How much does it cost to leave a TV on standby for a year?

Entertainment By Ellen HartwellPublished 23 September 2026

What a television on standby actually draws

Standby was the villain of every energy saving leaflet for about fifteen years, and the numbers in those leaflets came from televisions built in the 1990s. The rules have moved on since. Commission Regulation 1275/2008, still in force in the UK as retained law, caps standby and off mode at 0.50 watts for equipment placed on the market since 6 January 2013, and allows 1.00 watt only where the device keeps a display lit to show status. ENERGY STAR applies the same half watt ceiling to certified televisions.

That gives an honest working range of 0.3 to 1.0 watts for any set bought in the last decade, and the middle of it, half a watt, is the figure the arithmetic below uses. A television older than the rules has no such ceiling, and the only way to know what it pulls is a plug in energy monitor, which is why the calculator here lets you type in your own reading rather than trusting ours.

The cost of a full year on standby

Half a watt is 0.0005 kilowatts. Leave it there for every hour of the year, all 8,760 of them, and you have used 4.38 kilowatt hours. At the Ofgem cap rate of 26.11p per kilowatt hour that is £1.14 for the year.

The spread barely matters. At the bottom of the range, 0.3 watts, the year costs 69p. At the top, a full watt, it costs £2.29. Nothing you can do to a modern television moves that figure by more than about a pound in either direction.

In real life the set is not on standby for all 8,760 hours, because some of them it is on and being watched. A household watching four hours a night leaves twenty hours of standby a day, which is 3.65 kilowatt hours across the year, or 95p.

The cap moves on 1 October 2026 to 26.32p per kilowatt hour, which takes the full year figure from £1.14 to £1.15. That single penny is a useful sense of scale for the whole subject, since Ofgem puts the typical annual bill for the same period at £1,723 and standby is not where any of it went.

Readers in the United States can run the same sum against the EIA residential average of 18.34 cents per kilowatt hour, which puts those 4.38 kilowatt hours at about 80 cents a year. In California, where the average is 34.74 cents, it comes to a little over a dollar and a half.

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.

How much electricity does a smart TV use on standby against being switched on

This is where the standby panic falls apart. A television in use draws around 120 watts, so a five hour evening uses 0.6 kilowatt hours and costs 15.7p. One evening in front of the set therefore costs about the same as two months of leaving it on standby.

Stretch that across a year and the viewing comes to roughly 219 kilowatt hours, or £57, against 95p of standby. The thing you are being asked to worry about is under two per cent of what the television costs you, and the ninety eight per cent is the brightness setting, the screen size and the hours.

The box beside the television that actually costs money

Standby gets the attention because it feels like waste, and the feeling is right even though the number is small. The useful move is to point that feeling at the right device.

A Wi-Fi router left on around the clock draws about 10 watts, which is 87.6 kilowatt hours a year and £22.87 at the cap rate. That is twenty times what the television costs on standby, from a box most people never think about. A set top box or a games console left in networked standby sits somewhere between the two, because networked standby is allowed a higher ceiling than plain standby so the device can keep listening for a wake up signal.

Five ways to cut what standby costs you

• Turn off the quick start or instant on setting in the television menu, since it keeps the network chip awake and pushes the draw to the top of the range rather than the bottom.
• Put the television, the sound bar and the set top box on one switched extension lead, so a single press kills all three instead of you crawling behind the unit.
• Check any set or hi-fi bought before 2010 with a plug in monitor, because the half watt cap does not apply to it and older kit sometimes draws several watts.
• Unplug the kit in the spare room and the garage, where the device is on standby for months at a time and never earns its keep.
• Spend the attention you were giving standby on the router, the console and the tumble dryer instead, where the same effort saves ten to a hundred times more.

Is it worth switching the television off at the wall

On the money alone, barely. A pound a year is a rounding error next to a £1,723 typical annual bill, and anyone promising you meaningful savings from killing standby is quoting figures from a decade when they were true.

There are two better reasons to do it anyway. Switching off at the wall protects the set during a storm, which matters more in a house with an overhead supply, and it breaks the habit of the television being the default thing that is on. If flicking one switch gets you an evening of reading instead, the electricity saved is the least interesting part of the deal.