How Much Does an Infrared Sauna Add to Your Electric Bill?

In short, it adds less than most expect. Health Mate estimates that a two-person infrared session costs roughly $0.20–$0.40. Metered testing of a Health Mate Enrich unit backs that up, finding that a full session uses about 1.68 kWh of electricity. So, if you run the sauna three or four times a week, then you’re adding only a few dollars a month to your bill.

The reason it’s so cheap is simple: an infrared sauna warms your body directly instead of heating a whole room of air. Plus, once the cabin is up to temperature, the heaters cycle on and off instead of running flat out.

Below, we break down the truth about the metered numbers, what a session and a month actually cost, where that energy goes, and a few easy ways you can trim the cost further.

The short answer in real numbers

Health Mate’s engineering team metered a two-person Enrich unit through a complete 90-minute session.

That measured 1.68 kWh sits right inside, (in fact just below), the 2–3 kWh per session Health Mate cites in its two-person sauna cost guide. So, the real-world numbers confirm what the site already tells buyers: an efficient two-person cabin is genuinely cheap to run.

Why the rated wattage overstates your real cost

Every sauna lists a rated wattage on its spec sheet. Keep in mind: that figure is the maximum the heaters can pull. That number is useful for sizing a circuit, but it’s misleading as a guide to your bill.

An infrared sauna heats hard during warm-up, but once it reaches your set temperature, the heaters cycle on and off to hold it. If that sounds familiar, there’s a reason for it: that’s exactly the way your home thermostat works.

A two-person cabin is typically rated somewhere around 1.6 to 2.0 kW, yet Health Mate’s test unit averaged just 1.12 kW across the whole session.

If you’re like so many people, if you try to calculate your cost from the rated figure, you’ll overestimate it, and often by a wide margin. Always remember: the number that lands on your bill is the real, cycling average, and not the spec-sheet maximum.

This is probably the single most common reason people assume a home sauna will be too expensive to run when, in practice, it isn’t.

Where the energy actually goes: the warm-up

Test after test has shown that most of a sauna session’s electricity is spent getting the cabin hot, not keeping you warm in it.

Of the 1.68 kWh the unit used over 90 minutes, about 0.94 kWh, more than half, went into the 50-minute warm-up to 133°F. Once the cabin was up to temperature, the rest of the time, the sauna drew only around 0.74 kWh.

That one fact changes how you should think about cost: the cheapest way to run a sauna isn’t necessarily a shorter session. Rather, saving money is in a smarter warm-up period.

If your unit offers scheduled or app-based preheating, start it only as far ahead as you actually need. Additionally, don’t leave it holding temperature while you finish dinner. Trimming 10 or 15 minutes off an unnecessary idle-at-temperature stretch saves more electricity than shaving the same time off the session itself.

What it costs per month

Since a session is a known quantity (about 1.68 kWh on the tested unit), your monthly cost just depends on how often you use it. The table below uses the average US residential rate of about $0.17 per kWh. In high-rate states like California or Hawaii, roughly double these figures.

Over the long run, those numbers stay small. Health Mate estimates about $400–$800 in electricity across five years of regular use. That’s a fraction of what you’d spend on a single year of spa visits. Plus, that’s only a sliver of the sauna’s own purchase price. For a daily wellness habit that you own, the running cost is close to an afterthought.

What about standby power?

A fair question that many ask: does the sauna use electricity when it’s plugged in but idle? Health Mate measured that too. With the heaters off, the tested unit drew just 2.7 watts with Bluetooth audio on standby. That number rose to about 14 watts with both Bluetooth and the interior LED light left on.

In dollars, that’s almost nothing. It comes to roughly $0.65 a month left on standby continuously, or about $3.39 a month if you also left the cabin light on the entire time. In normal use, standby is a rounding error. Of course, as you’ve realized, you can erase even that by switching the light off when you step out.

What drives your sauna’s energy use

If your own numbers come out a little above or below these, it’s usually because of a handful of factors. Cabin size is the biggest one: a four-person unit has more heaters and more air and wood to warm, so it draws more power and takes longer to reach temperature than a two-person cabin.

How long you preheat matters almost as much, since warm-up is the energy-hungry phase.

After that it’s simple arithmetic: how many sessions you run per week, and your local electricity rate. That latter can vary two- or threefold between a low-cost state and a high-cost one. A cold garage also makes the heaters work a little harder than a warm spare room.

None of these turn an infrared sauna into an expensive appliance. Instead, they just nudge the final figure up or down.

Four ways to keep running costs even lower

Don’t leave the light on. The interior LED is the biggest standby energy drain. Switch it off when you step out and standby cost drops to pennies.

