What does an electric shower cost to run?
A big number on the wall — 8.5 or 10.5kW — but it runs for minutes, not hours, so the cost per shower is smaller than the wattage suggests.
Typical model is rated 8,500W
Price cap is 26.11p
31p per shower, 364 showers a year, 437 kWh in total — about £10 a month.
An electric shower heats water on demand with a powerful element, so it draws a lot while it runs. But an eight-minute shower on an 8.5kW unit uses only a bit over a kilowatt-hour. The wattage frightens people; the run time is what actually decides the bill.
It is still electricity, at roughly three times the price of gas per unit, so a household of four showering daily runs into real money over a year. A mixer shower fed by a gas combi heats the same water for about a third of the cost — though it wastes more down the drain while it warms up, and cannot deliver hot water in a power cut the way a gravity system can. The cheapest single change is a shorter shower or a lower-flow head.
The short answer: Cheaper per shower than the 8.5kW label implies, but on a gas home a mixer shower off the boiler costs about a third as much.
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This is the small stuff
Every appliance on this site put together is usually less than a third of a typical energy bill. Heating the house is the rest of it. If the numbers here bothered you, the number that actually matters is what your heating costs — and whether a heat pump would make it better or worse in your particular house.
Work out your heating costOther appliances
Energy figures checked 2026-08-26. Electricity priced at the Ofgem cap for 1 July – 30 September 2026. Your own machine and tariff will differ — put your figures in above.