How much does a whole-house generator cost?
Price a standby generator from the parts nobody itemises for you, then see the number the dealer will never show you: how many hours your power is actually out in a year, and what that makes each hour of backup power cost.
Estimated cost
$9,827
Typical range $7,862 – $15,723
- Generator and transfer switch (your quote)$5,500
- Electrician (20 field hrs @ $91)$1,829
- Gas fitter (10 field hrs @ $95)$948
- Materials, pad, conduit, gas pipe$1,200
- Permit and inspection$350
- Total$9,827
A standby generator is insurance, not an investment, and the honest way to price insurance is
against how often you claim on it. EIA publishes exactly that. In 2024 the average US customer lost power
for 10.2 hours counting major storm days, and only 2.1 hours without them: about
eight of those ten hours were a handful of catastrophic days.
More
Spread a typical install over 20 years and you are
paying somewhere near $115 for every hour of backup power it ever delivers. That is not a reason
not to buy one. It is a reason to be clear about what you are buying, because the tail is the whole product. Census asks households what actually happened when their power went out, and the answer that matters is this:
11.0% of American households have a medical device that needs electricity to run. If that is you,
stop reading calculators and buy the generator. If it is not, you are buying a very expensive convenience, and you
should at least know that is what you are doing.
§ 02 What it actually buys you
Cost per hour of backup power$115
Fuel and servicing, per year$311
20-year cost of ownership$16,048
Cost is our model. Outage hours, labor rates and fuel prices are sourced. Cost per hour of backup power spreads the install plus 20 years of fuel and servicing over the hours your state's average customer is actually without power. It is a way of seeing the scale of the purchase, not a claim about what an outage costs you, and it says nothing about the one long winter outage that is the real reason to own the machine.
Where the money goes
By the numbers
- And NAICS 238290, where the Census files non-residential generating equipment, is not a generator business either: it is 40.5% elevator and escalator work. A NAICS code is a bucket, not a job, and we have been caught by that one before.
- The government names this exact job. The 2022 NAICS index lists, verbatim, 'Home standby power generator installation' under 238210, ELECTRICAL CONTRACTORS, and 'Power generating equipment (except home standby power generator) installation' under 238290. So the trade you are hiring is an electrical contractor, and the Census says so in those words.
- But it will not tell you how big a business that is. The Economic Census Kind of Business file has 96 categories and not one of them is a generator: we searched all 96. So we cannot tell you what share of an electrical contractor's work is generators, and we are not going to guess. What we can tell you is that 69.3% of that class's receipts are electric power installation and service.
- And do not read our $91 an hour as a limit on what your installer charges. It is built from a national median wage and a class-wide markup, so it is a shape, not a ceiling. The Economic Census's own billed rate for the same class runs $89.60 to $126.31 a field hour across the states, and individual firms sit outside even that. A turnkey quote well above our labor line is not automatically dealer margin: it is consistent with an ordinary firm at the class mean.
- EIA (Form EIA-861, 2024): the average US customer went 611.3 minutes, or 10.2 hours, without power counting major event days, and 126.0 minutes, or 2.1 hours, without them.
More
The gap is the whole argument for a generator, and the industry's preferred reliability metric is the one that deletes it. We use the with-major-events figure throughout, because hurricanes and ice storms are what drive most generator purchases, and they are what the major-events series measures. It is not the whole picture: wildfire safety shutoffs, rural line faults and medical equipment all put generators in houses, and none of them are in that figure. - EIA: where you live decides this, not what you buy.
More
Louisiana averages 29.2 hours a year without power and Washington DC averages 0.86, a spread of more than thirty to one. South Carolina alone lost 3,136 minutes, over 52 hours, in 2024. The same machine is a bargain in one state and an ornament in another. 6 more
- Census (American Housing Survey, 2023): 82% of households had no outage at all lasting 6 hours or more in the previous year, and only 3.4% had three or more. 25.7% lost power completely at least once.
More
The typical household's exposure is far smaller than the average implies, because the average is dragged up by a few catastrophic days. - Census (AHS 2023): of the households that did lose power, 14.2% had food spoil, 8.5% had to leave home and stay somewhere else overnight, 8.0% missed work, and 1.9% had pipes freeze.
More
Of those keeping refrigerated medicine, 2.9% lost it. These are the losses a generator actually prevents, and they are worth more than an hourly rate suggests. - Census (AHS 2023): 11.0% of households have a medical device at home that requires electrical power to operate. That is the single clearest reason to own standby power, it has nothing to do with payback, and no generator advert leads with it.
- Census (AHS 2023): 21.0% of households already own a generator of some kind, rising to 24.7% among owner-occupiers.
