How Much Does a Heat Pump Cost to Run?

Compared to Natural Gas, Heating Oil, Propane, & Electric Resistance in 2024-25

This one takes like 10 seconds, because the great Department of Energy Resources in Massachusetts releases a report answering this exact question every year.

Here is this year’s report: Massachusetts Household Heating Costs. Figure 2:

Figure 2: Cost to Produce Heat this Winter (2024/25) for Different Technologies

So, 3 takeaways:

1. If you’re heating with natural gas, prices rose this year (Green Energy Consumers Alliance has a great blog on the reasons for this) and the gap between heating with heat pump vs. natural gas has narrowed to about 10% on average.

2. Oil & heat pump heating costs roughly at parity this year!!

3. Electric resistance, as always, remains the low hanging fruit at roughly 3x the cost of heating with heat pumps.

Most of our installations at LC are oil to heat pump conversions, so while it’s good to know that costs won’t go up, the main benefit of a heat pump now is really the AC & comfort.

That, and not having a giant tank of oil in your basement.

Caveat: Municipal Light Plants

If you live in any one of these towns, your electricity rate is like, half of EverSource/National Grid’s basic rates. While you may not get the $10k rebate from Mass Save, you WILL save a ton of money on heating bills switching to heat pumps.

For example, here’s Groveland coming in at half the cost of Eversource & NG:

If you’re in MLP territory, consider getting a heat pump!

Caveat: Heat Pump Specific Rates

Unitil seems to be rolling out heat pump-specific rates soon. There's talk of National Grid looking to do the same thing.

How much would you save with this heat pump rate? It'll shave about 6 cents off. That's significant:

The Propsal

I don’t think this will rollout statewide this year, but we’ll keep an eye on this. It’ll be a factor in future years, along with the constantly shifting commodity prices of oil & gas.