How much electricity does a treadmill use?
Written by Jamie Irwin, Founder & EditorLast checked
About £36 a year for half an hour a day at 750 W and 26.32p a unit. Both are examples.
Work out your own running cost
Your rate is on your bill, per kilowatt-hour. The default is the Ofgem price cap for 1 October to 31 December 2026, 26.32p, the direct debit figure averaged across England, Scotland and Wales. The quarter before it, 1 July to 30 September 2026, was 26.11p. The cap changes every quarter and your own tariff will differ by region and supplier, so put your rate in above. Publisher stated, Independent publication, checked 19 Sept 2026
How much electricity does a treadmill use?
Between £14 and £48 a year for half an hour a day, if the machine draws somewhere between 300 and 1,000 watts. That bracket is ours, stated rather than measured, and it is that wide because the answer depends on two things we cannot know for you: what your machine draws, and what you pay per unit.
Electricity is billed by the kilowatt-hour. A 1,000-watt appliance running for one hour uses one kilowatt-hour. So:
watts / 1000 x hours x your rate in pence / 100 = cost in pounds
That is the whole thing. Everything below is about getting the two numbers right.
Finding your machine's real draw
Every mains appliance sold in the UK carries a rating plate, usually near the power inlet at the front of the deck or on the underside of the motor cover. It states the input either in watts or in amps. If it gives amps, UK mains is 230 volts, so:
amps x 230 = watts
UK mains is declared at 230 volts, so a machine rated 6A draws up to about 1,380 watts. Publisher stated, Independent publication, checked 19 Sept 2026 A standard 13-amp plug then tops out around 3,000 watts, which is arithmetic on the plug's own name rather than anything the regulation says: 13 x 230 is 2,990. Any home treadmill on a normal socket is bounded by that whatever its marketing says.
That rating is the maximum. Actual draw is lower most of the time and rises with speed, incline and the weight on the belt: a 90 kg runner at 12 km/h on a 10% incline pulls considerably more than a 60 kg walker on the flat. The incline calculator shows what that incline costs in effort, which is what the motor is working against.
Why horsepower is not the answer
Treadmills are sold on horsepower and it is close to useless for this question, for two reasons.
First, the figure quoted is usually peak horsepower, a brief maximum the motor can reach, not the continuous rating it can sustain. The two can differ by a factor of two or more, and brands are inconsistent about which they print. Where a manufacturer does not say which it is quoting, we record the figure as manufacturer-stated and unverified rather than converting it. Manufacturer stated, Manufacturer spec, checked 18 Sept 2026
Second, horsepower describes power delivered to the belt, and the electricity you pay for is power drawn from the wall. The difference is motor efficiency, which almost no consumer manufacturer publishes. Converting 2.5hp into watts and calling it your running cost quietly assumes an efficiency figure nobody has given you.
What it costs to run a treadmill in the UK
Half an hour a day, every day, at 26.32p per kilowatt-hour. These are the arithmetic above applied to an assumed draw, not measurements of any particular machine.
| Draw | kWh per hour | Per 30 min session | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 W | 0.20 | £0.03 | £0.80 | £10 |
| 300 W | 0.30 | £0.04 | £1.20 | £14 |
| 500 W | 0.50 | £0.07 | £2.00 | £24 |
| 750 W | 0.75 | £0.10 | £3.00 | £36 |
| 1000 W | 1.00 | £0.13 | £4.00 | £48 |
| 1500 W | 1.50 | £0.20 | £6.00 | £72 |
| 2000 W | 2.00 | £0.26 | £8.01 | £96 |
The table is a straight line, and that is the useful part: cost is exactly proportional to draw, so a machine pulling twice as much costs exactly twice as much to run. There is no threshold, no efficiency band and nothing to optimise. If you halve the wattage you halve the bill.
A walking pad against a treadmill
We cannot tell you which costs more to run, and the one wattage we have found says the question is not as obvious as it sounds. Our records hold 18 treadmills and 5 walking pads. None carries a power draw as a specification, because we do not hold a field for one. Exactly one product's source publishes a figure at all: the WalkingPad P1 states a rated input of 746 W. That is a rated input rather than a measured draw, and it is a WALKING PAD sitting almost exactly on the 750 W worked example above.
So the tidy version, pad at the bottom of the range and treadmill at the top, is not something this site can tell you. What we can say is what each machine's own source says, and on draw almost all of them say nothing. Manufacturer stated, Manufacturer spec, checked 19 Sept 2026
Horsepower does not fill the gap, for the reasons above. 14 of the 18 treadmills publish a numeric horsepower figure and 2 of the 5 walking pads do; 1 of the treadmills is a curved manual machine with no motor at all, which is a fact rather than a gap. A site quoting you a watts figure per machine is either measuring it, and should say how, or making it up.
