Budget and prices
What a home office workstation costs per year
Depreciation, electricity and the parts that wear out. A $900 workstation kept five years costs about $207 a year, or 83 cents a working day.
The running cost of a home office is almost never the electricity, and almost always the fact that the chair was replaced after 3 years. This guide separates the two so you can see which one your habits create.
Four numbers go into it: what the equipment cost, how long you keep it, what it draws while it is on, and the parts that wear out before the whole does. Every price below is an example used to show the arithmetic, and the electricity rate is the published national average rather than yours.
Depreciation is the big number
Spreading the purchase over the years you keep it is one division, and it dominates everything else in this guide. A $900 workstation kept 5 years is $180 a year. The same $900 replaced after 3 years is $300 a year, and kept for 8 years it is $112.50.
The spread between those is $187.50 a year on identical equipment, which is roughly seven times the electricity figure in the next section. Nothing you do with power settings approaches the effect of the chair lasting eight years instead of three.
This is also the honest argument for the budget split in the choose guide on this site. Putting 45% of a $900 budget into the chair is $405, and a chair that reaches year eight turns that $405 into about $51 a year. A chair that is replaced in year three turns the same $405 into $135.
| Total spend | Kept 3 years | Kept 5 years | Kept 8 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $166.67 | $100.00 | $62.50 |
| $900 | $300.00 | $180.00 | $112.50 |
| $1,500 | $500.00 | $300.00 | $187.50 |
Each cell is the spend divided by the years, with no resale subtracted. A chair or monitor sold on simply moves you to a cheaper row.
Electricity is smaller than you think, unless nothing sleeps
Take a laptop and one monitor as an example drawing 75 W together while in use. Eight hours a day for 250 working days is 75 x 8 x 250 / 1,000, which is 150 kWh. At $0.18 per kWh, rounded from the 18.16 cents the EIA's Electric Power Monthly reports as the average U.S. residential price for August 2026, that is $27.00 a year.
The same equipment left awake 12 hours a day every day of the year is 328.5 kWh and $59.13. Left running 24 hours a day it is 657 kWh and $118.26, which is 4.4 times the working-hours figure for exactly the same work.
That multiplier is the whole of the energy advice. The sleep timer is worth more than the efficiency rating, which the next section puts a number on.
| Usage pattern | kWh per year | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| 75 W, 8 hours a day, 250 working days | 150 kWh | $27.00 |
| 75 W, 12 hours a day, 365 days | 328.5 kWh | $59.13 |
| 75 W, 24 hours a day, 365 days | 657 kWh | $118.26 |
The 75 W is an assumption for a laptop and one monitor in use, not a measurement of named equipment. Read your own figure with a plug-in meter if the number matters to you.
What the efficiency label is worth at this scale
ENERGY STAR states that monitors earning the label are on average 7% more energy efficient than standard options, and that certified computer monitors must meet a total energy consumption requirement covering On Mode and Sleep Mode that varies with screen area and resolution.
Apply that 7% to the $27.00 working-hours figure and the saving is about $1.89 a year. Apply it to the 24-hour case and it is about $8.28. The label is a real and verified difference, and at household scale it is a smaller lever than the sleep timer by a wide margin.
The reason to prefer a certified monitor is therefore not the dollar figure. It is that the certification requires measured behaviour in Sleep and Off modes, which is the behaviour the previous section showed to be worth four times more than the On-mode draw.
- 7% of the $27.00 working-hours case: about $1.89 a year
- 7% of the $59.13 twelve-hour case: about $4.14 a year
- 7% of the $118.26 always-on case: about $8.28 a year
- Setting the display to sleep after 10 minutes moves you between rows, which is worth more than all three
The parts that wear out before the workstation does
A chair usually fails at the gas cylinder, and a standard replacement is an example $35 part fitted in about 15 minutes with no specialist tool. Replacing a cylinder on a $405 chair in year five keeps it in the eight-year column, which is worth about $84 a year on the depreciation table above.
The other recurring items are smaller and more predictable: a keyboard or mouse every few years at an example $40 the pair, and a monitor arm bought once at an example $60 that outlives the monitor it was bought for.
Put together on the example figures, consumables and small parts come to roughly $25 a year across a five-year period. That is close to the electricity figure and a seventh of the depreciation, which is the ranking this whole guide keeps arriving at.
The whole year in one line
On the examples used throughout: $180 of depreciation on a $900 workstation kept 5 years, $27.00 of electricity at working hours, and about $25 of parts. That is roughly $232 a year, or about $0.93 per working day across 250 days.
Prices drift underneath all of this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the all items consumer price index up 3.7% over the 12 months ending September 2026, so a replacement bought three years from now is not the same number as the one in the table. That is an argument for the eight-year column, not for buying sooner.
Change one input at a time and the order holds in nearly every household: how long you keep it, then what wears out, then what it draws. A household trying to cut the running cost of a home office by changing power settings is working on the smallest of the three.
Before you buy
- Total what the desk, chair and screens actually cost, including the ones bought separately
- Decide the number of years you expect to keep each item and divide
- Put your own electricity rate from a recent bill in place of $0.18 per kWh
- Meter the desk for 24 hours instead of using the assumed 75 W
- Set the display sleep timer to 10 minutes and the computer sleep to 30
- Check whether the chair takes a standard gas cylinder before deciding it is worn out
- Write the annual total on one line and compare it to the per-working-day figure
Questions readers ask
- Should I count the laptop in the workstation cost?
- Only the share that belongs to the desk. If the laptop is also your personal machine, splitting it in half and spreading that half over its life is closer to the truth than either counting all of it or none of it. The method is the same division: price, divided by years, divided by the share of use.
- Is it cheaper to leave the computer on than to restart it?
- No, on the arithmetic above. Leaving a 75 W setup awake 24 hours a day costs $118.26 a year against $27.00 for working hours only, a difference of over $90. Startup draws a brief surge measured in seconds, which does not come close to 16 extra hours of idle draw each day.
- How much does a second monitor add?
- Assume about 25 W in use for a typical desktop monitor. Eight hours a day for 250 days is 50 kWh, or $9.00 a year at $0.18 per kWh, plus its own depreciation. A $225 second monitor kept 5 years is $45 a year, so the purchase is five times the running cost.
- Does an ENERGY STAR monitor pay back the price difference?
- Rarely on energy alone, since 7% of a $27.00 annual bill is about $1.89. The certification is useful because it tests Sleep and Off mode behaviour, and the gap between a monitor that sleeps properly and one that does not is worth far more than the 7%.
- What is the cheapest way to cut the annual figure?
- Keep the chair. On the depreciation table, moving a $900 workstation from the three-year column to the eight-year column saves $187.50 a year, which is about seven times the entire working-hours electricity bill. A $35 gas cylinder is usually what makes that possible.
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration - Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3: average residential retail price 18.16 cents per kWh, August 2026 — checked 2026-11-03
- ENERGY STAR - Monitors (certified monitors average 7% more energy efficient; total energy consumption requirement covering On Mode and Sleep Mode) — checked 2026-11-03
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - Consumer Price Index news release, September 2026 (all items up 3.7% over 12 months) — checked 2026-11-03
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