Home energy use by area: methodology

The source

Every figure comes from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s subnational electricity and gas consumption statistics, Accredited Official Statistics published on 18 December 2025. They are built from the meter readings of every home in Great Britain, not a survey or a sample: about 29.3 million domestic electricity meters and 24.7 million gas meters in 2024. Northern Ireland has its own energy market and isn’t included.

We keep the domestic figures for each of the 350 local authority areas, for every year from 2015 to 2024, and refresh them when DESNZ publishes a new year each December.

Which years

The 2024 electricity figures cover February 2024 to January 2025, the meter reading year DESNZ uses for domestic meters. The 2024 gas figures cover mid-May 2024 to mid-May 2025.

What counts as a home

An electricity meter counts as domestic if it is on one of the two domestic profiles, standard or Economy 7, unless it uses more than 100,000 kWh a year, or more than 50,000 kWh at an address that looks like a business. A gas meter counts as domestic if it uses less than 73,200 kWh a year, the industry cut-off, so a few small businesses are included and a few very large homes are not. Gas figures count only meters that used some gas that year.

The figures are per meter, which is close to but not the same as per home. The share of homes on mains gas we quote is gas meters divided by electricity meters, capped at 100%, and is approximate for that reason.

Median, not mean

We lead with the median: line up every home in the area from lowest use to highest, and it’s the one in the middle. The mean, which DESNZ also publishes and we show, is pulled up by a minority of very high users, so most homes use less than the mean. Across Great Britain in 2024 the median home used 2,471 kWh of electricity against a mean of 3,323 kWh. If you want to know whether your home is typical, the median is the fair comparison.

Weather correction

DESNZ’s gas figures are weather-corrected: the annual estimates come from Xoserve, which adjusts each meter’s consumption for regional temperature and wind. A cold year in one place doesn’t make it look wasteful, and the trend from year to year shows changes in behaviour and homes rather than winters. Electricity isn’t weather-corrected, which matters most in areas where many homes heat with it.

Areas without gas

DESNZ records no domestic gas meters in Isles of Scilly, Orkney Islands or Shetland Islands. Their pages show electricity only. Several other areas, mostly rural and island ones, have gas in only some towns.

Comparisons

An area’s rank counts how many areas have a higher median, so first is the highest use. “Areas with similar use” are the five nearest on both medians, each measured against how much it varies between areas, so that gas, with numbers about four times bigger, doesn’t swamp electricity. Areas without gas are matched with each other on electricity alone.

Costs

The cost of a median home’s energy uses the price cap for 1 October 2026 to 31 December 2026 in the area’s own electricity region: the direct debit unit rates and standing charges, including VAT. Where a council sits across two or three regions, their rates are blended by the share of its homes in each; the regional prices methodology explains how those shares are measured. It is what a home using exactly the area’s medians would pay on a standard variable tariff; actual bills depend on actual use.

What these figures can’t tell you

An area average says nothing about any one home. A street can hold a one-bedroom flat using 1,500 kWh of electricity and a family house with an electric car using 8,000. Areas with bigger homes use more, areas with more flats use less, and none of that is a sign of waste. To compare your own home, use the electricity benchmark, which matches you against homes of the same type, or the electricity and gas analysers, which read your own smart meter download.

Licence

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. DESNZ is not responsible for our presentation or the costs we calculate from its figures.