Iowa (IA) electricity and natural gas rates
Electricity
15.99¢
per kWh
Natural gas
$2.31
per therm
Gas and electricity in the same unit
A therm is 29.3 kilowatt hours of energy, so Iowa's gas works out at 7.88¢ per kWh against 15.99¢ for electricity.
That compares the energy you buy, not the heat you get. A furnace throws away a fifth of every therm up the flue, while a heat pump delivers two to three times the heat in a kilowatt hour — so the cheaper unit here is not automatically the cheaper way to heat a house.
Residential sector, US Energy Information Administration, 2026-07. Updated monthly.
How Iowa compares
At 15.99¢ per kWh, Iowa is below the national average of 19.26¢, making it the 24th cheapest of the 51 states we track.
What a typical Iowa household uses
Electricity a month
856 kWh
Bill a month
$121
Households in Iowa use about as much electricity as the national average and pay 20% less than average. Light use and a below-average rate together, which is the cheapest position a state can be in. The climate pulls the other way here: 6,600 heating degree days against 1,000 cooling ones, so how a home is heated matters more than how it is cooled.
More on this: the average electric bill in Iowa, including how far it swings between seasons.
Averaged over twelve months across 1,487,134 residential accounts in Iowa. Source: EIA.
What this means for heating
Iowa sees around 145 freezing nights a year. Whether a heat pump beats a furnace here depends on the gap between those two prices above — not on the equipment.
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