What an infrared sauna costs to run

The short version: an infrared cabin's running cost is its wattage times the hours you run it, times your rate per kilowatt-hour. A one-person cabin at around 1,000 W run for an hour uses about one kilowatt-hour. That is the whole calculation, and it is why infrared is markedly cheaper per session than a traditional room — a 6 kW stove uses six times as much for the same hour, and takes longer to get to temperature.

The arithmetic

1. 1Find the cabin's wattage on the listing. This page's picks publish 905 W to 3,600 W.
2. 2Divide by 1,000 to get kilowatts. A 1,170 W cabin is 1.17 kW.
3. 3Multiply by hours of use, including warm-up. A 40-minute warm-up plus a 30-minute session is about 1.17 hours.
4. 4Multiply by your rate, which is on your electricity bill in cents per kilowatt-hour. Use your actual number — rates vary by more than a factor of three across the US.
5. 5Adjust for the duty cycle. A cabin at temperature cycles its panels rather than drawing full power continuously, so the figure above is the ceiling rather than the average.

Why infrared costs less than a traditional sauna

Two reasons, and neither is efficiency in the engineering sense. First, the target temperature is lower — an infrared cabin runs at 120 to 150 °F where a traditional room runs at 175 to 195 °F, and heating air to a lower ceiling takes less energy. Second, infrared heats you rather than the room, so the useful part of the session starts before the cabin is fully up to temperature. Our infrared vs traditional sauna page covers what that difference feels like, and sauna running costs covers the traditional side of the bill.

What else is on the bill

• The circuit. If your cabin needs a dedicated 20 A circuit and you do not have one, that is an electrician's visit — a one-off cost that dwarfs a year of running.
• Warm-up you do not use. Scheduling or a timer stops you heating an empty cabin. Cabins with app control earn their keep here.
• Standby. Small, but not zero, on cabins with displays and Bluetooth left plugged in.
• Heat you are paying for twice — a cabin in an air-conditioned room in summer means the AC removes what the sauna adds.
• Wear. Panels and controls are the parts that fail; our how long do sauna heaters last page covers the traditional equivalent.

Cutting the cost without cutting sessions

Shorten the warm-up by preheating only as long as the manufacturer suggests rather than an arbitrary hour. Site the cabin somewhere that is not actively fighting it — an unheated garage in January makes every session more expensive, which is one of the arguments in best saunas for garages. Keep the door shut during warm-up, which sounds obvious and is the most common waste. And if the cabin has a timer, use it, because the single largest avoidable cost in this category is heating a cabin nobody gets into.

These are the cabins and the blanket whose published figures sit behind the table above, from a one-person unit on a plug to a three-person cabin on 220 V.

Every pick on this page comes from published specifications, not from hardware we own. Read how we pick — including what spec-led ranking cannot tell you.