I rent, and the heat pump bill is enormous

Why your question is different

The heat pump literature, this site included until now, is written for someone choosing equipment. It compares fuels, weighs efficiencies, and assumes the reader controls the outcome. If you rent, you control almost none of it, and the useful questions are narrower:

• Is this bill normal for this house in this weather, or is something actually wrong?
• If something is wrong, what is it, and is it a setting or a fault?
• What evidence makes a landlord or property manager act?
• What can I change myself that actually matters?

This page answers those four. It does not tell you whether a heat pump was the right choice for the building, because that decision was made without you.

Working out whether the bill is normal

You need three numbers, and two of them are on your bill.

1. Your kWh for the month, not the dollar total. Dollars mix in rate changes and fixed charges.
2. A summer month's kWh from the same address, as a baseline for everything that is not heating. Subtract it and what remains is roughly your heating.
3. Your heated floor area. Approximate is fine.

The winter bill guide walks through that subtraction properly and gives an expected figure for your state. If your heating share lands far above it, that is the evidence you needed.

What a genuinely broken one looks like

The worst performer in this site's dataset is a household in Coastal Maine, near Bar Harbor at 2.58 watt hours per square foot per heating degree day. The best is Southwest Indiana at 0.21. Both are cold climates with similar degree day totals. [r/heatpumps, coastal Maine]

A factor of 12 between two houses in comparable weather is not explained by weather. In every household above the normal band in this dataset, a specific cause was identified: a compressor locked out at a default temperature, resistance strips energised by a thermostat that did not understand the equipment, a system sized for a load it never sees. The full dataset and every identified cause is here.

This matters for a renter because those causes are settings and commissioning faults. They do not require new equipment. They require somebody competent to spend an hour with the thermostat and the outdoor unit.

What you can change yourself

• Stop using deep setbacks. This is the one that surprises people. A heat pump recovering from a large setback frequently calls the resistance strips to catch up, and the strips cost more than the setback saved. A steady temperature is usually cheaper with a heat pump, which is the opposite of the advice that works for a furnace.
• Find out whether "emergency heat" or "auxiliary heat" is showing on the thermostat, and how often. If it is on in mild weather, that is the fault, and it is worth photographing as evidence.
• Do not switch it off while you are out for the same reason as the setback point.
• Check the outdoor unit is not blocked by snow, leaves or stored items, and that it is not sitting in a drift. This is genuinely common and genuinely yours to fix.
• Read your own meter weekly for a few weeks. A dated series of readings is far harder to dismiss than a complaint about a bill.

What you cannot change is the equipment selection, the balance point, the lockout temperature, the refrigerant charge or the ductwork. Those are the ones that usually matter most, which is the frustrating part.

Getting a landlord to act

The obstacle is structural rather than personal. Whoever bought the equipment does not pay the bill, so the incentive to commission it properly was weak. That is a known problem with a name, the split incentive, and naming it is more useful than being annoyed about it.

What tends to work:

• Send numbers, not adjectives. "December was 2,900 kWh against 400 kWh in August, in a 1,400 square foot unit" travels further than "the heating is very expensive".
• Frame it as a fault, not a preference. Auxiliary heat running in mild weather is a commissioning defect, and the fix costs a service call rather than a machine.
• Name the specific checks. Ask for the compressor lockout temperature, the auxiliary heat lockout temperature and the balance point to be confirmed in writing. Specific requests are harder to wave away, and this page explains what each one does.
• Point out that the fault costs them too. Resistance strips running unnecessarily shorten equipment life and make the unit harder to let next year.

If the landlord pays the heating and you do not, all of the above still applies, and you have a better chance of being listened to.

Who this page is for, and who it is not

It is for you if you rent a home heated by a heat pump, the bill is higher than you expected, and you want to know whether that is the weather or a fault before you raise it.

It is not for you if you own the home. The diagnostic material is the same but you have options this page deliberately leaves out; start at the winter bill guide.

It is also not for you if you are a landlord deciding what to install. This site has no data on the economics of that decision, and it would be inventing rather than reporting if it pretended otherwise.

How this was checked

The household figures come from 21 homes whose occupants published their own consumption, normalised to watt hours per square foot per heating degree day so that houses of different sizes in different climates can be compared. Nothing is estimated on anyone's behalf and missing values are left blank. The method and every row is here.

The diagnostic material is drawn from two federal field studies that instrumented real occupied homes rather than laboratory samples. [PNNL-37127 (2025)] [NREL/TP-5500-84745 (2023)]

What this page does not cover

Tenancy law. Nothing here is legal advice, and rights differ substantially by state and by lease.

Whether the landlord should have installed something else. That decision involves capital costs this site does not model.

Utility assistance programmes. Real and often significant, but state specific and outside what this site tracks.

Your specific building. Everything here is inference from bills and published figures. It is a way to ask better questions, not a diagnosis.

References

1. Mendon, V., Keene, K., Rosenberg, S., Rotondo, J. A., Nwe, K., Young, J., Wind, W., and Goetzler, B. (2025). Performance Results from DOE Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge Field Validation. PNNL-37127. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830. January 2025.
2. Winkler, J. and Ramaraj, S. (2023). Field Validation of Air-Source Heat Pumps for Cold Climates. NREL/TP-5500-84745. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. May 2023.
3. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Electricity Data Browser, retail sales and average price by state and sector, monthly. Series accessed through the EIA Open Data API v2.
4. Homeowner report and follow-up discussion, r/heatpumps, February 2024. Coastal Maine near Bar Harbor, 1,600 sq ft 1996 house, two Mitsubishi ductless heat pumps rated 12,000 and 15,000 BTU/h plus a new heat pump water heater, 4,600 kWh in a single month against a previous system of electric baseboards. Eighty comments, including six other households who gave their own floor area and monthly consumption and two Maine residents who named their utility's discounted heat pump rate.
5. Tenant report and follow-up discussion, r/heatpumps, January 2025. Queens, New York City, roughly 1,150 sq ft rental apartment in a 1988 building, three GREE ductless mini-splits installed by the landlord in place of central steam heat. Consumption, equipment plates, setpoints and lease terms are the tenant's own, posted publicly.
6. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Heat Pump Systems.