultimate customers) — and EIA labels 2025 and 2026 values as “preliminary estimates based on a cutoff model sample”, so it is an estimate of an average, not your bill.
| Machine, per DOE | CEF (lb/kWh) | 8.45 lb ÷ CEF | × 18.31¢ | × 213 cycles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline electric standard | 2.20 | 3.84 kWh | about 70¢ | about $150 a year |
| 2028 minimum standard | 3.93 | 2.15 kWh | about 39¢ | about $84 a year |
| Hybrid heat pump | 5.20 | 1.63 kWh | about 30¢ | about $63 a year |
| Heat pump, DOE Max-Tech | 7.39 | 1.14 kWh | about 21¢ | about $44 a year |
Those dollar columns are arithmetic, not measurements. The CEF values and the 8.45 lb load are DOE’s; the rate is EIA’s; the multiplication is ours, and we have shown it so you can redo it with your own rate instead. Substitute the number from your own bill and the per-load cost moves proportionally — at 30 cents a kilowatt-hour the baseline machine passes a dollar a load, and at 11 cents it drops to 42 cents.
The same drum, three technologies, three different sums
The table above is really a story about the heat source, and the gap between its top and bottom rows is larger than anything you can achieve by changing your habits. A baseline resistance dryer makes heat and throws it out of the wall. A heat pump moves heat around a closed loop and reuses it. DOE’s own ladder puts those two at 2.20 and 7.39 lb/kWh respectively, and if you divide one by the other you get the arithmetic behind a figure ENERGY STAR publishes without showing the working: heat pump dryers “use around 70% less energy than a conventional clothes dryers” (ENERGY STAR, clothes dryers). Baseline against Max-Tech is a 70% reduction per pound of laundry. The two numbers reconcile exactly, which is reassuring in a field where usually they do not.
Gas is the one case where this sum does not transfer. CEF converts gas energy into kilowatt-hour equivalents for the purposes of the standard, so a gas dryer’s rating cannot be multiplied by a per-kWh electricity rate and turned into a bill — you need a therm or ccf price, and a 120 V electricity figure for the drum and controls on top. That comparison has its own page at gas dryer vs electric dryer, and it ends where every honest version of it ends: at the ratio of your two local rates.
Your tariff is the biggest variable and it is not holding still
Two of the three inputs in that sum belong to you, and the rate is the one that swamps everything. The EIA table above gives the US residential average as 17.30 cents per kWh for calendar 2025 and 18.31 cents for July 2026, with a 2026 year-to-date figure of 18.19 cents. That is a national average moving by about a cent a year, and it conceals far wider state and tariff variation underneath.
So before you accept anybody’s per-load figure, including the ones in the table above, find your own rate. It is on the bill, usually expressed per kWh, and if your supply is time-of-use there will be more than one of them — in which case the cheapest hour of the day is a bigger lever on your dryer bill than any setting on the machine. (A delay-start button is the rare appliance feature that is purely financial.)
Seventy cycles apart: the test procedure versus the field
If you want an annual figure, the multiplication is the easy part and the loads-per-year is where everyone goes wrong. DOE’s field estimate is specific: its energy use analysis reflects “an average annual sample-weighted usage of 213 cycles per year”, derived from the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey. It also records the decline — “average consumer usage of electric standard clothes has steadily declined from 301 cycles per year per dryer in the 2005 RECS to 213 cycles per year per dryer in the 2020 RECS” — while average household size stayed at three people. The cycle count is also the one input you can cut outright rather than optimise, which is the real case for a rotary line carrying 160 to 200 feet of washing: it removes loads from the 213 instead of shaving pennies off each one.
And yet the federal test procedure itself still runs on a different number. DOE records the trade association AHAM pointing this out: RECS data “suggested an annual number of cycles of 236 as opposed to the 283 cycles in the current test procedure”, with AHAM arguing the 2020 data put it at 209. So there are two live federal figures, 213 and 283, roughly a third apart, and a per-year cost built on the wrong one is wrong by a third before you start. Never publish or accept a yearly dryer cost without being told how many loads it assumed. The same trap exists on the washer side and is laid out at how much electricity does a washing machine use.
