Heat Pump Payback in Salt Lake City, UT
Salt Lake City, UT: the heat pump payback math
In Salt Lake City, the extra upfront cost technically comes back, just not before the equipment wears out. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $5,500 more up front here. Salt Lake City's residents would see roughly $110 a year back in running costs, putting the payback around 50.2 years. Salt Lake City's own numbers say this pencils out only in theory, not in practice.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Salt Lake City. Look one up here.
Why Salt Lake City's climate drives this number
4667 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Salt Lake City has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1804 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is 19°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was 12.2°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 3.16 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Salt Lake City sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Salt Lake City International, 2 miles from Salt Lake City.
The yearly running costs in Salt Lake City
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 3,740 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $692 a year. Salt Lake City's gas rate of $10.19 per Mcf, applied to the 49 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $802 a year, against 13.12¢ per kWh for electricity. 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.
How sensitive Salt Lake City's result is to prices
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 Salt Lake City. 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.
Electric resistance heat in Salt Lake City, compared
Plenty of homes in Salt Lake City 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. 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.
How Salt Lake City compares nationally
Salt Lake City lands at position 1020 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 111 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.
Next step if you live in Salt Lake City
About 217,783 people live in Salt Lake City, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Salt Lake City's 3.16 seasonal COP and payback figure. Salt Lake City's 19°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here, see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.