Do Air Fryers Use a Lot of Electricity?
No - and the reason is not the one everyone gives. An air fryer draws roughly the same power as an oven element. It wins on the other two terms in the equation.
7 min read Last updated
Short answer
No - about 8¢ a cook
An air fryer draws around 1,500 W, but only for about twenty minutes, so a typical cook uses roughly 0.45 kWh - around 8 cents, or 11p. That is well under half what the same food costs in an electric oven. It is one of the cheapest hot appliances in the kitchen.
The short answer, and the interesting part
No, air fryers do not use a lot of electricity. That much is easy. The interesting part is why, because the explanation you will usually be given - "it's a low-power appliance" - is simply not true, and believing it will make you wrong about the cases where the air fryer is the more expensive choice.
The thing everyone gets wrong
An air fryer is not a low-power appliance. At 1,500 W it draws more than a kettle spends most of its life drawing, and it is in the same league as an oven element. It is cheap to run because of the other two terms in the equation - time, and how much stuff it has to heat.
The arithmetic, in one line
You can do this yourself for any appliance in the house, and it is worth doing once so the numbers stop being mysterious:
kilowatts × hours × your unit rate = cost
So a 1,500 W air fryer is 1.5 kW. Run it for 20 minutes and that is a third of an hour. 1.5 × 0.33 = 0.5 kWh. At a US average of roughly 17 cents per kWh that is about 8 cents; at a UK rate of roughly 25p it is about 12p. Check your own bill for the unit rate - it is the only number in this that is actually yours, and it moves.
One honest correction to that, which most pages on this subject quietly skip: the element is not on the whole time. A thermostat brings the chamber up to temperature and then cycles the element on and off to hold it there. So 0.5 kWh is the ceiling, not the typical figure - the real number is lower, and how much lower depends on how well the appliance holds its heat. Which turns out to be the whole story.
Against an oven, and a microwave
The same job - a portion of chips for two - done three ways. Preheat is counted, because it is real and because it is where the oven quietly loses.
| Appliance | Draw | Time | Energy | US | UK |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microwave | 1,000 W | 5 min | ~0.08 kWh | ~1¢ | ~2p |
| Air fryer | 1,500 W | 3 min preheat + 18 min | ~0.45 kWh | ~8¢ | ~11p |
| Electric oven | 2,400 W | 12 min preheat + 30 min | ~1.1 kWh | ~19¢ | ~28p |
These are estimates, and they are built on assumptions worth stating out loud: the element cycles rather than running flat out, and it cycles less in a well-insulated oven than in a thin-walled air fryer. Your machine, your prices and your chips will all differ. The ratio is the durable part - the air fryer lands at roughly a third to a half of the oven, and that holds up whatever the unit rate does.
Note the microwave wins outright, and there is no point pretending otherwise. It puts energy straight into the water in the food rather than heating a box first. It also cannot brown or crisp a single thing, which is precisely why you own an air fryer and not just a microwave.
Why it wins - and it is not the wattage
An air fryer element pulls 1,500 W; an oven element pulls about 2,400 W. If power were the whole story, the air fryer would be about 40% cheaper and that would be that. It is usually far better than 40%, and the extra comes from two places.
1. It heats the food, not the room
This is the real mechanism, and it is a thermal-mass argument. An oven cavity is 60-70 litres of air wrapped in a heavy steel box, with steel racks in it. Before a single chip gets hot, you have paid to heat all of it - and a large, hot box loses heat through its walls and door for as long as it stays hot, which is why the element keeps cycling back on. An air fryer heats perhaps 5 litres and a small basket. You are buying vastly less heat to cook exactly the same food.
Put bluntly: most of what an oven costs you is spent heating the oven. The food is a rounding error in it. The air fryer's saving is that it barely has an oven to heat.
2. It is finished sooner
The same thermal mass that costs the oven its energy also costs it its time. An air fryer is up to temperature in two to three minutes where an oven takes ten to fifteen, and then it cooks around 20% faster once it is there, because the fan moves air over the food far more aggressively. Energy is power multiplied by time - so shaving the time cuts the bill just as surely as shaving the watts would.
That 20% is the same figure the conversion calculator is built on, and it is not a coincidence - it falls out of the same physics.
When the air fryer is not cheaper
Follow the mechanism honestly and it tells you where it breaks. The air fryer is efficient because it is small. So it stops being efficient exactly when small stops being enough.
