Energy Use in Your Area

National energy averages are almost useless for working out whether your own bills are reasonable. A city centre of flats and a rural district of large detached houses both sit inside the same national figure, and neither looks anything like it.

This page pulls together six official datasets for a single local authority: how much electricity and gas homes there use, how they are heated, how efficient the housing stock is, how far smart meters and heat pump grants have reached, and how much fuel poverty the area has.

Find your area

Enter a postcode and we look up the local authority it belongs to.

The postcode is not stored. It is sent in the body of a single lookup request, resolved to an area code, and discarded — it never appears in the URL, is never written to a log or database, and is never passed to analytics. Only the area code travels onward, and it is checked against the official geographies we hold before anything is shown.

How much energy your area uses

These are mean annual consumption figures per metered domestic property, from the Government’s sub-national energy statistics. Electricity and gas are counted separately and neither is an estimate for any particular home.

Gas figures come weather-corrected, so a mild year is not mistaken for a sudden outbreak of efficiency. Where too few properties in an area are connected for a figure to be published without identifying households, the value is suppressed — and shown here as unavailable rather than as zero, because “not published” and “none” are different statements.

How the homes around you are heated

Central heating type comes from the Census, which asks every household rather than sampling. It is the most complete picture available of what is actually heating British homes, and it explains a great deal about an area’s consumption figures.

An area with many homes off the gas grid — heating with electricity, oil or solid fuel — will show low gas use and high electricity use, and the households in it typically pay more for the same warmth. That is a different situation from an area that simply uses less energy.

England and Wales and Scotland ran their censuses in different years with different categories, so the two are shown separately and never combined into one Great Britain figure.

How efficient the local housing stock is

EPC bands, smart meter coverage and heat pump grant uptake each say something about how ready an area’s homes are for cheaper, lower carbon heating.

One caveat matters throughout: an EPC is produced when a property is sold or let, so the register covers transacted homes rather than all homes. Areas with low turnover — long-held family houses, stable social housing — are under-represented, and the band distribution skews toward whatever has changed hands recently. It is a real signal, not a census.

Fuel poverty, and why the three nations differ

Fuel poverty is where energy statistics stop being an abstraction. It measures households that cannot afford to keep warm — and it is measured differently in each nation of Great Britain.

England uses a Low Income Low Energy Efficiency measure, which counts a household as fuel poor if it is on a low income and lives in a property below a given efficiency band. Scotland and Wales use their own definitions, built around what proportion of income energy costs consume.

These are not variations on one measure. They answer different questions, and a household could be counted in one nation and not in another with identical circumstances. So the figures below are shown per nation and we refuse to compute a Great Britain rate from them, because any such number would be arithmetic performed on incompatible definitions.

An area average is not your house

Every figure on this page describes a local authority — often hundreds of thousands of people — and within one the spread is enormous.

Sitting above your area’s average is common and not in itself a problem, particularly if your home is larger or more exposed than the local norm. The comparison worth making is against homes like yours rather than against your neighbours in aggregate, which is what typical household energy use is for — it breaks consumption down by property type, size, age and tenure.

To turn any of these consumption figures into money, put them through the energy bill calculator with the price cap rates for your region. And if your area looks heavy on electric heating, it is worth reading about air source heat pumps and the grants tracked on our solar and heat pump page.