How Do Power Outages Affect Households?

Homeowners were more affected by power outages than renters: 28.3% of homeowners reported a power outage compared to 19.9% of renters.

A smaller share of households in urban areas experienced power outages than households in rural areas: 22.8% of households in urban areas compared to 35.4% of those in rural areas.

People dependent on life-sustaining electrical medical equipment are particularly vulnerable during power outages.

Around 14.5 million households reported having medical devices that require electricity to operate. Nearly a third of these households (31.6%) were affected by power outages.

Power outages can pose unique challenges for individuals with disabilities and their caretakers. In 2023, 28.2% or 8.6 million of the more than 30 million households with at least one person with a disability reported experiencing a power outage in the previous 12 months.

Of the 15 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, Detroit was the most affected with 44.8% of households reporting a power outage in the last 12 months. The San Francisco (36.3%) and Seattle (29.3%) metropolitan areas rounded out the group of metropolitan areas with percentages higher than the national average of 25.4%.

On the other end, only 135,000 households in the Miami metropolitan area (5.8%) reported a power outage. The New York metropolitan area was the second lowest, with only 885,000 or 11.2% of its estimated 7.9 million households reporting being without power at some point in the previous 12 months. 

Households that reported a power outage were further asked about difficulties it caused.

Power outages can make it difficult to keep working with so many electronic devices that rely on a power source. And according to the AHS, 2.4 million housing units had someone who missed work because of a power outage. This represents 7.9% of households that both experienced an outage and had at least one person in the household working.

When the electricity goes out, so does the refrigerator which can lead to food and medicine spoilage during long outages. The Food and Drug Administration advises that food that requires refrigeration is no longer safe to consume if a power outage lasts at least four hours, and recommends consumers throw out refrigerated medicine if outages last a day or more unless the drug label states otherwise.

Around 14% of households (4.9 million housing units) that experienced an outage said they had food that spoiled, and 705,000 households or 2.9% of those with refrigerated medicine said their medicine spoiled.

Power outages can lead to additional expenses like an overnight hotel stay or needing to hire a contractor to repair frozen pipes or a flooded basement because of a sump pump failure.

About 2.9 million households (8.4%) reported they had to stay away from home overnight due to a power outage.

Frozen pipes affected an estimated 673,000 housing units in the previous 12 months. And about 343,000 households reported water collected in their basement or crawl space because their sump pump stopped working due to a power outage.   

AHS is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is the United States’ most comprehensive housing survey, providing information on the physical condition of homes and neighborhoods; the costs of financing and maintaining homes; and the characteristics of people who live in these homes over time.

All comparative statements have undergone statistical testing and, unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are statistically significant at the 10% significance level.

More information on confidentiality protection, methodology, sampling and nonsampling error and definitions is available on the AHS page.