What does a heated throw cost to run?
About a penny an hour. It is the cheapest way to be warm in a cold house, by a wide margin, and it is not close.
Typical model is rated 120W
Price cap is 26.11p
3p per hour, 600 hours a year, 72 kWh in total — about £2 a month. Costed over 150 days, not the whole year — this is a winter appliance.
A heated throw draws around 120W on its highest setting and much less once it reaches temperature — most cycle down to 30–50W. Compare that with a 2,000W heater and the reason it is so cheap becomes obvious: it is warming a person, not a volume of air that then leaks out through the walls and windows.
That is the whole principle, and it is why it beats every other electric heating option in this section. You cannot insulate a room for the price of a throw, but you can insulate the person in it.
The limits are real, though. It only warms whoever is under it, so it does nothing for a family spread across a room, and it does nothing about damp or condensation. It is a way to be comfortable in a cool room, not a way to make a cold house warm.
The short answer: Around 1–3p an hour. Cheapest warmth in the house, provided you only need to warm yourself.
What actually helps
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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.