How much does an LED TV cost to run?

Figures on this page are calculated from typical appliance wattages and the price per kWh you enter, not looked up from a bill. See how we calculate this.

What an LED TV costs to run: typical 90 W, about $24 a year. Adjust the figures to your own usage and electricity price.

Wattage and running cost

Based on 4 h a day at $0.18/kWh, the US average. Change the hours and the price in the calculator above.

A modern LED television is far cheaper to run than the plasma and CRT sets it replaced, but it is still on for hours every day in most homes, so its cost is worth knowing. Power draw depends mostly on screen size and brightness. A small 32-inch set might pull only 40 W, a typical 55-inch model around 90 W, and a large, bright 65-inch or larger 4K panel can reach 200 W or more, especially with HDR content that drives the backlight hard.

Because a TV runs at a fairly steady power while it is on, the hours-per-day approach the calculator uses is a good fit. Enter your set's wattage — you can find it on the energy label or the sticker on the back — along with how many hours a day it is genuinely on, and your price per kWh. Watching four hours a day, a 90 W television uses about 131 kWh a year, a modest but real line on the bill that grows with bigger screens and longer viewing.

Two things are easy to overlook. First, brightness settings matter a lot: shops set TVs to a punishing 'vivid' mode, and dialling that back to a normal picture can cut power noticeably with no real loss in a living room. Second, a TV keeps sipping power in standby so it can respond to the remote — usually only a watt or two, but it runs every hour the set is 'off', which is most of the day. The savings tips below tackle both.

Those size figures climb faster than they look, because a panel's power tracks its area and not the diagonal printed on the box: a 65-inch screen has roughly four times the surface of a 32-inch one to light. Technology, meanwhile, matters less than the names suggest, because "LED TV" and "LCD TV" are the same thing — an LCD panel with an LED backlight, which is what replaced the fluorescent-backlit LCDs of the 2000s. If you are comparing an LED against an LCD you are almost certainly comparing two LED-backlit sets of different sizes, ages or brightness settings, and the gap you find will be down to those, not to the label. OLED is the one that genuinely works differently: each pixel makes its own light and a black pixel is simply off, so on an OLED a dark film really does cost less to watch than a bright sports broadcast on the same screen — something no backlit panel can do.

What an LED TV costs in other countries

The figures above assume $0.18/kWh, the US average. An LED TV does not change when it crosses a border — the price of the electricity it drinks does. Here is what its 131 kWh a year cost in the 14 countries with a page here, dearest first.

Each figure is in that country's own currency at its average all-taxes-included price; the dollar column is there so they can be set against each other. Ireland to Canada is a factor of 3.8 — same appliance, same hours, 3.8 times the bill. Follow a country for its real retailer tariffs and what makes up that price, or see the full electricity price comparison by country.

How to cut LED TV running costs

• Switch the picture mode from 'vivid' or 'dynamic' to 'standard' or 'eco' — it cuts backlight power with no real loss at home.
• Turn the backlight or brightness down a notch; it is the single biggest lever on a TV's power use.
• Enable the ambient light sensor if your set has one so it dims automatically in a darker room.
• Use the real power button or a smart plug to cut standby on a set you rarely watch.
• Bigger is not free: if you are buying, check the energy label's watts, not just the screen size.

Frequently asked questions