Nor is a walking pad necessarily the simpler machine. 1 of our 5 pads publishes a powered incline, up to 7%, 1 states it has none, and the rest publish nothing either way.
Treadmill or gym membership: the break-even
A treadmill is paid for once and then costs pence a month; a gym is paid every month and costs nothing up front. They cross at some point, and where they cross depends entirely on four numbers that are yours rather than ours.
£500, £30 a month, 4 sessions a week and 5 years are starting numbers to type over. None of them is a claim about what a treadmill costs or what a gym charges: we do not publish prices, and gym membership varies by chain, city and contract. The draw and minutes come from the calculator at the top of the page.
What this leaves out is not small, and it all runs one way. Delivery, a service, a repair, the floor space and the resale value at the end are all real and none of them is costed here. Nor is anything a gym gives you that a treadmill does not: every other machine in the building, classes, and somebody else fixing it when it breaks. The break-even above is the running cost against the membership, and that is all it is.
How this is calculated
Running cost is watts / 1000 x hours x pence per kWh / 100. A month is a year divided by 12 rather than counted in days, so a 31 day month and a 28 day one do not read differently for the same habit.
The break-even is price / (membership per month - electricity per month), in months. Where the electricity costs more than the membership it never crosses, and the page says so rather than printing a negative number. Cost per session is (price + electricity over the years) / total sessions for the machine and membership x 12 / sessions a year for the gym.
The 300 to 1,000 watt bracket is a stated bracket, not a measurement: it spans a walking pad to a substantial motorised machine. Every figure derived from it is arithmetic on an assumption, which is why the calculator takes your own number.
Sources
- Publisher stated, Independent publication
- The electricity unit rate under the Ofgem price capOfgemEnergy price cap: unit rates and standing chargesOpened 19 September 2026Gives 26.11p per kWh for 1 July to 30 September 2026 and 26.32p for 1 October to 31 December 2026, both on direct debit. It also states that there is no VAT on electricity from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, so the October figure is the whole unit rate. THE CAP CHANGES QUARTERLY, which is why every page here names the quarter and offers an input for your own rate rather than treating a published figure as durable.
- Publisher stated, Independent publication
- The 1 October to 31 December 2026 cap, and the VAT removalOfgemChanges to the energy price cap between 1 October and 31 December 2026Opened 19 September 2026States "26.32 pence per kilowatt hour (kWh)" for direct debit on a standard variable tariff, and that "VAT is not included in electricity bills for people covered under the energy price cap between 1 October and 31 December 2026". Gas stays at 5%.
- Publisher stated, Independent publication
- UK mains is declared at 230 voltsThe Electricity Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002 (UK)Regulation 27: declaration of phases, frequency and voltage at supply terminalsOpened 19 September 2026Regulation 27(2) states that "the voltage declared in respect of a low voltage supply shall be 230 volts between the phase and neutral conductors at the supply terminals", and 27(3)(b) permits a variation of up to 10% above or 6% below it. THAT IS ALL IT SUPPORTS. It says nothing about plugs, so the 13 A ceiling on our page is not covered by this source and does not carry its mark: 13 A is what a 13 amp plug is called, and 13 x 230 = 2,990 W is arithmetic on that name. Added 19 September 2026, because the voltage had been asserted with no source at all.
The unit rate this page defaults to changes every quarter, which is why both calculators above take your own rate and why the quarter is named beside every figure.
Limits
We have not plugged a treadmill into a power meter. We own none and we have measured none, so you will not find a table of measured wattages here, and you should treat one on any site that does not say how it was measured with the same suspicion. What we have given you is the arithmetic, the method for reading your own machine's plate, and the reasons the headline horsepower figure will mislead you. That is the part we can stand behind.
If you own a treadmill and a plug-in energy monitor, we would genuinely like your readings, with the model, your weight, the speed and the incline. Send them over. That is how a figure on this page earns a better grade than manufacturer-stated.
Three things cost more than the motor, and none of them is costed here:
- Standby. A treadmill left switched on at the wall draws a small amount continuously. We have not measured standby draw on any machine, so we cannot say what it adds over a year. Switching it off at the socket removes the question.
- The room. Heating a cold garage so the treadmill is usable costs considerably more than the treadmill does.
- A console screen. A large screen draws power of its own, on top of the motor. How much, on any particular machine, is not something we have measured.
Related tools
Looking for a machine rather than a number? See our guide to choosing a treadmill you will actually use. Every specification there carries its source and the date it was checked.