- Cooking for a crowd. The moment a meal takes three sequential batches, you are paying the run time three times over, while an oven would have cooked the lot in one go on two shelves. The oven's big cavity is a cost when it is empty and an advantage when it is full. This is the single biggest reason people find their air fryer did not save them anything.
- Long, slow cooks. Over an hour or two, the oven's insulated cavity coasts: it is up to temperature, it loses heat slowly, and the element barely fires. The air fryer's thin walls keep bleeding heat, so it keeps firing to hold the number. The preheat advantage is long spent and the gap narrows.
- When the oven is already on. If something else is in there, the marginal cost of adding a tray of chips alongside it is close to nothing. Do not fire up a second appliance to save money on the first.
Cutting it further
Honestly, at 8 cents a cook there is not a great deal left to squeeze - and anyone selling you an "energy saving" air fryer accessory is selling you nothing. But if you want the last few percent, and each of these follows from something above rather than being folklore:
- Skip the preheat on long cooks. On a 45-minute cook it buys you almost nothing and it costs you three minutes at full draw. On an 8-minute cook it is worth it - the preheat guide has the rule.
- Fill the basket properly - once. A single well-spaced layer that cooks in one go beats two half-empty batches, which is the same argument the oven uses against you at scale. Do not overcrowd it either, or nothing crisps and you end up running it longer.
- Keep it clean. A grease-clogged crisper plate throttles the airflow the whole design depends on, so everything takes longer, and longer is what costs money. The cleaning guide covers it.
- Do not open it constantly. Every look dumps the hot air you just paid for. The chamber is tiny, so it empties fast - though for the same reason it recovers fast, so one shake is fine.
- Buy the size you actually need. A big machine costs about the same per minute but takes longer to heat, and a machine that is too small forces the multiple batches that wreck the whole economy of it.
If you are still choosing a machine, the size decision is the one that drives all of this - see how to choose an air fryer. And if you are weighing it against a fan oven you already own, that comparison is its own page: air fryer vs convection oven.
Frequently asked
Do air fryers use a lot of electricity?
No. A typical air fryer draws around 1,500 W, but it only draws it for about twenty minutes, so a normal cook uses roughly 0.45 kWh - somewhere around 8 cents in the US or 11p in the UK. It is one of the cheaper things in your kitchen to run, and it is markedly cheaper than the oven it usually replaces.
How much does it cost to run an air fryer?
Work it out in one line: kilowatts multiplied by hours multiplied by your unit rate. A 1,500 W (1.5 kW) machine run for 20 minutes (0.33 h) uses about 0.5 kWh at full draw, and less in practice because the thermostat cycles the element on and off. At a typical rate that is under 10 cents, or roughly 10-12p. Your own bill has the unit rate on it - that is the only number that makes this exact.
Is an air fryer cheaper to run than an oven?
Yes, usually by around half to two thirds for a small meal. But not for the reason people assume. An air fryer does not sip power - it draws 1,500 W against an oven element's 2,400 W, which alone would only be a modest saving. It wins because it preheats in 3 minutes instead of 12, cooks around 20% faster, and above all because it only has to heat a 5-litre chamber rather than a 60-litre steel box.
How many watts does an air fryer use?
Most sit between 1,400 W and 1,800 W, and this barely changes with size - a large 8 qt machine draws about the same as a small 4 qt one. That is worth knowing, because it means a bigger air fryer is not meaningfully more expensive to run per minute. It simply takes a little longer to get up to temperature, because there is more air and more metal to heat.
Does an air fryer use more electricity than a microwave?
Yes, comfortably. A microwave puts its energy directly into the water in the food and is done in a few minutes, so a reheat costs about a penny. An air fryer has to heat a whole chamber to 200°C and hold it there for twenty minutes. If cost were the only consideration the microwave would win every time - but it cannot brown or crisp anything, which is the entire reason you own the air fryer.
When is it cheaper to use the oven than the air fryer?
When you are cooking a lot at once. An air fryer is only efficient because it is small, and that same smallness means a family-sized meal becomes two or three sequential batches - at which point you are paying the preheat and the run time over and over, and a single oven load that cooks everything simultaneously wins. The oven also wins on very long cooks, where its insulated cavity coasts at low duty while an air fryer keeps firing to hold heat in a thin-walled box.