Use this page to check 24-inch monitor electricity consumption for your own 24-inch monitor: enter your wattage, hours of use per day and electricity rate, and press Calculate. You see your daily, monthly and yearly cost plus your yearly kWh consumption. Those same results also cover 24-inch monitor power consumption.
Wondering what your desk screen adds to the power bill? 24-inch monitor electricity consumption usually works out to a few dollars a year, and the exact figure depends on the display's brightness, panel and how many hours you leave it on. This guide shows how to turn a wattage rating into kilowatt-hours and dollars, so you can check your own screen in minutes.
Monitor power consumption is one of the lighter loads on a modern desk, and a 24-inch screen sits at the modest end of it. Most models sit well below a desktop tower, and far below a space heater or a gaming rig. Still, a monitor often runs eight hours a day, so the small number adds up. The table below uses one reference display, a 24-inch IPS office panel that draws 21.8 W at normal brightness, run 7.5 hours a day at an electricity rate of $0.1734 per kWh.
| Scenario | Draw | kWh per year | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dimmed to about 40% brightness | 16.3 W | 44.62 kWh | $7.74 |
| Normal brightness (reference) | 21.8 W | 59.68 kWh | $10.35 |
| Full brightness | 29.6 W | 81.03 kWh | $14.05 |
| HDR content playing | 38.2 W | 104.57 kWh | $18.13 |
| Standby for the other 16.5 hours | 0.4 W | 2.41 kWh | $0.42 |
The spread between the dimmest and the HDR row is more than $10 a year for one screen. Multiply that by a shared office with ten desks and the choice of settings starts to matter for the whole building.
Two units cause most of the confusion. A watt measures how fast a device draws electricity at one moment. A kilowatt-hour measures how much it used over time, and it is the unit your utility bills you in. One kilowatt-hour is the energy used by a 1,000 W load running for one hour, so a 21.8 W screen needs about 46 hours to use a single unit. That is why the monthly cost of a monitor looks tiny next to an air conditioner, even though both are quoted in watts.
The rated number on the back of a display is a ceiling, not a promise. The average wattage you actually see depends on what the screen shows, but panel construction sets the range. A 24-inch model usually lands somewhere between the high teens and the mid thirties in everyday use, while bright or high-refresh panels can climb past that. Treat the figure in your user manual as a starting point and the manufacturer's specifications page as the place to find typical usage and peak usage listed separately, since total power consumption follows the typical figure far more closely. Compare with how much energy does a 32-inch led tv use.
Almost every current 24-inch screen is an LCD panel lit by an LED array. The liquid crystal layer barely uses power; the backlight does most of the work, which is why brightness moves the wattage so much. Older fluorescent backlighting was less efficient, so replacing a decade-old screen with a modern LED model often cuts the draw by a quarter or more.
A higher resolution packs more pixels behind the same glass, and a 4K panel needs a stronger backlight to look as bright as a Full HD one. The panel type matters too: IPS panels trade a little efficiency for colour accuracy, TN panels are usually frugal, and an OLED screen draws less on dark content and more on a white page. An ultrawide panel has more area to light, and portable monitors are built for a few watts over USB-C, so neither is a fair comparison with a 24-inch desktop model.
An office panel is tuned for text, moderate brightness and low cost, while a gaming monitor adds high refresh rates, higher peak brightness and sometimes extra lighting. That extra hardware means a gaming display can draw half again as much as an office screen of the same size. The bigger gaming bill, though, tends to come from the computer behind the screen rather than the panel itself, which the refresh rate section below explains.
Turning wattage into a bill takes one multiplication chain. First convert watts and hours into kilowatt-hours, then multiply by your rate:
$$\text{kWh per day} = \frac{\text{Watts} \times \text{Hours used per day}}{1000}$$
$$\text{Cost} = \text{kWh} \times \text{Rate per kWh}$$
With the reference screen, 21.8 W × 7.5 hours = 163.5 Wh, which is 0.1635 kWh per day. At $0.1734 per kWh that is about $0.0284 per day. The same screen uses 4.97 kWh in an average month and 59.68 kWh over a year.
Two inputs change the answer more than any spec sheet: hours used per day and the electricity rate on your statement. Enter partial hours as decimals, so 45 minutes becomes 0.75. For the rate, read the supply charge from your bill rather than guessing, since the average rate in one state can be half or double that in another. Use the all-in price per unit, including delivery, if you want the number that matches your bill.
The reference display produces these totals, and you can swap in any wattage to compare screens.
| Period | Energy used | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Per day | 0.1635 kWh | $0.0284 |
| Per month | 4.97 kWh | $0.86 |
| Per year | 59.68 kWh | $10.35 |
The monitor energy usage calculator on this page follows the formula above, so you can calculate a result without doing the arithmetic. Any monitor energy calculator of this kind needs the same three inputs, and getting each one right matters more than rounding:
Press the button and the tool returns the daily, monthly and yearly energy usage in kWh, along with the matching cost. If you only know the screen size, start with a typical 24-inch figure and refine it later with a measured reading. An electricity usage monitor (a plug-in meter) gives that measured number for a few dollars, and the next sections explain how to use one.