More
But AHS does not distinguish a $500 portable from a $15,000 standby unit, so treat that as an upper bound on how many people have what you are pricing, and a loose one. - Census (2022 Economic Census) and BLS (OEWS, May 2025): the electrical trade, in aggregate, works out at about $91 per field hour on our build-up and the plumbing and gas trade at about $95, derived from the median wage those trades actually earn ($30.38 and $30.67) times the markup their industries actually charge (3.01x and 3.09x).
More
The markup is measured from what firms take in, not assumed. Never confuse the wage with the bill: that error is a 3x error. - EIA (2025): natural gas costs $15.34 per thousand cubic feet to residential customers and propane $2.589 a gallon.
More
Per unit of heat, propane runs about 1.9 times the price of natural gas. Running a 5 kW load costs roughly $1.10 an hour on gas and $2.10 on propane, so a full week-long outage is a fuel bill in the low hundreds at worst. The fuel is not what this machine costs you. The capital and the servicing are.
- Census (American Housing Survey, 2023): 82% of households had no outage at all lasting 6 hours or more in the previous year, and only 3.4% had three or more. 25.7% lost power completely at least once.
What is ours here, and what is not. The cost is our model. The American Housing
Survey has no generator job type: we enumerated all 36 codes that occur in the 2023 public-use file and checked them against
Census's own value labels, and the closest is "electrical wiring, fuse boxes, breaker panels", which is a different
job. And no federal statistic publishes a dollar price for the machine, which is why we make you type it in rather
than invent one.More
We used to put that last point far more strongly than the evidence allowed, and the
correction belongs in the open. This page used to tell you the federal government published nothing whatever
about what these machines cost. That was false. BLS's Producer Price Index has published a monthly price index for motor and generator manufacturing
since 1947, and it is still running. What it publishes is an INDEX: a ratio to a base year, which tells you that
these machines have got dearer or cheaper and by how much, and never tells you what one costs. A dollar price for a
residential standby unit is the thing no federal statistic carries, and that narrow sentence is the one we are
entitled to. The Economic Census gets closest and then stops: its products file has 18 lines for this industry and
every quantity cell in all 18 is suppressed, so no factory-gate price can be derived from it either. Suppressed
means we do not know. It never means zero.
The hours, the materials and the servicing figure are our estimates and are labelled as such.
But the labor RATE is not a guess, and neither is anything that decides whether you should buy one. The
$91 and $95 per field hour are the BLS median wage for each trade (May 2025) multiplied by the markup we MEASURED
from the 2022 Economic Census: labor-only billed revenue, meaning value of construction work less materials and
subcontracts, over actual field hours, divided by the wage those firms really pay. The markup is measured, not
invented. The resulting rate is deliberately at the cautious end of the evidence: the Economic Census's own billed
rate is higher, about $112 and $114 in 2025 dollars, because its wage base is a mean across every construction
worker in the industry while we anchor to the median electrician. We use the lower number and tell you the higher
one exists. The outage hours are EIA's. The fuel
prices and heat contents are EIA's. What happens to households in an outage is Census's. We tell you which is
which because the parts we cannot source are exactly the parts an industry with a commercial interest would be
happiest to fill in for you.
Where every number above comes from
-
Energy prices
EIA, Electric Power Annual Table 11.1 (US reliability, SAIDI)
eia.gov -
Energy prices
EIA, Form EIA-861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report (SAIDI by state)
eia.gov -
US Census
US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey 2023 (generator ownership, outage experience)
census.gov -
US Census
US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census (billed labor rate)
census.gov -
Wage data
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025
bls.gov -
Wage data
BLS, Producer Price Index by industry: motor and generator manufacturing (NAICS 335312, series PCU335312335312, monthly since 1947). A price INDEX, not a dollar price: it measures how the factory-gate price of these machines moves, which is why this page still makes you type the price in
download.bls.gov -
Energy prices
EIA, residential natural gas price
eia.gov -
Energy prices
EIA, heat content of natural gas
eia.gov
What this assumes, and where it could be wrong
Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.
WHERE WE LOOKED, AND HOW BIG EACH PLACE IS.
We name the universes rather than wave at them, because a refusal is a claim and we have got seven of them wrong: DOE and NREL's measures database is 93 sheets across two workbooks and we read the sheet list; the American Housing Survey asks the cost of 37 named improvement job types (36 of which occur in the 2023 data) and we read all 37; the Economic Census products file (EC2200NAPCSINDPRD) carries 137,429 US product rows with quantity and unit columns. We twice told you it did not exist, and then that it was all oil and ore. Both were wrong. What is TRUE, having read it properly: 789 rows publish a quantity and 669 of those also publish a dollar value, so prices ARE derivable for many building materials. For THIS material, every dollar-or-quantity cell is suppressed, so no factory-gate price can be derived, and that is the only refusal we are entitled to make; its Kind of Business file has 96 categories; and the 2022 NAICS index has 20,398 entries. If it is not in those, we have not found it, and that is a fact about us rather than about the world.
