About CostToHeat
An independent tool for working out what it actually costs to heat a home in the United States, built and maintained by one person.
Why this exists
Almost every heating cost calculator online has the same two problems. It asks for your square footage and guesses everything else, and it prices fuel using a single national average that may be a year old. Both are avoidable. The government publishes residential fuel prices by state, weekly for heating oil and propane through the heating season and monthly for electricity and natural gas. Nobody was assembling them into something a homeowner could actually use, so this site does.
The result is a comparison anchored on what you personally burned last winter rather than an estimate derived from the size of your house, priced against the most recent figures published for the state you live in.
Who maintains it
CostToHeat is built and run by Jerry Mills. It is not affiliated with the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with any utility, fuel dealer, equipment manufacturer or installer, and it does not accept payment for placement in any comparison. No supplier can buy a better position in the ranking, because the ranking is arithmetic.
How the data stays current
Prices are pulled directly from the EIA open-data API on a schedule and committed automatically. When the fetch fails or returns incomplete data, the site keeps the previous figures rather than publishing a half-updated set — stale but correct beats fresh but wrong. Every page shows the date of the reading it is displaying.
Heating oil and propane are surveyed only from October through March. Between April and September the site says so explicitly and shows the last reading of the season with its date, rather than presenting a five-month-old number as though it were this week's.
What this site will not do
Wood pellets, cordwood and kerosene have no federal price series. Rather than publish a plausible-looking national estimate, the comparison omits them until you enter a real local price. This is the clearest line between a tool and a content farm: a site willing to invent a pellet price is willing to invent anything else.
Current coverage is 21 states with a direct heating oil reading, 38 with propane, 46 with natural gas and 51 with electricity. Where a state reading does not exist, a regional or national substitute is used and labelled as such on the page.
Corrections
If a figure looks wrong, it may well be — please say so. The full workings are on the methodology page, and corrections can be sent through the contact page. Journalists covering heating costs are welcome to use these figures with attribution to the underlying EIA series.