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Running a 65 W work laptop 8 h/day costs about $34 a year

A 65 W ultrabook running 8 hours a day at a realistic 60% load (office work mixes idle and short bursts, not sustained compute) costs about $20.52 a year at $0.18/kWh — $1.71 a month. That's 114 kWh annually, the electricity of about four loads of laundry.

Annual cost
$20
At $0.18/kWh
Monthly cost
$2
8 h/day at 60% load
Annual consumption
114 kWh
65 W rated

Calculator

Power Cost Estimator

Device Configuration

W

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Effective Power: 39W

Hours
$/kWh

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Daily Cost
$0.06
Monthly Cost
$1.68
Yearly Cost
$20.50
114 kWh / year

How this is calculated

65 W is the typical USB-C / Thunderbolt charger rating for ultrabooks like the 13" MacBook Air, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad X1, and similar. Actual draw is almost always lower: 10-25 W in normal office work, briefly up to 40-55 W when compiling, transcoding, or running a Teams call on battery-saver off. A 30 W TDP Mac silicon chip can spend entire workdays averaging 8-12 W, making these machines roughly 5× more efficient than an equivalent gaming PC used for the same tasks.

Verdict

$21 a year is a rounding error on any office's IT budget. For remote workers covering their own electricity, the difference between a 65 W ultrabook and a 500 W desktop working the same hours is about $130/year — not negligible over a 3-year deployment.

More Laptop scenarios

230 W gaming laptop, 4 h/day
Gaming laptop (230 W)
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Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to run a gaming PC 24/7?
At 300 W continuous draw and €0.30/kWh, a gaming PC left on 24/7 costs about €788 per year. Cut that to 8 hours per day of active gaming plus idle the rest and it drops to roughly €260/year. Sleep mode and turning the PC off when not in use are the biggest levers.
How do I calculate kWh from watts?
Multiply wattage by hours, then divide by 1,000. A 500 W device running for 4 hours uses 500 × 4 ÷ 1,000 = 2 kWh. Multiply by your electricity rate (e.g. €0.30/kWh) to get the cost.
What uses more electricity: an RTX 4090 or a typical fridge?
Peak power, the RTX 4090 wins (450 W vs roughly 100-150 W compressor draw). Annual consumption is the opposite: a fridge runs 24/7 at an average of 40-50 W, adding up to around 400 kWh/year — more than many gaming PCs used only a few hours daily.
Does a 1000 W PSU use 1000 W all the time?
No. A PSU is rated for its maximum output capacity; actual draw depends on what the components need. A system with a 1000 W PSU at idle might pull 80 W from the wall, jumping to 400-600 W under gaming load.
How much does an always-on TV or server cost per year?
At 100 W continuous draw and €0.30/kWh, any device running 24/7 costs €263/year. A home NAS at 50 W costs €131/year; a 65-inch OLED TV watched 4 hours/day at 150 W costs about €66/year.
Why is my electricity bill higher than the estimator predicts?
The estimator assumes the wattage you enter is the average over runtime. Real devices spike, idle, and have standby draw. Measure with a cheap wall-socket power meter for the most accurate baseline, then use the estimator to project costs for different usage scenarios.

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