How much electricity does a Wi-Fi router use per month if you never switch it off?
A typical home router draws about 10 watts and never switches off, which is 7.3 kilowatt hours a month and £1.90 at the Ofgem cap rate of 26.11p per kWh. Across a year that is 87.6 kilowatt hours and £22.87, which makes it one of the most expensive things in the house that nobody ever thinks about.
What a router actually draws
The number is smaller than people expect and steadier than anything else in the house. Routers from the leading brands average around 10 watts, with lean standalone units near 5 watts and all in one gateways that carry a modem, a phone base station and a four port switch reaching 20 watts.
Three things push a unit towards the top of that range. A built in VDSL or fibre modem adds a couple of watts on its own. A second radio for the 5GHz band, or a third for 6GHz, adds more, which is why tri band mesh nodes sit well above a plain single band box. Active ethernet ports draw power whether or not you are using them, so a gateway with four devices plugged in runs warmer than the same gateway with one.
None of that varies with how much you download. A router streaming a film all evening draws almost exactly what it draws at three in the morning with the house asleep, because the radios are transmitting either way and the difference is in the duty cycle rather than the load. That is the fact that makes this appliance worth costing.
Work it out for your own wi-fi router
Type in the wattage from the plate on the back, then your own unit rate. The numbers update as you type.
The monthly and yearly numbers
Ten watts is 0.01 kilowatts. Multiply by the 730 hours in an average month and you get 7.3 kilowatt hours, which at the Ofgem cap rate of 26.11p per kilowatt hour is £1.90. Across 8,760 hours the year comes to 87.6 kilowatt hours and £22.87.
The spread is wide enough to be worth checking your own unit for. A 5 watt router costs 95p a month and £11.44 a year. A 20 watt gateway costs £3.81 a month and £45.75 a year. The sticker on the power brick gives you the ceiling rather than the draw, so the honest way to pin it down is a plug in monitor left in place for a day.
The cap moves to 26.32p per kilowatt hour on 1 October 2026, which nudges the month from £1.90 to £1.92 and the year from £22.87 to £23.05. Router costs drift with the cap rather than with anything you do, which is part of why they slip past unnoticed.
For readers in the United States the EIA residential average is 18.34 cents per kilowatt hour, so the same 7.3 kilowatt hours costs about $1.34 a month and $16.06 a year. In California, at 34.74 cents, the year comes to just over $30.
| Appliance | Typical draw | Usage we assume | Per hour (UK) | Per usage (UK) | Per month (UK) | Per hour (US) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wi-Fi router | 10 W | per 24 hours, left on | 0.26p | 6.3p | £1.90 | 0.18 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.
Why the router is the most expensive small device in the house
Almost nothing else runs continuously. A television is on for five hours. A dryer runs for ninety minutes. A router runs for every hour of every day for the four or five years you own it, and continuous running is what turns a trivial wattage into a real number.
Put the comparison side by side. A television left on standby for a year costs £1.14. A router left on for the same year costs £22.87, twenty times more, from a device that draws twenty times the watts and never gets switched off. Add a mesh node in the back bedroom and you have doubled it again.
Over a five year ownership the electricity comes to around £114 at today's rate, which is often more than the router cost to buy. That is the argument for choosing a reasonably efficient unit rather than the cheapest one, and the argument against leaving the old router plugged in as a spare.
Most British homes do not choose the router at all, since it arrives free in a box from the broadband company and stays until the contract ends. You can still control the second half of the bill, which is everything else you have plugged in beside it. A powerline adapter pair, a network attached drive and an always on smart home hub each sit in the same five to twenty watt band as the router itself, and a shelf with four of those on it is costing more than the fridge.
Five ways to cut what the router costs you
- Unplug the router the broadband company replaced. Old units left running in a cupboard as a backup cost the same £22 a year as the one doing the work.
- Switch off the guest network and any second radio band you do not use, since each active radio adds draw whether or not a device is connected to it.
- Use the built in Wi-Fi scheduler rather than pulling the plug, because it powers down the radios while the modem keeps its line sync.
- Replace a separate modem, router and switch with one gateway where you can, as three power supplies idling is worse than one box doing all three jobs.
- Move the router to the middle of the house instead of buying a mesh node. A second node is another 10 watts a year in, every year.
Should you switch it off overnight
Eight hours off a night takes a third off the bill, which is 63p a month and £7.62 a year. On a full fibre line that is a clean saving, and the connection comes back in under a minute.
On an older copper line it can cost you more than it saves. Dynamic line management at the exchange watches for connections that keep dropping, and it responds to repeated drops by lowering your sync speed to make the line stable. A router switched off every night looks exactly like a line with a fault, so the machine does what it was designed to do and leaves you slower. Check what technology your line uses before you reach for the switch, and if it is fibre, use the scheduler in the router settings rather than the socket.
Common questions
How much electricity does a Wi-Fi router use in 24 hours?
A 10 watt router uses 0.24 kilowatt hours in 24 hours, which costs 6.3p at the current cap rate. A lean 5 watt unit halves that to 3.1p and a heavy all in one gateway at 20 watts doubles it to 12.5p.
How much electricity does a Wi-Fi router use per hour?
At 10 watts it is 0.01 kilowatt hours an hour, or 0.3p. The number is small enough that per hour is the wrong unit for this appliance, because the whole point of a router is that the hours never stop.
Does a Wi-Fi router use a lot of electricity?
Not per hour, but a lot per year. At £22.87 a year a router quietly costs more than twenty televisions left on standby, and it is one of only a handful of devices in a house that genuinely runs all 8,760 hours.
Should I turn my router off at night to save money?
Eight hours off a night saves about 63p a month. On a fibre line that is free money if nobody needs the connection, but on an older copper DSL line the exchange equipment can read the nightly drop as a fault and cut your sync speed to stabilise it.