The cost build-up is ours. The generator and transfer switch are a price you supply, because no federal statistic publishes a dollar price for one and we would rather hand you an empty box than fill it with a number we invented.
That sentence is deliberately narrower than the one it replaces, which claimed the federal government published nothing at all about this machine's price and was wrong. BLS's Producer Price Index publishes a monthly index for motor and generator manufacturing, and has since 1947, so the federal government tracks what is happening to these prices. An index is a ratio to a base year: it moves, it does not price. We are not aware of any federal statistic that publishes what a residential standby unit costs in dollars, and we say what we searched in the registration rather than asking you to take it on faith.
Labor is billed at $91 per field hour for the electrician and $95 for the gas fitter.
That is the BLS median wage for each trade (May 2025) multiplied by the markup measured from the 2022 Economic Census: value of construction work, less materials and subcontracts, divided by field hours, against the wage those firms actually pay. We source the RATE. The HOURS are our estimate and you can change them.
Those rates are the cautious end of the band.
The Economic Census's own billed rate, in 2025 dollars, is about $112 an hour for electrical work and $114 for plumbing and gas. It runs higher because its wage base is a mean across all construction workers in the industry, while we anchor to the median electrician. The truth is somewhere in between, and the high end of the range reflects that.
Outage hours are EIA's SAIDI for your state, averaged over 2019 to 2024 and INCLUDING major event days.
SAIDI is a mean across all of a utility's customers, so it is pulled upward by a few catastrophic days, and it describes a utility, not your address. A house at the end of a long rural feeder does far worse than its state average; a suburb with buried cable does far better.
Fuel burn is calculated, not taken from a brochure: load divided by engine efficiency, times 3,412 Btu per kWh, divided by the fuel's heat content.
EIA supplies the prices and the heat contents (1,037 Btu per cubic foot of gas; 91,452 Btu per gallon of propane). The 23% engine efficiency is our assumption. It implies roughly 72 cubic feet an hour at a 5 kW load, so you can check it against your own unit's spec sheet.
The weekly self-test is ours too: we assume it runs about 12 minutes a week at a 1.5 kW load, which is 10.4 hours a year and costs around three dollars.
Every standby unit exercises itself, but the schedule and the load are set by the installer, so treat this as the rounding error it is, not a measurement.
The propane price is EIA's residential series, which is collected weekly through the heating season rather than all year.
That is the right price for this purpose, since outages cluster in storm season, but it is not a calendar-year average and we are not going to call it one.
Servicing is our estimate and it is the line that quietly dominates: at $300 a year it costs more over 20 years than the fuel ever will.
We could not find a free source for it, and here is where we looked: DOE's residential measures database has no generator entry at all, and neither the Economic Census nor BLS breaks out standby-generator servicing. If you know of one, we want it. Change the figure if you have a real maintenance quote.
Cost per hour of backup power divides the install plus 20 years of running cost by 20 years of your state's average outage hours.
It is deliberately a blunt instrument. It treats an hour of a summer blip as worth the same as an hour of a February ice storm, which is wrong in a way that matters, and the whole point of the machine is the second kind of hour.
We do not model gas meter upsizing, and we do not model a panel upgrade beyond letting you add electrician hours. THE PANEL UPGRADE IS A GAP IN THIS PAGE, NOT IN THE WORLD, AND WE HAD THAT BACKWARDS.
This assumption used to end by telling you that neither job had a published price. Half of that was false, and the disproof was sitting in a file this site already holds. The American Housing Survey asks households what they paid for a completed job, and job type 23 is 'added or replaced electrical wiring or panels'. Households that used a contractor reported a MEDIAN of $1,848 in 2025 dollars, on 1,406 jobs, with the top tenth above $9,295. Read it for what it is: a median of household-reported outlays across a code that FUSES wiring, fuse boxes, breaker panels and built-in lighting, so it is not a price for a panel upgrade specifically, and a median across 1,406 households bounds no quote you will be given. But it is a national figure for roughly this job, it is free, it is federal, and we told you it did not exist. We have not wired it into the calculator, because a generator install that happens to need a new panel is not the same job as the one AHS timed, and we would rather leave you the electrician-hours box than quietly add somebody else's median to your total. GAS METER UPSIZING is the half that survives: every gas utility sets that charge in its own tariff, we have not compiled those tariffs, and we are not going to call our own missing homework an absence in the world.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a whole-house generator cost installed?
