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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.

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. 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.

§ 01 Your numbers

This is YOUR number, and it has to be. No free federal source publishes generator prices, so we will not pass one off as a statistic. The $5,500 already in the box is a placeholder so the page has something to compute, not a benchmark and not a price we are claiming: replace it. A quote or a retailer listing has the real figure in front of you. Air-cooled units around 22 to 26 kW are the usual whole-house choice.
EIA-861: minutes per year the average customer in your state spent without power, averaged 2019 to 2024, INCLUDING major storm days. This is the whole question. Read it before you read the price.
EIA 2025 residential prices. Per unit of heat, propane costs about 1.9 times what natural gas does. If you have a gas main, use it.
Not the generator's rating: what your house actually draws on average during an outage. Fridge, furnace, well pump, some lights and outlets is roughly 5 kW. Add air conditioning and it climbs.
Billed at $91/hour: the median electrician's wage from BLS (May 2025) multiplied by the 3.01x markup MEASURED from the Economic Census, not a guessed one. The hours, though, are our estimate.
Billed at $95/hour on the same measured basis (3.09x for plumbing and gas). A standby generator needs a gas line as well as an electrician, which is the half of the job most quotes bury.
Our estimate, not a published figure. Composite pad or gravel bed, conduit, copper, gas pipe and fittings.
There is no national permit-fee database and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Your city or county publishes its own schedule. Put the real number in.
Our estimate, not a sourced figure. Set by the fuel choice above. Leave it at zero on natural gas, or if you already have a tank.
Our estimate. No free source publishes it. Oil, filters, plugs, valve lash and a battery every few years. Nearer $150 if you do it yourself, more on a dealer contract. It matters more than the fuel does.
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
See next steps →

§ 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
Households with no 6-hour outage last year (Census)82%

Cost is our model. Outage hours, labour 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

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

Recommended next steps

Some links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, Calcatrice may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only suggest tools that fit your result, and a company can't pay to show up here.

A five-figure commitment for a machine that runs a handful of hours a year. Worth it if your power genuinely fails, or if someone in the house depends on it. Price the tail, not the average.

By the numbers

  • 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. 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 the only outages anyone buys a generator for.
  • EIA: where you live decides this, not what you buy. 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.
  • 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. 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. 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. 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): an electrical contractor bills about $91 per field hour and a gas fitter 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). 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. 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.

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 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. No free federal series publishes the price of the machine either, which is why we make you type it in rather than invent one. The hours, the materials and the servicing figure are our estimates and are labelled as such. But the labour 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: labour-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 $110 and $112 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.

Sources: EIA, Electric Power Annual Table 11.1 (US reliability, SAIDI) · EIA, Form EIA-861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report (SAIDI by state) · US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey 2023 (generator ownership, outage experience) · US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census (billed labour rate) · BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · EIA, residential natural gas price · EIA, heat content of natural gas

How this estimate is calculated

  • The cost build-up is ours. The generator and transfer switch are a price you supply, because no free federal source publishes one and we would rather leave the box empty than fill it with a number we invented.
  • Labour 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 $110 an hour for electrical work and $112 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. No free source publishes it. Change it 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, which utilities often require for a large unit and which may be free or may not, and we do not model a panel upgrade beyond adding hours. There is no national source for either.

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 free federal source publishes one. 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 in most states 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. There is no free federal price series for generators, 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. 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 labour 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.

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