What does a toaster cost to run?
High wattage, but it runs for two minutes — so the cost per round of toast is a fraction of a penny.
Typical model is rated 1,200W
Price cap is 26.11p
1p per use, 364 uses a year, 15 kWh in total — about £0 a month.
A toaster pulls around a kilowatt while it runs, but a two-minute cycle uses almost nothing. Its whole point is efficiency: it heats the bread and the small space right around it, and no more. Making the same toast under an oven grill, which has to heat a large cavity, costs several times as much.
There is essentially nothing to optimise here — it is already one of the cheapest things you own to run. The only saving worth mentioning is not using the oven grill for a job the toaster does better and cheaper.
The short answer: Negligible to run, and far cheaper than grilling toast in the oven.
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.