More Americans Are Heating Their Homes with Electricity than Ever Before

The share of homes using primarily electricity for space heating has steadily increased since 1950, replacing coal, wood and oil.

Americans have been steadily increasing their reliance on electricity for heating their homes over decades. Legacy  fuels like coal, wood, and oil have largely subsided (though oil still serves many homes in the Northeast).

The growing popularity of electric heat creates opportunities for cleaner home energy, displacing dirtier fuels and making use of an electric system which is getting cleaner year over year. 

Electricity can be a cleaner heating fuel than gas or oil, because it can be produced by low-carbon technologies. But its impact on buildings in the United States depends on adoption by millions of families in their own homes. These charts show that families are in fact choosing electricity more and more over time as their heating source. Sustaining this trend will be important for delivering a long-term decline in pollution from buildings.

Here’s what else we see in the Census home heating data: 

• In 1940, the majority of American households heated with coal and over 20% with wood. Electricity use for heating was rare. 
• By 1970, natural gas had become America’s primary home heating fuel and oil had surged to second place, while electricity was still below 10%. 
• By 2024, electricity became the heating fuel of choice for 42% of American households, an all-time high. Natural gas provided heat for 47% of homes, down slightly from its peak decades earlier. 

• The growth in electric heating has been steady across regions of the country. While electric heat is most prevalent in the South — where it serves two out of every three homes — the growth trend shows up everywhere, as electric heat is growing in popularity even in colder regions like the Midwest and Northeast. 
• This trend includes both electric heat pumps and electric resistance heating, which is less efficient.