How Much Electricity Does a Dishwasher Use?

Most of what a dishwasher costs you is not the motor spraying water around. It is the heating: warming the incoming water to washing temperature, and then, if you let it, running an element to dry the dishes at the end. Change those two things and the running cost changes with them.

The element, not the motor, is the cost

A dishwasher cycle can run two hours, but the element is not on for two hours. It heats water at the start, holds temperature through the main wash, then heats again for the final rinse and optionally for drying. The pump and spray arms draw a couple of hundred watts and are almost irrelevant to the total.

This is why eco and light cycles save less than the time difference suggests, and why longer eco cycles can actually use less energy than shorter normal ones. A long cycle at a lower temperature with more soak time uses less heat than a fast cycle that has to compensate with a hotter wash.

Cost per cycle across electricity rates

One hour of element-equivalent runtime, priced at every common rate.

Dishwasher running cost by state

Same machine, same load, different tariff.

Where the 1.5 kWh actually goes

A rough breakdown of a normal cycle on a modern machine. Numbers vary by model, but the shape is consistent:

• Main wash heating, roughly half the total. Bringing the wash water up to temperature and holding it there.
• Final rinse heating, roughly a quarter. The sanitising rinse runs hotter than the wash on most cycles.
• Heated dry, up to a third if enabled. This is pure discretionary energy. The dishes get dry either way, just more slowly without it.
• Pump and controls, under a tenth. The motor spraying water is close to free compared with everything else.

Two conclusions follow. Anything that reduces heating reduces cost, and anything that reduces cycle time without reducing heating does not.

Older machines and the standards that changed

Dishwasher energy use has fallen sharply. A machine from the late 1990s commonly used 2.5 kWh and 10 gallons of water per cycle. Current models are held to roughly 1.2 to 1.6 kWh and under 4 gallons. If your dishwasher predates 2000, it is using close to double what a replacement would, and it is using two and a half times the hot water on top of that.

That does not automatically justify replacing a working machine. At five loads a week the energy saving alone is around 45 dollars a year at current rates, which is a long payback against a new appliance. It does mean that when a 20-year-old dishwasher fails, repairing it rarely makes sense.

Five settings that change the bill

• Turn off heated dry. This is the biggest single saving available and costs you nothing but a bit of patience. Cracking the door open at the end lets the dishes air dry from residual heat.
• Run full loads. A dishwasher uses nearly the same energy half full as full, because it heats roughly the same amount of water.
• Skip the pre-rinse. Rinsing plates under a hot tap can use more hot water than the entire wash cycle. Scrape, do not rinse.
• Use the eco cycle for anything not urgent. Longer, cooler, cheaper.
• Check the incoming water temperature. If your water heater is set at 120, the dishwasher does less internal heating than if it is fed lukewarm water from a long uninsulated pipe run.

How this compares to everything else you plug in

Per hour of runtime against the rest of the kitchen.

Questions people actually ask

Related running costs

• How much electricity a electric water heater uses — 4,000 W typical, about $0.74 an hour.
• How much electricity a refrigerator uses — 150 W typical, about $0.03 an hour.

Running it on solar

A dishwasher uses 1.80 kWh a day, which needs about 2 standard 400 W panels. Full array, battery and inverter sizing is on how many solar panels to run a dishwasher.

Run the numbers on your own bill

• Electricity Cost Calculator
• Whole-Home Appliance Load Calculator

Costs on this page use a national average residential rate of 18.44¢ per kWh (August 2026, EIA-derived state residential averages). Your own rate is printed on your electricity bill and is the number that actually matters. Every figure here is recalculated from one central rate setting, so these tables move when the national average moves.