What does it cost to run a gas grill?

Running a gas grill costs cents per burner-hour, not dollars. A 31,000 BTU grill with every burner wide open burns about a dollar of propane an hour at $3.00 a gallon, and roughly half that on natural gas at typical utility rates. Nobody runs wide open for long, so real cooks land under those figures. The two tables below do the arithmetic for common burner ratings and fuel prices. Bring your own price: the propane number is on your refill receipt, and the natural gas number is on your utility bill.

A quick cost table

Both tables are computed from one published reference. EIA puts propane at 91,452 Btu per gallon and defines a therm of natural gas as 100,000 Btu. A burner's rating says how many Btu it burns in an hour at maximum, so cost per hour is the rating divided by the energy in a unit of fuel, times what you paid for that unit. The prices across the top are scenarios, not market claims. Find your own on the receipt or the bill and read down the nearest column.

Every cell assumes the burners run flat out from first minute to last, which only preheat does. Treat the figures as ceilings for the hour, the mirror of the propane runtime table, where the same assumption makes its hours a floor.

How to read the table against a real grill

The 31k row is there for a reason: Weber rates the Spirit E-325's three main burners at a combined 31,000 BTU per hour, which makes it a clean worked example. Wide open on $3.00 propane, that grill burns about a dollar an hour. Most cooks include a short full-output preheat and lower settings afterward, so use the table with your own burner pattern rather than treating the maximum as a forecast.

Two things move your number off the table. Burners you are not using cost nothing, so a three-burner grill running one burner for smoking sits near the 10k row, not its own rating. And the ratings on different spec sheets count different burners, so check whether a side burner or sear burner is inside the headline figure before you pick your row. How many BTUs a gas grill needs covers that counting trap in full.

Where your own price comes from

Propane by refill is priced per gallon, straight off the receipt. Propane by exchange takes one extra step: divide what you paid by the gallons in the fill, and remember an exchange tank typically hands you 15 pounds, about three and a half gallons, rather than a full 20 pound fill. The runtime guide covers that gap and how to weigh what is left.

Natural gas billing is friendlier than it looks. Utility bills price gas per therm or per Ccf; EIA's conversion puts a Ccf of natural gas at about 1.037 therms. Convert a Ccf rate before using the table rather than treating the units as identical. Include delivery charges if you want the full marginal fuel cost.

What the gap between the tables buys

At the scenario prices, natural gas runs an hour of the same burner for roughly a third to half of propane's cost. That gap is real and it is also small money: the difference on a dollar-an-hour grill is a few hundred dollars over a decade of heavy weekend cooking, not a purchase-deciding sum on its own.

The honest accounting puts the plumbing on the other side of the ledger. A natural gas grill needs a factory natural gas SKU and a plumbed line to the patio, run by a licensed professional, and often a permit. If the line already exists, the cheaper fuel and the tank that never runs dry are free wins, and the Spirit E-325 review covers a grill sold both ways. If the line does not exist, the install costs years of the fuel savings, and propane wins by default. Fuel cost is the tiebreaker here, never the argument.

Fuel cost is usually a tiebreaker rather than the reason to choose a grill. Start with the food you cook, the space you have, and how the grill is built on the gas grills page, then size the tank plan with the propane runtime table.