What It Costs to Run Air Conditioning Around the World

I run retail stores in the Caribbean, where power costs over 30¢ a kWh and the air conditioning never gets a season off. I built the region pages on this site one at a time, and each one used its own assumptions, so you couldn't line them up. This page fixes that: the same unit, the same rule for hours, measured weather for every place. Only the price of electricity and the climate change.

What drives the cost

The 15 most expensive places to run AC

Cost of a year of air conditioning with one 12,000 BTU unit, in U.S. dollars.

1. 1Cayman Islands$807
2. 2Barbados$606
3. 3Hawaii$601
4. 4Puerto Rico$578
5. 5Bahamas$502
6. 6Singapore$461
7. 7Philippines$458
8. 8Jamaica$452
9. 9Northern Territory$426
10. 10Bermuda$375
11. 11Cambodia$363
12. 12Thailand$283
13. 13Cyprus$277
14. 14Vietnam$275
15. 15Arizona$236

All 118 places compared

Each place links to its own page, with costs in local currency, by unit size and efficiency, and the details of its electricity price. EU countries without their own page link to the Europe price map.

Why these numbers differ from the country pages

Each region page answers a local question, so it uses the local default: a 3-ton central system in the U.S. and Canada, a 3.5 kW split in Europe, Asia and Australia, and our own estimate of the hours for each city. Those are the right numbers for planning a bill where you live, but they can't be lined up against each other. This page gives up some local detail to make the comparison fair:

• Same unit everywhere. One 12,000 BTU unit using 0.70 kWh an hour. A U.S. home with a 3-ton central system uses about 3.7 times as much electricity an hour as this unit.
• Same rule for hours. Hours come from measured climate, not from a separate estimate for each region. The rule (80 + 0.8 × cooling degree days) is a straight line fitted to the city-by-city hour estimates on our Europe, Caribbean, Asia and Australia pages (69 cities). It gives, for example, 880 hours for a place with 1,000 cooling degree days and 2,480 for 3,000.
• One city per place. A state or country is represented by one city's climate (named under each row). Hotter and cooler parts of the same place will differ.
• Europe uses Eurostat's all-in averages for every EU country (and an Ofgem-based figure for the UK), the same prices as our Europe map. A few European country pages use the tariff price of each extra kWh instead, so their prices can differ.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and method

• Climate: Open-Meteo historical weather API (ERA5 reanalysis, Copernicus/ECMWF), daily mean temperature 2016–2025; cooling degree days at base 18.3 °C (65 °F), averaged per year.
• U.S.: EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, average residential price by state, July 2026.
• Canada: Hydro-Québec, Comparison of Electricity Prices in Major North American Cities (rates in effect April 1, 2025), average price at 1,000 kWh a month before tax, largest city in each province.
• Europe: Eurostat household electricity prices (nrg_pc_204), 2,500–4,999 kWh a year, all taxes, January to June 2026 (newest half-year for each country); UK from Ofgem's price cap.
• Caribbean, Australia and Asia: each country's utility, regulator or tariff source, listed on its page (Caribbean, Australia, Asia).
• Prices in other currencies are converted to U.S. dollars at the exchange rates stated on each region page.

You're welcome to use these figures; please link to this page as the source.