How Much Does It Cost to Run a Gaming PC?

By Efe Arda Ergez · Published 21 September 2026

The short answer

At the US average residential rate of 19.42¢ per kWh, a gaming PC built around an RTX 5070 costs about $124 a year to run — $10 a month — if it is used for 4 hours of gaming and sits idle for another 6 hours every day. The same habits cost $92 a year with an RTX 4060 and $202 with an RTX 5090, the most power-hungry consumer card there is.

Those figures are for the whole PC, not the graphics card alone, and they change a great deal with two things most articles skip: how many hours the PC actually spends in games, and what you pay for a kilowatt-hour. The rest of this guide works through where the number comes from, so you can adjust it to your own setup.

The number on the box is a limit, not a draw

Graphics cards are sold with a power rating — NVIDIA calls it Total Graphics Power, AMD Typical Board Power. The RTX 5070’s is 250 W. It is tempting to multiply that by your gaming hours and your rate, but that overstates the card and ignores everything else in the case.

• The card rarely sits at its limit. Most games leave some headroom, and frame caps, V-Sync and lighter scenes pull it lower. This guide, like the calculators, assumes the card averages 85% of its limit while gaming: 212.5 W for the RTX 5070.
• The rest of the PC draws power too. The processor, motherboard, memory, storage and fans add roughly 120 W under a gaming load, which brings the whole system to 332.5 W.
• An idle PC is not free. On the desktop, in a browser or downloading, a gaming PC still draws about 70 W (15 W of it the card).

Working it out, step by step

For the RTX 5070 PC at the US average rate:

1. Gaming: 332.5 W × 4 h = 1.33 kWh a day.
2. Idle: 70 W × 6 h = 0.42 kWh a day.
3. Together that is 1.75 kWh a day, or 639 kWh over a year.
4. 639 kWh × 19.42¢ = $124 a year, which is $0.34 a day.

Two things stand out. The graphics card accounts for 54% of that energy and the rest of the PC for the other 46%, so the processor, board and fans are a large part of the bill whichever card you pick. And the idle hours are 24% of the total: a PC that is switched off or asleep when you are not using it saves $30 a year in this example.

Your electricity rate matters more than your card

Residential electricity prices vary by a factor of 4 across the US. The same RTX 5070 PC costs $84 a year in Nevada (13.11¢) and $337 in Hawaii (52.72¢).

The spread is wide enough to reverse the obvious ranking. A budget RTX 4060 PC in Hawaii costs $248 a year; a flagship RTX 5090 PC in Nevada costs $137. Before choosing a card for its efficiency, check what you actually pay per kWh — it is printed on your bill.

Hours are the other big lever

Every figure so far assumes 4 hours of gaming a day. The cost scales almost directly with that number, because the idle hours are the only part that stays put:

• 1 hour a day: $53 a year
• 2 hours a day: $77 a year
• 4 hours a day: $124 a year
• 6 hours a day: $171 a year
• 8 hours a day: $218 a year

Someone who plays for an hour on weeknights spends less than half of what a daily four-hour player does, on the same card, in the same state.

How to spend less without changing the card

• Cap the frame rate. Rendering frames your monitor cannot show is pure waste. Capping at the refresh rate often brings the card well under its limit. If it averaged 70% of its limit instead of 85%, the RTX 5070 PC above would cost $113 a year instead of $124.
• Undervolt or lower the power limit. Tools such as the vendors’ own control panels let you trim the card’s power target. The last few percent of performance cost a disproportionate share of the power.
• Let the PC sleep. Across the cards below, idle time is 15% to 33% of the bill — the larger share on the most efficient cards — and sleep draws only a few watts.
• Check your tariff. On a time-of-use plan, evening gaming can fall in the most expensive hours of the day; the calculators let you enter your own rate.

Every card at the US average rate

The whole PC, 4 hours of gaming and 6 hours idle a day, at 19.42¢ per kWh. Current generations first; each name opens that card’s calculator, where you can set your own state and hours.

What these figures leave out

The monitor, speakers and anything else plugged in beside the PC are not included, and neither are factory-overclocked boards, which ship with higher power limits than the reference cards listed here. Real draw also depends on the game: a competitive shooter at a capped frame rate uses far less than an uncapped path-traced title. Treat these as a well-founded estimate of scale, and use your own rate and hours in the calculator for a figure that fits your setup.

Calculators used in this guide

• GPU power cost — every card, every state
• RTX 5070 power and cost calculator
• RTX 5090 power and cost calculator
• PSU wattage calculator

Card power limits: nvidia.com GeForce specifications (Total Graphics Power); AMD published Typical Board Power at launch. Electricity: EIA Electric Power Monthly Table 5.6.A, residential, June 2026. Every figure on this page is computed at build time from the same data and code as those calculators; the formulas are on the Methodology page.

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