LED Neon vs Glass Neon Energy Costs: What a Sign Adds to Your Power Bill

“How much will it add to my electric bill?” is a question we hear most often from business owners planning to run a sign twelve hours a day, and occasionally from a spouse doing due diligence on a man cave purchase. Fair question either way, and the answer happens to be one of the biggest practical differences between LED neon and traditional glass neon. Let’s do the math in public with real figures.

The per-foot numbers

Neon signs are priced and powered by tube length, so wattage per foot is the number that matters:

• LED neon flex: roughly 3 to 4 watts per foot, per Neon Filter’s energy guide.
• Traditional glass neon: around 20 watts per foot, per the same guide, and Voodoo Neon’s testing puts LED at roughly 80 to 90 percent less electricity than glass for the same design.
• Electricity price: the average US residential rate is around 18 cents per kilowatt hour in 2026, per EIA projections.

This mirrors LED lighting generally: the Department of Energy says LEDs use at least 75 percent less energy than the incandescent technology they replaced.

What a real sign costs to run

Take a mid-size 30 to 35 inch sign with roughly 10 feet of lit tube, like our Cheers Beer Mugs sign. Using the per-foot figures above and the 18 cent rate, here is the estimate:

• LED version, 6 hours a night: about 40 watts, 0.24 kWh a day, roughly $1.30 a month. A year of nightly glow costs about what one coffee does.
• Same sign in glass, 6 hours a night: about 200 watts, 1.2 kWh a day, roughly $6.50 a month, call it $79 a year.
• Business use, 12 hours daily: LED lands near $32 a year. Glass lands near $158 a year, per sign, every year.

Scale matters. One glass sign is an annoyance on the bill. A storefront running three of them for a decade has quietly spent thousands of dollars on electricity that an LED equivalent would have delivered for a few hundred.

The hidden energy costs of glass

Wattage is not the whole story. Glass neon runs on high-voltage transformers in the 3kV to 18kV range, per Engineering World’s comparison, and those transformers are components that wear out and cost real money to replace. They also shed heat, which is wasted energy by definition. LED neon runs on a low-voltage adapter that plugs into a standard outlet, stays cool to the touch, and costs about as much as a phone charger to replace if it ever dies. We ranked what actually fails on these signs in our lifespan guide.

Dimming pays you back twice

Every sign we sell ships with a remote dimmer, and dimming is not just mood control. Run an LED sign at half brightness and you cut its draw further while extending the life of the chips. A dimmed LED neon sign in a bedroom is drawing less power than the phone charger on the nightstand next to it.

The bottom line

Electricity should not decide whether you buy a neon sign; on the LED side the running cost rounds to pocket change. But it should absolutely decide which technology you buy if you are choosing between LED and glass for a sign that runs every day. We covered the rest of that decision, look, lifespan, price, in LED versus traditional glass neon, and the purchase prices themselves in our 2026 cost guide.