New Hampshire residents use several different options when heating their homes — heating oil, propane, gas, electricity, wood — but they all share one thing this year: higher prices.
Consider heating oil, used by more than one-third of New Hampshire’s homes. Northern New England leads the country in terms of how many of us burn fuel oil No. 2 in our furnaces.
Last year at this time, heating oil was around $3.30 a gallon in New England, according to the federal Energy Information Agency. It rose to over $5 a gallon in March of this year after American and Israeli attacks led Iran to block the Straight of Hormuz, sending the cost of crude oil soaring.
Official data for the fall won’t be released until early October, but prices from Concord-area dealers are still above $5 a gallon, with a statewide average sitting at $5.28 as of early September, according to the state Department of Energy.
There’s no indication that costs will go down this winter. For one thing, the nation’s stockpile of distillate fuels, which includes heating oil, is below the five-year average, according to the EIA.
Things are a little better, but not much, if you use propane. It was around $3.50 a gallon in October 2025 and averages slightly over $4 a gallon in New Hampshire this month, according to the state.
Natural gas, which the state says is the cheapest way to heat a home in New Hampshire, is also going up in price. However, as a regulated utility, it requires state approval. Liberty Utilities raised its natural gas rates last April by almost 50%, and Northern Utilities is seeking a 14% rate hike.
All of these products are made from crude oil or as a byproduct of the industry, so it’s no surprise they’re going up as prices of oil have hovered around $100 a barrel since the start of the Iran war. That is most obvious from the price rise of transportation fuels.
Gasoline is more than $4 a gallon in New Hampshire now, and diesel fuel is well above $5 a gallon. The latter is perhaps more significant because the bulk of the nation’s heavy transportation trucks use diesel, so its price increase filters down into almost everything we buy.
Electricity is increasingly used as a heat source with the spread of heat pumps, which have the unique advantage of also providing air conditioning in summer. It is the second-cheapest way to heat a home, according to the state, but it is also getting more expensive.
The state’s three investor-owned electric companies all increased their supply charge for the six-month winter rate. Eversource, by far the state’s largest electricity supplier, has a winter rate of 17.32 cents per kilowatt-hour this year, 10% higher than last year’s rate and 40% higher than the year before that. The other half of people’s power bill, covering distribution and transmission, has also risen steadily over recent years.
Wood, still used as the main heating source by about one residence out of every 20 in the state, has seen the price of wood pellets approaching $400 a ton at many suppliers, up roughly $50 from the price at this time last year. The price and quality of firewood vary so widely it’s difficult to summarize, but the assumption is that more people will depend on it to avoid the rising cost of other fuels.