Built from the parts, a typical install lands near $9,800: around $5,500 for a 22 to 26 kW air-cooled unit with a transfer switch, about $1,830 of electrician time, about $950 of gas fitting, roughly $1,200 of materials and a few hundred for the permit. That is our model, not a published statistic, and the machine price has to come from you because no federal statistic publishes a dollar price for one. (BLS's Producer Price Index does publish a monthly index for the industry that makes them, which tells you how these prices are moving and never what they are. We used to say even that did not exist.) If a turnkey quote comes in far above this, the difference is not the electrician's wage. It is dealer margin, scope you have not seen itemised, or genuine extra work like a panel upgrade or a long gas run. Ask which, line by line.
Is a whole-house generator worth it?
It depends almost entirely on how often your power fails, and EIA publishes that. Louisiana averages 29 hours a year without power; Washington DC averages under one. Census adds the other half: 82% of American households had no outage at all lasting 6 hours or more last year. Spread over 20 years, a typical install costs somewhere around $115 for every hour of backup power it actually delivers. The honest answer is that for most households this is an expensive convenience, and that is fine as long as you know it. The households for whom it is unambiguously worth it are the 11.0% with a medical device that needs power, and anyone whose state or feeder genuinely goes dark for days.
How much does a Generac cost?
We will not quote you a price, and you should be wary of any site that does. No federal statistic publishes what a standby generator costs in dollars, so any figure you see is either a manufacturer's list price, which is not a statistic, or a lead-generation site with a commercial interest in the number looking a certain way. Be precise about the gap, though, because we were not: BLS's Producer Price Index HAS published a monthly price index for motor and generator manufacturing since 1947, so there is a federal series about these prices. It is an index, so it measures the change and not the level, and it is built on factory-gate transactions rather than what a dealer charges you for an installed Generac. Those are different quantities and only the second one is your question. What we can tell you is what surrounds the machine: the electrician bills about $91 a field hour and the gas fitter about $95, both measured from the Economic Census rather than guessed. On our default hours that is about $2,800 of trade labor on a typical install, rising to roughly $5,900 if the runs are long or the panel needs upgrading. Put your actual quote in for the machine and the rest of the page is real.
How much does it cost to run a whole-house generator?
Far less than people expect, and this is the number the internet gets most wrong. At a 5 kW load, our efficiency assumption and EIA's 2025 prices put it at roughly $1.10 an hour on natural gas and $2.10 an hour on propane. Even a brutal week-long outage is therefore a fuel bill in the low hundreds. The weekly self-test costs about three dollars a year. What actually costs you is the capital and the servicing: at $300 a year, twenty years of maintenance exceeds the fuel bill many times over. If someone is scaring you about fuel costs, they have the arithmetic backwards.
Natural gas or propane?
Natural gas, if you have a main. On EIA's 2025 residential prices, a unit of heat from propane costs about 1.9 times the same heat from natural gas, so the same generator running the same load costs roughly twice as much per hour on propane. Natural gas also never runs out mid-outage, which is the entire point. Propane earns its place when there is no gas main, and then you should also budget for the tank, which we cannot source a price for and so leave to you.
Does a whole-house generator pay for itself?
No, and nothing that claims otherwise is describing this product honestly. A generator produces no income and saves no bill. It converts a rare, ugly, open-ended loss into a known, five-figure cost. That is what insurance is, and the right question is not payback but the one you would ask an insurer: how likely is the loss, and how bad is it if it lands? Census answers both. Of households that lost power, 14.2% had food spoil, 8.5% had to sleep somewhere else, and 1.9% had pipes freeze, which is the one that can cost more than the generator did.
Why does the American Housing Survey not tell you what a generator costs?
Because it never asks. AHS asks households the cost of a completed home-improvement job, and there are 36 job types in the 2023 public file: roofing, kitchens, windows, insulation, water heaters and so on. None of them is a generator. We checked every code against Census's own value labels rather than assuming, since a gap you have not actually hunted for is not a gap, it is an excuse to invent a number. The nearest code is electrical wiring and breaker panels, which is a different job and cannot be separated out. So the cost here is our model and we say so, while the things AHS does measure, who owns a generator and what happens to households when the power fails, are on this page precisely because they are real.
What size generator do I need?
Size is about the load you want to carry, not the size of the house, and it changes the price of the machine far more than the price of the install. A 22 to 26 kW air-cooled unit is the usual whole-house choice and will typically carry a fridge, furnace, well pump, lights and outlets with air conditioning cycling. Running the essentials without air conditioning is closer to 5 kW of average draw, which is the default we use for fuel. Note that a bigger machine mostly costs you at purchase: fuel scales with the load you actually draw, not with the nameplate rating.