Operating cost
What a sump pump costs to run for a year
This is the shortest honest answer on the site: running a sump pump costs almost nothing, and if electricity is a factor in which pump you buy, something has gone wrong with the decision. We built the tool anyway, because "almost nothing" is not a number and people reasonably want the number — particularly when a contractor suggests a larger pump and it is not obvious whether that carries an ongoing cost.
Run hours are the part worth deriving. Nobody knows how many hours their pump ran last year, but everybody can estimate how many days it was wet and roughly how long the water kept arriving. Combine that with the pump's flow at your actual head and the run hours fall out: gallons that had to move, divided by gallons moved per hour.
Annual running cost from duty, not from horsepower
Electricity to run the pump for a year
$17.78
That is 96 kilowatt-hours across 129 hours of actual running.
Annual cost, low to high $10.67 to $32.01
Biggest swing factor How many hours a year water is actually arriving. A single wet spring can double it, and a dry year can halve it, which is why this is presented as a band rather than a figure.
No flags from the numbers you entered.
Not included in this figure
- Motor starting surge. A sump pump draws several times its running current for a fraction of a second on each start; over a year that is a small share of the energy but it is not zero.
- Standby draw of a backup charger or controller, which runs every hour of the year whether the pump does or not.
- The cost of the water itself, which is free, and the cost of the pump, which belongs on the install page.
- Any tiered, time-of-use, or demand component in your tariff. This uses one flat rate per kWh.
The one sourced money figure on this site
The default electricity rate comes from the United States Energy Information Administration's Electric Power Monthly, table 5.3. The residential figure for May 2026 is 18.44 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is $0.18 per kilowatt-hour. EIA prints its own caution about that series directly beneath the table:
Values for 2024 and prior years are final. Values for 2026 and 2025 are preliminary estimates based on a cutoff model sample. See Technical Notes for a discussion of the sample design for the Form EIA-826.
Read that as the publisher telling you the number is provisional: the recent months are modelled from a partial sample and get revised as the full returns arrive, so the figure this page starts from will move a little. For the decision in front of you that revision barely registers: a tenth of a cent either way moves the annual total on this page by pennies. It matters for a different reason. A figure that arrives with a published caveat about its own sample is not one to buy a pump on without checking, and the check takes a page of your own bill.
| Figure | Value | Label | Source | Retrieved |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US residential electricity price | 18.44 cents/kWh | sourced | U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly Table 5.3 | 2026-08-24 |
| Converted to dollars | $0.18/kWh | derived | The cents figure divided by 100 | 2026-08-24 |
It is also, bluntly, the wrong number for your house. Residential rates across the states range from roughly a third of that figure to well over double it, and time-of-use tariffs move it again within a single day. The national average is here because it is genuinely sourced and because a form needs a starting value, not because it describes you. Your bill is one page away and it is the honest input.
Measure the watts; do not let us guess them
Running wattage is the other number that decides this calculation, and it is the one most often taken from a nameplate that describes maximum draw under conditions your pump never sees. Real running watts depend on the motor, on the head it is working against, and on the voltage at the outlet.
| Horsepower band | Assumed running watts | Annual cost at your duty and rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 HP | 1400 W | $33.19 |
| 0.25 HP | 400 W | $9.48 |
| 0.33 HP | 550 W | $13.04 |
| 0.5 HP | 800 W | $18.97 |
| 0.75 HP | 1100 W | $26.08 |
Look down the right-hand column. Across the entire residential horsepower range, at this duty cycle and this rate, the spread is a few dollars a year. That is the finding, and it is worth stating plainly rather than burying: operating cost is not a reason to choose one sump pump over another. Reliability, the right flow at your head, and a basin that does not force short cycling are the reasons. If somebody is selling you a pump on its efficiency, they are selling you the least important attribute it has.
The cost the calculator above does not show
A backup system's charger draws power every hour of the year whether the pump ever runs or not. It is a small continuous load rather than a large intermittent one, and over 8,760 hours a small continuous load is not necessarily smaller than the pump itself.
We do not model it, because charger standby draw varies widely between controllers and we have no sourced figure for it. If you want the number, the same plug-in meter that reads your pump will read the charger, and you can add it here: standby watts multiplied by 8.76 gives kilowatt-hours per year, multiplied by your rate gives dollars.
The reason to mention it at all is honesty about the shape of the answer. When the pump itself costs $17.78 a year, a standby load is no longer a rounding error relative to it, and a page that quoted only the pump would be quietly understating a system total.
Related tools
- Sizing calculator — the flow-at-head figure this page needs.
- Backup runtime — where the charger and battery actually earn their keep.
- Failure exposure — the cost that dwarfs everything on this page.