The Price of a Warm Home Index | UK City Heating Costs Ranked
The postcode lottery of heating: what it costs to keep a home warm, street by street
Two homes in the same city can face very different heating bills. We combine official Ofgem price cap rates with government gas consumption statistics to estimate annual heating costs for 29 UK cities and the neighbourhoods inside them. Type in your postcode to see yours.
Check your postcode
See the estimated annual heating cost for your neighbourhood and how it compares with your city and the rest of Britain.
Compare two places
Enter two postcodes, cities or neighbourhood names. You get the annual cost gap and a line you can quote.
All 29 cities ranked
Select a city to see the full breakdown and every neighbourhood inside it.
How the index is calculated
The base cost comes from Ofgem’s Final Levelised Cap Rates Model (Annex 9) for Q4 2026, which gives the dual fuel benchmark bill for each of the 14 Ofgem regions.
For neighbourhoods, we apply each area’s own mean gas use to Ofgem’s actual regional unit rate and standing charge for gas, and add the regional electricity charge at the 2,500 kWh benchmark. Gas use comes from DESNZ Subnational Gas Consumption Statistics 2024 at MSOA level (areas of roughly 8,000 people). Neighbourhood names are the House of Commons Library’s MSOA names for England and Wales; Scottish areas use the official Intermediate Zone names. A small number of newer neighbourhoods that have no published name are left out of the lists. This reproduces our 29 city-level figures almost exactly and stays consistent even where a neighbourhood’s gas use is well above or below its city’s average.
Limits to know about. These are modelled estimates for a typical household, not metered bills. Electricity is held at the regional benchmark (2,500 kWh) because local electricity data was not available. Neighbourhood averages hide big differences between individual homes, and a small number of neighbourhoods with unusually high or low gas use can sit above or below every city figure in the index. Postcodes outside the 29 index cities use the nearest matching Ofgem region and are labelled as approximate. Scottish areas use the local authority figure, and Northern Ireland is not covered.
Postcode lookups use the free postcodes.io service (ONS Postcode Directory data). Postcodes are not stored by WarmGuide.
Journalists and media enquiries
Quote figures from this index with a link to WarmGuide as the source. Every city, neighbourhood and postcode result has a ready-made citation line. Please describe the figures as modelled estimates. For comment on what the regional differences mean for households, get in touch.