Heat pump vs electric baseboard: the one comparison with no argument

The short answer

This is the only comparison on the site where the answer does not depend on where you live, and it is the only one where the margin is enormous everywhere.

Electric resistance heat, whether baseboard, wall heaters, or an electric furnace, converts electricity to heat at exactly 100% efficiency. That sounds good until you notice that a heat pump running on the same electricity at the same price delivers about 2.64 units of heat for the same kilowatt hour, because it is moving heat rather than creating it.

The result is a running cost reduction of roughly 62% in every state, regardless of electricity price. The price cancels out. Both machines pay it.

How the comparison actually works

Every heating system is a machine for turning purchased energy into heat in your house. The only question that matters for running cost is how many dollars it takes to put one kilowatt hour of heat into the room.

A combustion appliance burns fuel and loses some of it up the flue. Its AFUE rating is the share that reaches the house, so an appliance rated 95% delivers 95 cents of heat for every dollar of fuel. It can never exceed 100%.

A heat pump does not make heat. It moves heat that already exists in the outdoor air into the house, and the electricity it consumes runs the compressor doing the moving. Because it is moving rather than making, it can deliver three or four units of heat per unit of electricity. That ratio is the coefficient of performance.

Nothing else enters the arithmetic. Not the size of the house, not the length of the winter, not the national average. Those change how much heat you need, and they cancel out of the comparison because both machines have to deliver the same amount.

This site rates the heat pump at HSPF2 11.0, a good cold climate unit, and then knocks it down for backup heat. HSPF2 divided by 3.41214 gives a raw COP of 3.22. Assuming 10% of the season's heat comes from electric resistance strips running at COP 1.0 brings the effective figure to 2.64. That is the number used on every page here.

What it costs per unit of heat in every state

The saving is the same percentage everywhere because both systems buy the same electricity. What varies is the dollar value of that saving, which is larger where electricity is expensive.

Electricity is the 2025-12, 2026-01, 2026-02 heating season mean from EIA. Electric resistance at 100% efficiency, priced at the same state residential electricity rate as the heat pump.

Why efficiency above 100% is not a trick

A resistance heater cannot exceed 100% efficiency. Every joule of electricity becomes a joule of heat, and there is nowhere else for the energy to go. That is the ceiling for anything that makes heat by burning or by resisting current.

A heat pump is not bound by that ceiling because it does not make heat. It runs a refrigeration cycle backwards, absorbing heat from outdoor air and releasing it indoors. The electricity powers the pump doing the moving, not the heat itself. Moving something takes less energy than creating it, which is why the ratio of heat delivered to electricity consumed can be three or four rather than one.

The efficiency does fall as it gets colder, because there is less heat in the outdoor air to move and the temperature difference the machine has to work across grows. Even at low outdoor temperatures a modern cold climate unit holds a COP well above 1.5, which still beats resistance heat by a wide margin. The full explanation is in the page on coefficient of performance.

What would change this answer

Three inputs move this comparison, and only one of them is on the equipment label.

• Your actual fuel price. There is no separate fuel price to get wrong here, since both systems buy the same electricity. What does vary is whether your utility offers a heat pump tariff, which would widen an already large gap.
• Backup heat. Resistance strips run at COP 1.0. Fifteen percent of the season's heat from the strips costs 27% of your effective efficiency, which is enough to change the verdict in a marginal state. See the field note.
• The heat pump itself. A builder grade unit at HSPF2 8.0 has a COP of 2.34 against 3.22 for a cold climate machine, moving the breakeven from 2.64 to 2.07.

How this was checked

Fuel prices are pulled from the EIA public API and averaged over the most recent complete December to February window, using identical months for every state. Summer months are excluded deliberately. EIA's residential price is total revenue divided by total volume, and in summer the fixed monthly customer charge is divided by almost no gas, which inflates the apparent price by up to 114%. That error is documented in the corrections log.

The same rate file drives the calculator, every state page, and every table on this page, so the tool and the writing cannot disagree. Unit conversions were derived twice, once in dollars per unit of chemical energy and once in dollars per delivered BTU, and both give the same threshold.

No verdict is declared inside a 10% margin, because fuel prices move more than that between seasons.

What this page does not cover

Running cost only. This page says nothing about what the equipment costs to buy or install, what rebates or tax credits are available, what financing costs, or what either system does to your emissions.

It also ignores the largest single item in the capital comparison: a heat pump is also an air conditioner. If you would otherwise be buying a furnace and an air conditioner, you are buying one machine instead of two, and that can outweigh several years of running cost difference.

State averages hide real variation between utilities inside a state. If you have your own bills, put your own numbers into the calculator rather than trusting a state mean.

References

1. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity Data Browser, residential retail price by state.
2. AHRI Standard 210/240-2023, Performance Rating of Unitary Air-Conditioning and Air-Source Heat Pump Equipment.