How much does a heat pump cost to install and run?

Our one conversion, named: EIA publishes gas at dollars per thousand cubic feet and we need dollars per therm, so we use EIA's own heat content for residential gas, about 1,037 Btu per cubic foot, giving 10.37 therms per Mcf. It is the only number here not read straight off a price table. Our base case is the version that is KIND to heat pumps, and you should know that before you read the headline again. We price with an April electricity snapshot and an annual gas average, and you heat your house in winter, so neither is a heating-season price. We measured both against EIA's own monthly series. Gas is CHEAPER in the heating season, not dearer: the annual average is inflated by the summer, where the standing charge is spread over almost no gas, and December to March comes in at 89% of it. So we are pricing gas above what it actually costs you to heat with, which flatters the heat pump. April electricity runs 6% above the winter it should be compared with, which cuts the other way but by less. Correct both and a typical heat pump wins in 3 states rather than 4. The finding survives the correction that goes against us, which is the only reason we are willing to print it. These are national seasonal factors applied to every state, not a state-by-state measurement of your winter. Ours: the annual heat demand, which is a box. It scales the saving up and down and it does not change which way the comparison goes, because that is decided entirely by the two prices and the two efficiencies. The machine costs about $4,450. The job does not have a price we are willing to print, and that is a different sentence from "nobody publishes one". DOE and NREL keep a database of efficiency measures, and in it are the listed prices of 85 air-source heat pumps at Home Depot, the AC Outlet, Lowe's and HVAC Direct. The middle of that list is $4,450 for the machine, with the middle half running $2,553 to $5,729. That is what the box costs, and it is a price you could go and pay today. It is not what the job costs. And here is the part we got wrong, twice, and are not going to hide. This page originally said that no free federal source publishes an installed price for a heat pump. That was false. The very same DOE file has an "Installed Cost" column with 24 air-source models in it. We had already downloaded that workbook. We already cite it by name on our kitchen page. We simply never opened the sheet, and then announced that the thing we had not looked for did not exist. Then the fix was wrong too. We said we would take the material price because it was "DOE's own catalogue" and refuse the installed cost because it came from Homewyse and RSMeans. But nothing in that file is DOE's own: DOE compiled other people's listings. And the 24 rows carrying an installed cost turned out to be exactly the Homewyse and RSMeans rows, so we were taking the machine price off the very rows whose labour we were refusing, and calling that a principle. The honest rule is about what kind of number it is, not whose name is on it. A retailer's listed price is an OBSERVED price: Home Depot has a heat pump and a price on it. Homewyse and RSMeans are cost-ESTIMATE services, which do not observe your job, they model it. That is somebody's guess with a logo on it, and reprinting it because it happens to sit inside a government workbook is exactly the laundering we exist to avoid. So we now drop those 24 rows from BOTH columns, because a rule you apply to one and not the other is not a rule. The median does not move either way. The point is that the criterion now separates what it claims to separate. One caveat we will not bury: a listed price is not a transaction. Nobody in that file paid anything. These are prices asked, not prices met, and they are HSPF 7.5 to 8.2, which is the old rating scale. What the Census does and does not have, since we looked. The CONTRACTOR who fits it: 248 product lines for the plumbing, heating and air-conditioning class, and not one of the 248 carries a quantity. Dollars, no jobs, so no price per job. Worth knowing about that class while we are here, because it is the one your installer is counted in: it is only 40.9% actual HVAC work, the rest being plumbers, mechanical contractors and sprinkler fitters. The FACTORY: heat pumps get their own product lines, but the Census collects no unit count for the air-source kind at all, and withholds the dollar figure for the air-source-only line. The WHOLESALER: an $8.4bn line called "wholesale sales of heat pumps", also with no unit count. And the AMERICAN HOUSING SURVEY, which our HVAC page is built on: a heat pump, a gas furnace and a boiler are all job code 27, "added or replaced built-in heating equipment", so it can price the job and never the machine. One number did fall out of it. Exactly one heat pump has a published factory-gate price, and it is the water-source kind: $648,262,000 across 382,455 units, so $1,695 each leaving the factory. A water-source unit is a commercial water-loop machine, not the air-source box that would hang beside your house, so we are not going to dress it up as your equipment cost. We mention it because the distance between a number like that and a five-figure quote is mostly ductwork, electrical, distribution and labour, and not the machine.