How many watts does a clothes iron use?
A domestic clothes iron is rated **1200 to 1700 watts**. That rating is not what it draws over an ironing session. An iron has a thermostat. The element switches on to reach the set temperature, off when it gets there, and on again as the soleplate cools. The nameplate describes the element while it is on — so it is a **ceiling**, and the average over half an hour of ironing is lower. How much lower is not published by anyone, and this page is not going to invent it.
Work it out with your own tariff
Residential sector, US average, as published in Electric Power Monthly released 23 July 2026. This is a revenue-weighted average across all residential customers and utilities, not a tariff any single household pays. In the same month the state residential averages ran from 12.35 cents in Idaho to 52.00 in Hawaii, with California at 33.25 and New York at 29.93 — a spread of more than four times. Use the figure from your own bill; the default here is a placeholder, not an answer.
Minutes a day
Watts, from the label on yours
Your rate, cents per kWh
| Period | Cost | Time counted |
|---|---|---|
| One minute | $0.0072 | 1 minute |
| Your daily use | $0.0725 | 10 minutes a day |
| A month | $2.18 | × 30 days |
| A year | $26 | × 365 days |
1450 W × 10 min ÷ 60 ÷ 1000 = 0.2417 kWh × 30¢ = $0.0725 a day.
Minutes are counted per day in total, not per use. If you use it three times a day for two minutes, that is six. The distinction matters because multiplying one use by 365 assumes you use it once a day, and most pages that quote a yearly figure never say which they did. 1200-1700 W is the nameplate rating declared by the manufacturer: Proctor Silex model 11585 states 1200 watts, Hamilton Beach model 14216 states 1700. Unlike the kettle, this is a ceiling rather than an average: the rating is what the heating element draws while it is switched on, and a thermostat switches it on and off throughout the session. Nobody publishes the duty cycle, so the average draw over an ironing session is lower than these figures by an amount we cannot state. Rate defaults to 18.44¢ (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2026-05).
This is the same trap as the refrigerator, in the same direction
The refrigerator page on this site makes a point that applies here exactly: a compressor draws current in cycles, so multiplying its rated draw by 24 hours overstates its consumption several times over. An iron does the same thing on a shorter cycle.
The difference is that the refrigerator has a way out — certification programmes publish a measured annual figure for fridges, so the honest number exists. For irons it does not. ENERGY STAR does not certify them, and there is no US test procedure for them at all.
So this page can give you a ceiling and the arithmetic, and it can tell you plainly that the ceiling is high. It cannot give you a measured average, because none has been published.
The ceiling, priced
At the midpoint of the range, 1450 W, held continuously:
| Ironing time | Electricity (at the ceiling) | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 15 minutes a week | 18.9 kWh a year | about $3.48 |
| 30 minutes a week | 37.7 kWh a year | about $6.95 |
| 1 hour a week | 75.4 kWh a year | about $13.90 |
| 30 minutes a day | 264 kWh a year | about $48.70 |
Every figure in that table is an upper bound. Your real consumption is below it by however much of the time the thermostat had the element switched off — which depends on the setting, the fabric, how often you set the iron down, and how cold the room is.
What that means in practice
The honest summary for a normal household is that an iron is a high-wattage, low-hours appliance, like a toaster or a hair dryer: alarming on the label, small on the bill. Half an hour a week costs about seven dollars a year at the ceiling and less in reality.
If you iron daily, or for an hour at a time, it stops being negligible: the bottom row of that table is comparable to running a second refrigerator.
The setting matters more than the model
A hotter setting means the thermostat holds the element on for a larger share of the time. Ironing linen on the highest setting spends more of the session at full draw than ironing synthetics on a low one — with the same iron and the same rating.
This is the one lever that is genuinely yours here, and it is also why comparing the nameplates of two irons tells you almost nothing about which will cost more to use.
What the calculator below does
Set the watts from the rating printed on your iron and the minutes you actually iron per day, in total. Read the result as a maximum, not an estimate — that is what the arithmetic supports and no more.
What this does not account for
The rating is a ceiling and the page says so throughout. An iron's thermostat cycles the element; the average draw across a session is lower than the nameplate. We do not state by how much, because no published measurement of the duty cycle exists and a number we made up would be indistinguishable from the ones on other sites that we are trying not to be.
No certification programme covers irons. ENERGY STAR does not certify them and there is no DOE test procedure for them, so every wattage in circulation — including ours — is a manufacturer's declared rating rather than a measurement under a defined method.
Steam costs energy too, and it is inside the rating. Turning water into steam is most of what a steam iron does with its power. A dry iron on the same setting draws less. Both sit inside the range on this page rather than being separated, because manufacturers do not publish them separately.
Auto-shutoff is not a standby figure. Many irons switch themselves off after some minutes idle. That is a safety feature, and what the iron draws while waiting to do it is not published — so we do not give a standby number here at all.
Steam generator stations are a different appliance. Those run considerably higher than 1700 W and have a separate boiler. Nothing on this page covers them.
Sources
- 01Steam Iron with Retractable Cord 14216 — rated 1700 wattsHamilton Beach ·
- 02Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3 — average price of electricity to ultimate customersU.S. Energy Information Administration ·
How these figures are produced: see our methodology.
Figures are calculated from published wattages and a published tariff, both dated above. They are good for comparing devices, not for predicting your bill: your rate, settings and usage all differ.