Preheat only as long as you need. Warm-up accounts for most of a session’s energy. On Health Mate’s plug-and-play models, you can start the cabin shortly before you’re ready rather than letting it idle at temperature.

Use off-peak hours. If your utility charges time-of-use rates, an evening or late-night session costs less per kWh.

Right-size the sauna. A two-person cabin heats a smaller volume than a four-person one, so it reaches the desired temperature faster and uses less per session. See the full lineup on the Health Mate sauna models page.

Will your model match these numbers?

These figures come from a two-person Enrich unit, so treat them as a foundational baseline rather than an exact number for every sauna.

A four-person cabin with more heaters draws more power and takes longer to warm up, so it lands higher by comparison, while a compact unit may land lower.

The principle holds across the range of saunas, though. Because Health Mate saunas warm the body directly and run at a comfortable 120–140°F rather than the 180°F-plus of a traditional sauna, real-world consumption stays a fraction of what the rated wattage implies.

Many Health Mate models, including the Enrich 2 and Inspire 2, are plug-and-play on a standard 120V outlet. That helps keep installation costs down, giving you one more way to save money.

How to estimate it for your own home

You don’t need an entire science team in a lab to work out your own number. Take the energy a session uses (about 1.68 kWh on the tested two-person unit), multiply by how many sessions you do in a month, then multiply by your local electricity rate. That rate is the price per kWh listed on your utility bill.

To use an example, at $0.17 per kWh and 12 sessions a month, that’s 1.68 × 12 × $0.17, or about $3.40 a month.

Swap in your own rate and session count to have a realistic figure in seconds. Almost always, this will come in below whatever the rated-wattage math predicted. If you want to nail it down to the watt for your exact unit, a cheap plug-in energy monitor will show you the real energy draw of a full session on your own power.

How it compares to things you already run

Numbers in isolation don’t mean much, so it helps to put a sauna session next to the appliances already on your bill.

At roughly 1.68 kWh, a full session uses about what a typical dishwasher cycle does. Running the sauna four times a week costs on the order of what it takes to keep a refrigerator humming, which is basically just a few dollars a week.

An electric clothes dryer can pull more power in a single load than a sauna session uses start to finish. Seen that way, adding a Health Mate sauna to your routine is closer to gaining one more modest appliance than to installing something that reshapes your energy bill. For most households, the wellness payoff dwarfs the handful of dollars it adds each month.

Cheaper than a spa or studio sauna

It’s worth zooming out from the monthly bill to the comparison most buyers actually care about. A single infrared session at a spa or wellness studio typically runs $35 to $60. At home, that same session costs you well under a dollar in electricity. To put it another way, a month of daily home sessions costs roughly what one studio visit does.

Additionally, you skip the booking, the drive, and sharing a cabin with strangers. Across a year of regular use, the electricity to run your own sauna costs less than a handful of studio visits. That’s a big part of why a home sauna pays for itself for anyone who uses it consistently.

Frequently Asked Questions About Infrared Sauna Electricity Cost

How much does it cost to run an infrared sauna per session? On Health Mate’s tested two-person unit, it’s about 1.68 kWh per session. That’s roughly $0.29 at the average US rate and about $0.57 in California.

How much does an infrared sauna cost per month? At three to four sessions a week, it costs about $3.70 to $5.00 a month at the average US rate. Roughly double that for saunas in high-rate states.

Does an infrared sauna use a lot of electricity? No. Because the heaters cycle once up to temperature and infrared warms you directly, real-world use is well below the rated wattage. The electricity an infrared sauna uses is comparable to common household appliances.

Does it use power when it’s not in use? Only a few watts on standby. This comes to about $0.65 a month, or a few dollars if you leave the interior light on.

Why is my sauna’s rated wattage higher than what I actually pay for? Rated wattage is the maximum draw. Once the cabin is warm, the heaters cycle on and off, so your average consumption as well as your bill is lower.

How much of a session’s energy is the warm-up? More than half. On the tested unit, about 0.94 of the 1.68 kWh went into the 50-minute warm-up, so preheating efficiently is the single biggest way to save on cost.

Is it cheaper to run a sauna at home than to visit a spa? Far cheaper to use a sauna at home. A studio session is typically $35–$60. On the other hand, an at-home session costs well under a dollar in electricity, which is why regular users recoup the purchase over time.

Editor’s note (remove before publishing): Figures are from Health Mate’s internal metered test (two-person Enrich unit) in the “SEO Blog – electrical bill” thread; confirm them against the full Electricity Consumption Report PDF, and add the exact Enrich product-page link as an internal link. US avg rate ~$0.17/kWh; California ~$0.34/kWh.