🌀What does a fan cost to run?

✓ Tested & verified Updated: Aug 9, 2026 How we calculate this

Fan running cost

Appliance

Power it draws (watts)

Hours a day

Days a week

Country

Your price per kWh

$2.48 a month ≈ $29.78 a year

That is 0.48 kWh a day · $0.08 a day · $0.01 an hour while it runs

Electricity used a year: 175 kWh
Cost a week: $0.57
Cost a year: $29.78

A fan cools people, not rooms. Leaving one running in an empty room adds heat from the motor and removes nothing — it is cheap, but it is not free.

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How much does it cost to run a fan all night?

About one cent an hour. A typical pedestal or tower fan draws 60 watts, so eight hours overnight costs roughly $0.08 at $0.17 per kWh — £0.12 at £0.25, €0.17 at €0.35. Running it every night for three months of summer comes to about $7.

That is the whole answer, and it is worth putting next to the alternative: a window air conditioner covering the same bedroom draws 900 watts, fifteen times as much. For most of a temperate summer, a fan plus an open window does the job the air conditioner would have done, at a fifteenth of the cost.

The catch is that a fan does not cool a room — it cools skin. It moves air across you, which speeds evaporation and feels roughly 4 °F cooler, but the air temperature does not change. In an empty room the only thing a fan achieves is adding the motor’s own 60 watts of heat. Switching it off when you leave is not penny-pinching; it is the difference between a fan that works and a fan that is quietly warming the house.

Every fan in the house, and what a night of each one costs at $0.17 per kWh.

Fan	Watts	Eight hours	A summer of nightly use
Desk fan	20 W	$0.03	$2.45
Ceiling fan, low	25 W	$0.03	$3.06
Pedestal fan	60 W	$0.08	$7.34
Tower fan	65 W	$0.09	$7.96
Ceiling fan, high	90 W	$0.12	$11.02
Box fan, high	100 W	$0.14	$12.24
Window air conditioner	900 W	$1.22	$110

The last row is the point of the table. Everything above it is rounding error on an electricity bill; the machine at the bottom is the one worth thinking about.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to leave a fan on all night?

Around $0.08 for eight hours at $0.17 per kWh with a 60 W fan — about £0.12 in the UK and €0.17 at €0.35 per kWh. A whole summer of nightly use is single-digit dollars. Of everything plugged in at home, a fan is close to the cheapest thing you can leave running.

Does a fan use a lot of electricity?

No — a fan is one of the smallest loads in the house. A tower or pedestal fan is 40 to 100 W, a ceiling fan 15 to 90 W depending on speed, and a small desk fan under 25 W. For comparison a kettle is 3,000 W: two minutes of boiling costs about as much as an hour of fan.

Is it cheaper to run a fan or air conditioning?

A fan, by a factor of ten to fifty. A window air conditioner is 500 to 1,500 W, a central system 3,000 W or more. The honest comparison is not cost though — they do different jobs. An air conditioner lowers air temperature and removes humidity; a fan makes you feel cooler in air that has not changed.

Do ceiling fans cost more than portable fans?

Usually less. A ceiling fan on a medium speed draws 30 to 50 W and moves far more air than a pedestal fan at the same wattage, because the blades are much larger and turn slowly. A DC-motor ceiling fan can be under 20 W. The catch is the installation, not the running cost.

Should I run the fan and the air conditioner together?

Yes, and it is the cheapest trick in the house. The fan’s perceived cooling lets you set the thermostat about 4 °F higher for the same comfort, and each degree is roughly 3 to 5% off the cooling bill. The fan costs a cent an hour; the thermostat setting saves considerably more than that.

Which way should a ceiling fan turn?

Counter-clockwise in summer, seen from below, so it pushes air straight down and you feel the draught. Clockwise on the lowest speed in winter, which pulls air up the middle and eases the warm air collected at the ceiling gently down the walls. The switch is on the motor housing and hardly anyone uses it.

How we calculate this

Cost is watts × hours ÷ 1,000 × price per kWh, with the month taken as 30.44 days so that twelve months and one year give the same figure. Fan wattages are the ranges these products are commonly sold at: 40–100 W for pedestal and tower fans, 15–90 W for ceiling fans depending on speed and motor type, under 25 W for desk fans. The roughly 4 °F of perceived cooling from air movement is the commonly cited comfort effect at normal fan speeds; it is a change in how heat leaves skin, not a change in air temperature, which is why it does nothing in an empty room. The 3–5% saving per degree of thermostat setback is the figure published by the US Department of Energy.

Worked example

With Appliance Pedestal or ceiling fan, Power it draws (watts) 60, Hours a day 8, Days a week 7, Country United States (USD), Your price per kWh 0.17, this page works out $2.48 a month ≈ $29.78 a year. That is 0.48 kWh a day · $0.08 a day · $0.01 an hour while it runs

Electricity used a year175 kWh
Cost a week$0.57
Cost a year$29.78

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