Heat Pump Payback in Houston, TX
Should Houston switch to a heat pump?
This one's marginal in Houston: it only clears if you stay long enough. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,000 more up front here. Houston's residents would see roughly $290 a year back in running costs, putting the payback around 10.3 years. It's a genuine toss-up here, Houston's numbers don't point clearly either way.
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How cold Houston actually gets
776 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Houston barely has a winter to speak of; the cooling side runs to 3294 cooling degree days, where summers are severe enough that cooling can dominate the annual bill. 30.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 17.6°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.1 on the standard unit fit for this climate. Houston's winters don't get cold enough to need the cold-climate premium, a standard unit holds up fine. These numbers come from Houston Dunn Helistop, the closest NOAA station, 4.8 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 634 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $556 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 8 Mcf a year at $19.42 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $846 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 16.15¢/kWh). Priced as a standalone purchase, with a working furnace ripped out early, payback would take longer than the 15-year equipment life. Measured against the like-for-like replacement instead, a household here ends 15 years $1,357 ahead.
How sensitive Houston's result is to prices
In Houston the cooling savings outweigh the extra electricity for heating, so no plausible change in the electricity rate would make the old furnace and AC cheaper to run. A useful quote test for Houston: the heat pump is worth it within a decade if it costs less than $2,900 more than replacing the furnace and AC, and within 7 years if the gap is under $2,030.
Electric resistance heat in Houston, compared
Plenty of homes in Houston heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. The gap still doesn't close: the $7,500 incremental cost outlasts the 15-year equipment life here even against resistance heat.
How Houston compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Houston comes in at 2977 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 4 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
Deciding what's next in Houston, TX
Houston, Texas is home to about 2,390,125 people, and the figures above are the same ones a local HVAC contractor uses to size and quote a system, this site doesn't guess where a real quote would land, it just tells you whether it's worth asking for one. In Houston, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page, the 3.1 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. Homes in Houston without gas service should read the electric-resistance comparison instead, the numbers there differ from the gas case above.