How Much Does a Blender Cost to Run?

A blender used for three minutes a day costs between one and five dollars a year in electricity. For a 1,000 watt machine it is $3.18 a year. That is the whole answer, and the useful conclusion follows immediately: running cost should not influence which blender you buy.

We publish it anyway, because across the publishers surveyed for this site not one showed the calculation, and knowing a number is small is as useful as knowing it is large. It stops power draw being sold to you as a virtue it does not deserve to be, and it removes a variable from a decision that has enough of them already.

The arithmetic

Three inputs, one multiplication:

Where each input comes from

The wattageis whatever the manufacturer publishes, and that is less straightforward than it sounds — the numbers are not comparable across brands. Ninja publishes both a continuous and a peak figure. Hamilton Beach publishes a peak figure and then, in its own manual, defines peak as the draw during the first seconds of operation, while the rating plate on the same machine says 3.7 A. Vitamix publishes no watt figure at all for the 5200 — only horsepower and an 11.5 A nameplate rating. We use the figure that reflects what the motor actually draws while running, and say which one that is for every machine. There is more on why this matters in the guide to blender wattage.

The usage assumption is 3 minutes a day, 365 days a year. That is generous for most households, and deliberately so: an over-estimate that still comes out small is a more useful number than a flattering one. If you blend for one minute, divide by three.

The electricity rate is 17.45¢ per kWh, the US average residential price from US EIA, Electric Power Monthly — average residential price, US total, retrieved July 2026. Your rate is on your utility bill and is very probably different — rates vary by more than a factor of three between US states, which swings the figures below more than any difference between the machines does.

What each machine costs a year

Every wattage below is published by the manufacturer and cited on that product’s page. Where a manufacturer publishes no usable wattage, the row says so rather than carrying an estimate.

The spread from the most expensive machine to the least is under four dollars a year. Put differently: the difference in running cost between the most powerful blender here and the cheapest one is roughly the price of a coffee, spread across twelve months.

What actually costs money to own

If running cost is a rounding error, what is not? Three things, in order:

Replacement. A machine that dies at three years and gets replaced costs you the whole purchase price again. This is why warranty length is the number we weight most heavily — the gap between a one-year and a seven-year term dwarfs every electricity figure in the table above by two orders of magnitude.

Consumables.Gaskets, blade assemblies, cups and jars. On personal blenders in particular the gasket is the usual cause of death, and it is normally excluded from the warranty — NutriBullet’s terms exclude cups and accessories explicitly. Check that spare parts are sold at all before you buy; a machine with no parts listing has been designed as disposable.

Not using it. The most expensive blender is the one in the cupboard. That is usually a height problem — full-size machines are commonly 17 to 20 inches assembled against a standard 18-inch worktop-to-cabinet gap — or a cleaning problem. Both are worth more attention than wattage.

Redoing this with your own numbers

Take the wattage from your machine’s rating plate — the sticker on the underside, which is the real figure rather than the marketing one. Take your rate from your utility bill in cents per kWh. Then:

If your answer is a surprise, it is almost always the minutes. Three minutes a day is a lot of blending; most people do closer to one.

What this figure is not

It is a computation from published specifications, not a measurement. We have not put a meter on any of these machines — we do not own them, and we say so on every page. What makes the number worth publishing is that every input is public and the sum is shown, so you can check it, argue with the assumption, or substitute a better one. That is a different kind of confidence from a lab reading, and on this particular question it is enough.