How much electricity does a gaming PC use per month in the UK?
A mid range gaming PC draws around 400 watts while a game is running, so a three hour session uses 1.2 kilowatt hours and costs 31.3p at the Ofgem cap rate of 26.11p per kWh, which is £9.40 over a month of daily play. An entry level build at 250 watts costs £5.87 a month and a high end single card system at 550 watts costs £12.92.
What a gaming PC really draws
Forget the number on the power supply. That figure is the maximum the unit can deliver, not the amount your machine pulls, and treating the two as the same is the single most common mistake in every thread on this subject.
The graphics card is the largest consumer by a distance. NVIDIA lists the total graphics power of the RTX 5070 and the 5070 Ti at 250 watts, and recommends a 650 watt system supply for both. Add a processor drawing 65 to 150 watts under load, a handful of drives and fans, and the whole system lands where the testing says it lands. Tom's Hardware puts entry systems with cards such as the RTX 5060 at 250 to 350 watts while gaming, a budget build peaking at 400 to 450 watts, and notes that mainstream single card systems rarely exceed 550 watts.
We use 400 watts as the everyday figure for a mid range machine running a demanding game, 250 watts for an entry build and 550 watts for a high end one.
Work it out for your own gaming pc
Type in the wattage from the plate on the back, then your own unit rate. The numbers update as you type.
The monthly bill, three ways
| Build | Draw while gaming | 3 hour session | Per month at 3 hours a day | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry, RTX 5060 class | 250 W | 19.6p | £5.87 | £71.46 |
| Mid range, RTX 5070 class | 400 W | 31.3p | £9.40 | £114.36 |
| High end, single card | 550 W | 43.1p | £12.92 | £157.25 |
| Desktop browsing, any build | 80 W | 6.3p | £1.88 | £22.87 |
Three hours a day, every day, on a mid range machine costs less than a tenner a month. That is the answer most people are looking for and it is lower than they expect, because the mental image of a gaming PC as a space heater comes from the peak figure rather than the average.
| Appliance | Typical draw | Usage we assume | Per hour (UK) | Per usage (UK) | Per month (UK) | Per hour (US) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gaming PC | 400 W | per 3 hour session | 10.4p | 31.3p | £9.50 | 7.3 cents |
Rates: Ofgem cap 1 July to 30 September 2026 at 26.11p per kWh (source), EIA residential average June 2026 at 18.34 cents per kWh (source). Checked 2026-09-22.
The part that actually costs money
Gaming is not what runs up the bill. Leaving the machine on is.
A modern system sitting at the desktop with a browser open draws somewhere around 80 watts. That is 1.92 kilowatt hours a day if it never sleeps, which is 50.1p a day and £15.04 a month, on top of whatever the gaming costs. A household that games for three hours and then leaves the PC running for the other twenty one is paying £24.44 a month, of which £9.40 is the fun part.
Sleep mode, by contrast, pulls a few watts and costs under a pound a month. The saving from setting the power plan to sleep after twenty minutes is larger than the saving from any component upgrade you could make.
How to work out your own number
Buy a plug in energy monitor, or read it off the software. Take the wattage while you are actually playing, not the idle figure and not the power supply rating, divide by a thousand, multiply by hours played, then multiply by your unit rate.
For 420 watts over a four hour session, that is 0.42 multiplied by 4, which is 1.68 kilowatt hours, then multiplied by 26.11p for 43.9p. Do it once and you never need to read another article about it.
Six changes that genuinely cut the cost
- Set the machine to sleep after twenty minutes of inactivity, which saves more than everything else on this list combined.
- Cap the frame rate to match your monitor. A card pushing 240 frames a second into a 144Hz panel burns full power for frames you never see, and a cap often drops the card's draw by a third.
- Turn on the efficiency preset in the driver or undervolt the card. Enthusiast testing regularly finds 10 to 20 per cent less power for a couple of per cent less performance.
- Switch the monitor off rather than leaving it showing a screensaver, since a large panel adds 30 to 60 watts of its own.
- Unplug or disable the RGB lighting controller if the machine sits on overnight, because a few watts of decoration running 24 hours adds up faster than a few hundred watts running three.
- Think about when you play rather than only how long. On a tariff with cheap overnight units, the same three hours after half eleven costs roughly a third as much.
The same machine in the United States
At the EIA residential average of 18.34 cents per kilowatt hour, a three hour session on a 400 watt build costs 22 cents and a month of daily play costs $6.60. Leaving the same machine idling around the clock adds $10.57 a month. In California at nearly 35 cents the monthly gaming figure rises to $12.51, and in Texas at under 16 cents it drops to $5.74.
Is it worth worrying about
On these numbers a gaming PC is not an expensive appliance. Three hours a day of gaming costs about the same as one load in a tumble dryer a week, and far less than a hot tub, an electric shower or a tumble dryer used properly. The thing to watch is the habit rather than the hardware, because a machine left running is the only version of this that costs real money.
Common questions
How much does it cost to run a gaming PC per hour in the UK?
At 400 watts under load a gaming PC costs 10.4p an hour at the current cap rate. An entry level machine at 250 watts costs 6.5p and a high end one at 550 watts costs 14.4p. None of those figures depend on the wattage printed on your power supply.
How much does it cost to run a gaming PC 24 7?
It depends entirely on what it is doing. Sitting at the desktop at around 80 watts, a full month costs £15.04. Running something that loads the graphics card continuously, such as rendering or folding, at 400 watts, the same month costs £75.21. Sleep mode at a few watts costs pennies.
Do gaming PCs use a lot of electricity compared with a console?
A PlayStation 5 pulls about 200 watts in a demanding game, so a three hour session costs 15.7p against 31.3p on a 400 watt PC. Over a year of daily play that is a difference of about £57, which is real money but rarely the deciding factor between the two.
Does a bigger power supply make my PC cost more to run?
No. A power supply is a limit, not a demand. An 850 watt unit feeding a system that draws 400 watts delivers 400 watts, and a well rated unit at half load is usually running at its most efficient point. NVIDIA recommends a 650 watt supply for an RTX 5070 whose own total graphics power is 250 watts, for exactly that headroom reason.