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Would a heat pump pay back against your baseboard heat?

A heat pump moves heat rather than making it, delivering two to four kilowatt-hours of warmth for every one it buys, where baseboard delivers exactly one. The saving is therefore a quantity of electricity multiplied by your price — which is why one installation quote is an easy decision in a 30¢ state and a poor one in a 12¢ state. This page does not estimate what installation costs; there is no official source for that, so it asks for the quote you were actually given.

What to know

• This site publishes no installation prices. There is no official, public-domain dataset for what an installer charges, and an invented range is worth less to you than one real quote. Get two or three, and put the figure you were given in the field above.
• Subtract rebates and tax credits before entering the quote. The federal 25C credit and utility rebates together often move it by several thousand dollars, which changes the answer more than the efficiency does.
• Seasonal COP matters, not the nameplate rating. A cold-climate unit commonly averages 2.0 to 2.5 across a northern winter and over 3.0 in a mild one. Below its design temperature it falls back on resistance heat, which is baseboard economics again.
• Baseboard's real advantage is that it costs almost nothing to install and very nearly never fails. The comparison is most honest when you are replacing a system anyway, or when you also want the cooling a heat pump provides.
• Assumes 250 watts per foot, the standard residential rating. The whole-house baseboard calculator lets you change it.

Questions

What does it cost to install a heat pump?

This site will not give you a figure, because no public, official dataset exists for installation prices and an estimate is worth less than a real quote. What the calculator does instead is take the quote you were given and tell you whether it pays back at your state's electricity price, which is the part the quote cannot tell you.

Why does my state change the answer so much?

Because the saving is a quantity of kilowatt-hours multiplied by your price. The same house and the same quote can pay back three times faster in a high-rate state than a low-rate one, which is what makes a national average payback figure close to meaningless.

Is baseboard ever cheaper to run?

No. Any heat pump above COP 1.0 uses less electricity for the same heat, and resistance heat is fixed at 1.0. The only open question is whether the installation cost is repaid.

State rates are averages of what residential customers actually paid (July 2026), from EIA. Your own plan can differ. Everything on this page is computed in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.