Heat Pump Payback in Lafayette, IN
Lafayette, IN: the heat pump payback math
In Lafayette, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $5,500 more up front here. Running costs here land $167 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Lafayette's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Lafayette. Look one up here.
How cold Lafayette actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Lafayette racks up 4684 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1024 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -8°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -9°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.51 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Lafayette needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. Source: NOAA station Purdue University Airport, 4 miles from Lafayette, the closest one on record.
Lafayette's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,725 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $953 a year. That compares with roughly 49 Mcf a year of gas at Lafayette's $11.49 per-Mcf rate, about $787 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 17.03¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $8,003 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
How sensitive Lafayette's result is to prices
For the verdict in Lafayette to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.1¢/kWh from 17.03¢, or gas climb past $14.91 per Mcf from $11.49. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Lafayette; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Lafayette has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $1,292 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 7.7 years.
Where Lafayette ranks in this dataset
Lafayette lands at position 1015 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 537 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
What to do with this number in Lafayette
Lafayette, Indiana is home to about 71,757 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 Lafayette, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Where Lafayette's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Lafayette's 2.51 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Lafayette's -8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.