Drying half a load is where the money actually leaks
Here is the single most useful sentence on this topic, and it comes from ENERGY STAR rather than from any calculator: “Drying a single towel for 30 minutes will cost about as much as drying a full load for the same time.” The dryer does not meter itself by how much laundry is inside. It runs a heater and a motor for a length of time, and a nearly empty drum pays the same rate for a fraction of the result. That is the gap a heated clothes airer works in — a couple of hundred watts across several hours rather than a couple of kilowatts across one — and it only ever wins on the loads too small to fill a drum.
ENERGY STAR takes it further in both directions, because overfilling costs too: “Drying too large of a load will cause it to take longer to dry”, and “smaller loads can take longer to dry without benefit of the tumbling effect of a full load.” A drum that is three-quarters full and tumbling freely is the cheapest state a dryer can be in, and it is free to arrange.
Two other levers are worth more than they look. Spinning the washing harder before it reaches the dryer removes water for a fraction of the energy the dryer would need to evaporate it — ENERGY STAR recommends pairing a dryer with a certified front-loader “which removes significantly more water from your laundry during the final spin cycle”. And a restricted duct raises the cost of every single load silently, for months, which is the subject of dryer taking too long to dry.
What does not move the number much is cycle length as a proxy for efficiency. DOE tested this directly and found “no discernable correlation between efficiency and cycle time” in its sample: for vented electric standard dryers “the most efficient model in DOE’s test sample has a shorter cycle time (80 minutes) than the least efficient minimally-compliant model in DOE’s test sample (98 minutes)”. A long cycle is not automatically an expensive one, and a short one is not automatically cheap.
FAQ
How much does it cost to run a dryer for one hour?
That depends on the machine’s rated power draw rather than its CEF, and most consumer dryers do not publish a continuous watt figure you can rely on. The per-cycle route is better: load weight divided by CEF, times your rate. Trying to price a dryer by the hour also ignores that the heater cycles on and off rather than running flat out.
Is it cheaper to run a dryer at night?
Only if your tariff is time-of-use. On a flat rate the clock makes no difference at all. Where off-peak pricing exists the saving can be large, and ENERGY STAR notes that delay start “could save energy costs if your utility offers time of use (TOU) pricing.”
How many kWh does a dryer use per load?
On DOE’s 8.45 lb standard test load, between about 1.1 kWh for a Max-Tech heat pump machine and about 3.8 kWh for a baseline resistance dryer, plus standby. Your own figure is your load weight divided by your machine’s CEF.
Does a heat pump dryer really save that much?
ENERGY STAR says heat pump models use “around 70% less energy than a conventional clothes dryers”, and DOE’s own efficiency ladder supports it — 7.39 lb/kWh for Max-Tech heat pump against 2.20 for baseline. What ENERGY STAR does not promise is a payback period, because that depends on your rate and your load count.
What does ENERGY STAR say a certified dryer saves?
“A full-size, electric clothes dryer that has earned the ENERGY STAR saves approximately $210 in energy bills over the life of the product.” Treat that as ENERGY STAR’s own modelled figure over a product lifetime, not a measured annual saving.
Is the dryer the most expensive appliance in my laundry?
Usually, if you use it for most loads. A washer’s own electricity is modest once the water is heated cold; evaporating water out of fabric is thermodynamically expensive by comparison. The cheapest dryer cycle remains the one you skip.
Weigh one load, find one rate, then do the division
The answer to this question is three numbers long and two of them are yours. Weigh a typical load on bathroom scales once. Find your machine’s CEF — it is on the EnergyGuide paperwork or the manufacturer’s spec sheet, in pounds per kilowatt-hour. Divide, then multiply by the rate printed on your bill.
What you will end up with is a per-load figure you can trust and nobody else can publish for you. If it looks higher than you expected, check the duct before you check the tariff: the cheapest energy-efficiency measure on any dryer is air that can actually get out.
