Where the money actually goes
Four cost buckets, and only the first one appears on a showroom tag.
- Appliance and installation. The purchase, the venting or chimney, the hearth pad, the permit, and the labor.
- Fuel, every year, for as long as you own it.
- Maintenance and consumables. Sweeping, gaskets, combustors, igniters, glass, and for pellet appliances a yearly deep clean.
- The costs attached to the appliance rather than the heat. Insurance treatment, inspection requirements, and what happens to the whole system in a power outage.
We publish figures for buckets 2 through 4 and for the emissions and efficiency that drive program eligibility. We do not publish a national installed-cost range on this page, because a credible one has to come from real quotes rather than from other people's blog posts. Our installation cost guide explains why the published ranges disagree by an order of magnitude and what actually drives the spread.
The comparison
| Wood | Pellet | Gas | Electric | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EPA median emission rate | 3.1 g/hr (1,155 models) | 1.3 g/hr (283 models) | Not in the EPA wood heater program | Not applicable |
| EPA median efficiency, published models only | 73% HHV (354 of 1,155) | 76% HHV (178 of 283) | Rated separately by AFUE or steady-state efficiency | Resistance heat converts nearly all input to heat at the appliance |
| Works in a power outage | Yes | No | Depends: millivolt ignition yes, electronic ignition with a blower no | No |
| Fuel handling | Split, stack, season, carry, load every few hours | Carry and pour 40 lb bags, hopper lasts about a day | None | None |
| Storage | Cords, outdoors, seasoned a year ahead | Bags or a bulk bin, must stay dry | None or a propane tank | None |
| Routine maintenance | Annual sweep, gaskets, glass | Annual deep clean, ash and fines removal, igniter and auger wear | Annual service, venting inspection | Minimal |
| Consumable that surprises people | Catalytic combustor on catalytic models | Igniter, auger motor, exhaust blower | None material | None |
| Noise while running | Silent unless a blower is fitted | Continuous: auger cycling and exhaust blower | Blower only | Blower only |
| Change-out rebate eligibility | Frequently eligible | Frequently eligible | Often eligible as the replacement appliance | Often eligible, usually as a heat pump rather than a resistance heater |
| Expired federal 25C credit | Was eligible at 75% thermal efficiency, dead after 2025-12-31 | Same | Was not a biomass credit item | Not applicable |
EPA figures on this page come from our own ingest of EPA's certified wood heater database, 1,438 models, August 15, 2026. Medians are computed only over models that publish the figure.
Electricity dependency, the axis nobody prices
A pellet stove is an appliance with motors. The auger feeds fuel, the igniter lights it, the combustion blower moves air through the burn pot, and a convection blower pushes heat into the room. Cut power and every one of those stops. Pellet owners in outage-prone areas buy a battery backup or a small generator, and that is a real line item that belongs in the purchase decision rather than discovered in January.
A wood stove has no such dependency. That is its single strongest argument and it is the one manufacturer comparison pages tend to underweight when they sell pellet appliances.
Gas splits: a millivolt or standing-pilot system will run without house power, while an electronic-ignition system with a blower will not. Ask which one you are being sold.
Noise, the axis every incumbent page skips
Wood is silent. Pellet is not. A running pellet stove cycles an auger on a timer and runs an exhaust blower continuously, and the sound is constant rather than intermittent. Whether that matters is a personal call, but it should be made in a showroom with the unit running, not after installation. We have not found a published, standardized dB measurement across pellet models, so we make no numeric claim here.
Combustion technology changes the maintenance math
Among the 1,438 EPA-listed models:
| Class | Models | Median efficiency, publishing models | Median emissions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-catalytic | 1,083 | 72% | 2.9 g/hr |
| Catalytic | 314 | 78% | 2.45 g/hr |
| Hybrid | 40 | 78% | 1.0 g/hr |
Catalytic and hybrid stoves post better numbers on both axes. They also carry a combustor that degrades with use and gets replaced on a schedule. Get the part number and the price from the dealer before you buy, and add it to the ownership cost at the interval the manufacturer states. A cheaper non-catalytic stove with no combustor to replace is sometimes the better total-cost answer even at lower rated efficiency.
Fuel costs, and what we can honestly say about them
Two of the four fuels have a published national residential price:
- Natural gas: $19.83 per thousand cubic feet, May 2026 (EIA natural gas prices).
- Propane: $2.674 per gallon, week of March 30, 2026 (EIA weekly heating fuels).
Cordwood and pellets have no national published price, because both are local markets with delivery-radius pricing and wide seasonal swing. Anyone quoting you a single national cord-price figure is estimating. Our annual running-cost guide works the comparison on your own local prices instead, and shows the arithmetic so you can check it.
For scale on the underlying energy: EIA publishes 1 cubic foot of natural gas at 1,036 Btu (2026 estimate), 1 kilowatthour at 3,412 Btu, and 1 gallon of distillate heating oil at 137,381 Btu (2026 estimate) (EIA energy conversion calculators).
Wood is a live residential fuel and not a niche one: EIA reports that in 2020, 8.9% of US households, about 11 million, used wood for energy, and about 2.2 million used it as their main space-heating fuel (EIA, wood and wood waste).
How to decide
Pick wood if you have a fuel source, you want heat that survives an outage, and you accept the labor. Check whether your model is catalytic and price the combustor.
Pick pellet if you want automatic operation and clean numbers and you can live with the noise and the power dependency. Budget a battery backup if your grid is unreliable.
Pick gas if you want the appliance to be invisible and the running cost to be predictable and you have a line to the house or room for a tank. Ask whether ignition is millivolt or electronic.
Pick electric if there is no venting path, the install budget is small, or the appliance is mostly for appearance and supplemental warmth. Do not expect it to qualify for a change-out rebate as a resistance heater.
Then check three things before you sign, in this order: whether your model publishes the efficiency figure any rebate you want requires, what your insurer needs on file, and what your jurisdiction requires for permits and inspection.
Methodology and freshness
Emissions, efficiency, and combustion-class figures: our own full ingest of EPA's certified wood heater database, 1,438 models, 2026-08-15, medians computed only over models publishing the figure. Fuel prices: EIA, cited inline with the period each covers. No figure on this page is estimated, and where no primary figure exists we say so rather than supply one. Refresh cadence: quarterly, and immediately on any EIA revision we cite.
Corrections: if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will correct or remove it.
This page is a reference directory, not tax, legal, or installation advice. We do not sell, install, or service stoves and we do not arrange installation work.