The same screen can use very different amounts of power from one hour to the next. Three settings explain most of the difference, and all of them are under your control.
Brightness is the biggest lever. Our reference screen drops from 29.6 W at full brightness to 16.3 W at about 40%, a saving of 13.3 W with no extra hardware. Most people run a panel far brighter than a room needs, particularly in the evening. Set the level by eye against the light around you, and use an automatic sensor if the screen has one.
HDR asks the backlight to produce brief, very bright highlights, and the draw can rise by half or more while it plays. If you only watch HDR video occasionally, the cost is negligible. If the screen runs HDR all day because it is switched on in the operating system, turn it off for office work and keep it for films and games.
A higher refresh rate changes the screen's own draw only slightly, but it can wake a graphics card into a busier state. The GPU in a desktop tower may add tens of watts at the wall, which dwarfs the display. A laptop sees the same effect as a shorter battery life whenever its GPU ramps up, and even an idle machine draws more at a high rate than at 60 Hz. Running the desktop at 60 Hz for text work and switching to a high rate only for games keeps the whole system quieter and cheaper.
Dana, a freelance copy editor, is trading a spare bedroom for a rented desk and wants to know whether the 24-inch screen she leaves on all day is worth switching off during her long reading blocks. A plug-in meter reads 24.7 W at her usual brightness, and she works about 9.25 hours a day. Her latest statement shows $0.2189 per kWh, delivery included.
She enters 24.7 for the power, 9.25 for the hours and 0.2189 for the price, then presses the calculate button. The tool converts the monitor power consumption to 0.2285 kWh a day, which comes to 83.39 kWh and $18.25 over 365 days, or about $1.52 a month.
Before trusting the figure, she compares the screen's draw with the rating in its manual and finds it sits under the stated maximum, so the meter reading is plausible. Then she changes one input. Lowering brightness to roughly 55% brings the meter to 19.9 W, and the calculator now reports 67.19 kWh and $14.71 a year, a saving of $3.55 for one screen.
That last line settles it. The saving is small, but the lower setting looks fine for editing text on a white page, so she keeps it. Her next step is to rerun the calculator with the standby reading from her meter, which is the only input she has not yet checked.
A spec sheet cannot reflect your brightness, content or room. Measuring takes about ten minutes and replaces a guess about your real electricity use with a number you can feed into the calculator. Next, look at how much electricity does a gaming pc use.
Place a plug-in watt meter between the wall and the monitor, wait for the reading to settle, and record it. Record a baseline at the brightness you normally use, then repeat at your lowest and highest settings. Take the readings with only the screen on the meter, so the computer's draw does not mix into the result.
A smart plug that logs energy is slower to react but ideal for long runs. Leave the screen on it for a week and read the total kWh; it will include lunch breaks, overnight standby and weekends, so the figure reflects real life. A power meter of either kind also shows whether a screen that looks off is still drawing current.
A screen spends many hours not showing anything, and those hours are not free. In sleep mode a panel waits for a signal, and in standby or off mode it keeps the power supply and a small controller alive. Our reference model draws about 0.4 W while waiting, which adds up to 2.41 kWh a year across 16.5 idle hours a day. Those small continuous drains are often called vampire loads. A certified energy efficient screen keeps them to a watt or two, and a higher number is a reason to look for a faulty setting. Each unit is small, but a floor of forty screens multiplies it.
The cheapest saving is simply running the screen less brightly and for fewer hours. Dimming the reference display by 5.5 W over 7.5 hours a day saves about 15.06 kWh a year, or $2.61. That is modest for one desk, yet it costs nothing and applies to every screen in a household or an office. The bigger savings usually come from the computer, so treat the screen as one piece of the overall energy consumption of the desk rather than the whole electricity bill. Compare with how much electricity does a wifi booster use.
Turn on the screen's energy-saving features: an eco picture mode, automatic brightness and a short sleep timer. A dark theme can help on OLED and some other panels, because dark pixels need little light. Check these options in the on-screen menu, since many monitors ship with the most power-hungry profile enabled.
Set the computer to blank the screen after five or ten minutes of inactivity, so a forgotten display does not stay lit overnight. For devices that sit unused for days, unplugging them or using a power strip with a switch removes the standby draw entirely. Combined with a sensible brightness level and an energy-efficient model on the next technology upgrade, with idle desks switched off, this keeps the cost of a modern 24-inch display low, whether it sits on an office desk or beside a TV in a bedroom workspace. This is the part of 24-inch monitor electricity consumption you can actually control.