Heat Pump Payback in Holladay, UT
Should Holladay switch to a heat pump?
The payback math works in Holladay on paper, past the equipment's own working life. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Holladay's residents would see roughly $110 a year back in running costs, putting the payback around 50.2 years. Holladay's own numbers say this pencils out only in theory, not in practice.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Holladay. Look one up here.
The climate behind Holladay's payback figure
Holladay has a real but manageable winter, 4667 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1804 cooling degree days. 19°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 12.2°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.16 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Holladay, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station Salt Lake City International, 11.2 miles from Holladay, the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,740 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $692 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 49 Mcf a year at $10.19 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $802 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 13.12¢/kWh). Buying outright rather than at replacement time stretches payback to longer than the 15-year equipment life. Over 15 years, compared with a like-for-like replacement, the heat pump leaves you $3,856 behind.
What would change Holladay's answer
This result holds unless electricity climbs above 16.8¢/kWh (it is 13.12¢ now) or gas drops below $7.94 per Mcf (now $10.19); past either point, gas becomes the cheaper fuel in Holladay. When quotes arrive, compare the heat pump price with a like-for-like furnace and AC replacement: at $110 a year saved, a difference under $770 pays back within 7 years here, and under $1,100 within 10.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Holladay heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,165 a year here, a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils, so the extra $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 8.6 years.
Holladay against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Holladay comes in at 1035 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1332 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Holladay
About 30,588 people live in Holladay, Utah, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here, the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page, the 3.16 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. At a 19°F design temperature, Holladay sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.