U.S. Energy Information Administration
Residential Energy Consumption Survey 2020, household consumption (Table CE2.1)
Annual site energy consumption of US homes in 2020 by fuel, in physical units and in Btu, for all homes and by region, housing type, income and other characteristics: the number of housing units, total consumption, and average consumption per household using each fuel. For electricity, every home uses it, so the average is per home: about 10,600 kilowatt-hours in 2020 for all 123.5 million primary occupied homes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Electricity from a home's own solar panels is included. The estimates come from a sample survey of households and their energy suppliers' bills for calendar year 2020; EIA publishes a relative standard error for each value.
Numbers published from it
Licence and credit
- What the terms say
“U.S. government publications are in the public domain and are not subject to copyright protection. You may use and/or distribute any of our data, files, databases, reports, graphs, charts, and other information products that are on our website or that you receive through our email distribution service.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-08; re-checked automatically every week.
- Credit we give
- Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (Mar 2024), 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey, Table CE2.1.
- Copy of the raw file
- Allowed: we keep a public copy of every version we use.
- Cite as
- Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (Mar 2024).
Files
Table CE2.1 as a workbook with three sheets: 'Btu', 'physical units' and 'rse' (relative standard errors). Row 'All homes' of 'physical units' gives the number of housing units (million), total electricity consumption (billion kWh) and average electricity consumption per household (kWh). Data release March 2023, revised March 2024. 37,081 bytes.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/c&e/xls/ce2.1.xlsx"2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey: Consumption and Expenditures Technical Documentation Summary" (May 2025, 48 pages), linked from the RECS methodology page. Its 'Consumption and Expenditures Annualization and Imputation' section (page 13) defines the reference period as 1 January to 31 December 2020.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/pdf/2020%20RECS%20CE%20Methodology%20-%20Monthly%20Appendix%20-%20Final.pdf
Status
- Programme
- The 2020 survey's consumption tables are final (revised March 2024). EIA lost more than 100 of its about 350 staff in 2025; the 2024 survey's data are announced for spring 2027.
- Updates
- Every four to five years (2015, 2020, 2024 survey cycles)
- Next release
- 2027-06-30: EIA's RECS page (read 2026-10-08): "EIA will be releasing the entire set of data from the 2024 RECS in spring 2027." No day is given; 30 June 2027 is the check-by date, not an announced date.
- Last check
- Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-25T10:11:49Z)