How much electricity does a fan use?

Fans are the cheapest cooling you can run, by a wide margin, and most people significantly overestimate what they cost. The confusion is understandable: a fan and an air conditioner both plug into the wall and both make a room more bearable, so it is reasonable to assume they are in the same ballpark. They are not in the same order of magnitude.

Every figure on this page — and every cost figure on this site — comes from one calculation:

(watts ÷ 1000) × hours × your rate per kWh

We use 18.34¢/kWh, the US average residential price for June 2026 from the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly. Your rate is on your bill and is probably not the national average — rates vary by more than a factor of two across the US, which is exactly why we print the formula rather than only the answer.

Worked once, slowly, so the table below is obvious: a 49 W fan for 8 hours is 49 ÷ 1000 × 8 = 0.392 kWh. At 18.34¢/kWh that is $0.072 — about seven cents a night. Thirty nights: $2.16.

Find your fan’s wattage on its nameplate — usually a sticker on the base or the back of the motor housing — or in its manual, and read across. The last column is continuous 24/7 running for a month, which is what people actually do with a bedroom fan in August.

Every wattage below is from the manufacturer’s own specification page. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, that is stated, because it happens more than you would expect and it is worth knowing before you buy.

The spread is the interesting part. A ceiling fan on low costs about 7.9¢ to run for a month of nights. A 20-inch box fan on high costs $4.49. Both are trivial next to an air conditioner, but the ceiling fan is roughly fifty times cheaper than the box fan for a comparable amount of perceived comfort in a bedroom — which is why a ceiling fan is the cheapest cooling that exists if you have somewhere to hang one.

The DC-motor comparison is the other one worth noticing. Lasko’s EcoQuiet DC tower draws 19 W flat out; its AC-motor Wind Curve tower draws 49 W. Same brand, same form factor, same job — and 84¢ against $2.16 over a month. Over a couple of summers the DC motor pays for the price difference, and it is also 23 dBA on low against a figure Lasko does not publish for the AC unit. More on that on the quiet-fans page.

The portable air conditioner costs roughly 68 times what the DC tower fan costs, for the same eight hours.

But — and this is the part a cost table cannot tell you — they are not doing the same job. A fan moves air across your skin, which speeds evaporation and makes you feel several degrees cooler. It does not remove any heat from the room; its motor adds a small amount. An air conditioner genuinely lowers the temperature and removes humidity. On a 95°F night with a 78°F indoor temperature, a fan is the answer. At 88°F indoors, no fan will make a bedroom sleepable and the extra $57 is what sleeping costs.

The honest framing is: use the fan first, and reach for the compressor only when the fan is genuinely not enough. Most people in most climates need the compressor for a smaller fraction of the summer than they think.

Standby power on anything with a remote

The certified ceiling fan data publishes standby wattage separately, and it is a real number: 0.8 W for the Hunter Vespucci, 1.2 W for a 72-inch Kingston. That is $1.93 a year for a fan that is switched off, and it never stops. Trivial per fan, but it is also more than the Vespucci costs to actually run on low for a month of nights — which is a genuinely odd fact about modern fans.

Wattage nobody publishes

Vornado publishes how far its circulators throw air — 70 feet for the 630, 75 for the 683 — and publishes no wattage and no CFM for either. That means no honest running cost for a Vornado exists in public, and we will not invent one. If you own one and want to know, a $15 plug-in energy meter will tell you in about a minute, and we would genuinely like to hear the number.

• Ceiling fans ranked on certified CFM per watt — the cheapest thing on this page, ranked properly.
• The quietest fans, by published dBA — the DC-motor units that also cost least to run.
• What a portable AC actually costs — the other end of this table, worked through.
• Cooling a room with no AC at all — where a fan is the whole strategy.