Energy Burden Calculator
Enter your income and state to find out what share of your household budget goes to keeping the lights on.
The average American household spends about 3% of income on home energy. The average low-income household spends more than twice that — and the quarter of low-income households with the highest burdens spend 15% or more.
Energy burden isn’t evenly distributed. It follows the fault lines of old housing stock, inefficient appliances, extractive utility pricing, and decades of underinvestment in the neighborhoods least able to absorb the cost.
Use the calculator below to see where your household falls.
What the thresholds mean
The DOE and ACEEE use two key thresholds:
High burden (6%+): At this level, energy costs begin crowding out other necessities. Households facing high energy burdens report skipping meals, forgoing medication, and keeping homes at unsafe temperatures.
Severe burden (10%+): In 23 of the 25 largest U.S. metro areas, one in four low-income households exceeds this threshold. In Baltimore, the median is 26%. These aren’t outliers — they’re the predictable result of a system built around utility profit rather than household stability.
Why it’s a policy problem
Energy burden isn’t a consequence of energy use — it’s a consequence of who owns the infrastructure. Low-income households don’t use more energy than wealthy ones. They often use less. But they live in older, less efficient homes they can’t afford to upgrade, pay higher rates per unit in some markets, and lack access to weatherization programs that could cut their bills 20–30%.
Community ownership of energy infrastructure — the model at the heart of the Foundation’s Sustainable Energy component — changes that equation. When the infrastructure serves the community rather than extracting from it, burden reduction becomes a design goal, not an afterthought.
Source: State energy cost averages from EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) 2020. Burden thresholds from DOE LEAD Tool and ACEEE research. National benchmarks from ACEEE “How High Are Household Energy Burdens?” (2020, updated 2024).