At the latest surveyed prices, the week of March 30, 2026, a season of heat for the typical home costs about $4,462 on oil, $3,766 on propane, and $3,335 on a cold-climate heat pump. The cheapest of the three right now is a heat pump; the dearest is oil, by $1,127 a season.
That ordering is a snapshot, not a law. The three fuels price on different clocks: oil moves with the world market week to week, propane follows it loosely with its own delivery economics, and electricity moves in slow administrative steps. The gaps between them have closed and reopened repeatedly, which is why this page's figures rebuild from the latest survey on every refresh rather than being written down once.
Propane's Seat at the Table
Propane is the fuel the oil-versus-heat-pump argument forgets, and in the hills it is the argument. Natural gas mains reach only 39 of these 101 towns; in the other 62, the piped option does not exist, and the choice is delivered oil, delivered propane, electricity or wood. The census says propane is already the leading heat in 6 towns, Goshen, Cummington, Windsor, Washington, Tyringham, New Ashford, and the second fuel in much of the rest of the hilltowns, where oil leads in 58 towns region-wide.
Its season cost has its own history, thinner than oil's because the survey added it later:
2001 to the latest survey week, between $1,114 and $4,000
Two practical notes that the clean comparison hides. Propane burns cleaner than oil and the equipment runs cheaper, which is part of why new construction off the gas grid nearly always chooses it; and propane pricing is a delivered, negotiated market where the tank's ownership changes your price, so two neighbours can pay meaningfully different rates for the same gallon. The survey figure is the state average; your contract is the number that matters.
What This Does Not Mean
A season-cost comparison at one week's prices does not decide a conversion. Equipment, installation, your house's electrical service and how cold your particular valley runs all sit outside it, and the heat pump line assumes a cold-climate unit doing the whole job, which in the region's leakiest old houses is itself a question for an installer. What the three figures do settle is the direction of the argument this season, and the thirty-five year record of the oil-against-heat-pump comparison flipping is the reason to check it again next year.
The live figures, updated with each survey week, are on the heat index and this week's numbers. What a whole winter has cost, every season since 1990, is the long record.
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration. Weekly residential heating oil and propane prices and monthly residential electricity prices, priced through the heat index's typical-home model.
- U.S. Census Bureau. The dominant home heating fuel in each town, from the American Community Survey.
"Figures through" is the period the publisher's data describes; "checked" is only when we last asked. The full sourcing: sources and method.