Care home energy use per bed: what is published, and how to measure yours

What is published, and what is not

There are three places an operator might look for a benchmark. None of them gives a per-bed figure for residential care.

• CIBSE TM46 and Display Energy Certificates. TM46 sets operational energy benchmarks in kilowatt-hours per square metre per year, for electricity and for fossil-thermal fuel, across building categories. It is the basis on which Display Energy Certificates rate a public building. It does not report per bed, so you need the floor area of the home and the CIBSE publication itself.
• DESNZ and Carbon Trust datasets. The public non-domestic energy datasets we searched on 29 October 2026 do not break residential care out per bed. If you know of one, tell us and we will cite it.
• Commercial energy brokers. A few publish size tables. The one we checked, EnergyCosts.co.uk (page marked as updated 6 October 2026), gives annual electricity by size band but states no source for the usage figures. Another broker states that a typical 20-bed care home uses "around 395,000 kWh of energy per year" with no split between electricity and gas and no source.

So the honest position is: the per-bed numbers below are a sanity check built from an unsourced table, and the only figure that matters for your decision is your own.

The broker table, divided by beds

The table below reproduces the broker's usage bands and shows our arithmetic. We divided each band by the number of beds it describes. For the medium and large bands we used the midpoint of the bed range (40 and 90) because dividing the extremes against each other gives a spread of 1,167 to 7,000 kWh per bed that tells you nothing.

All three bands land in roughly the same place, 1,700 to 3,500 kWh of electricity per bed per year. That consistency is a product of how the table was built, not evidence that the figure is right. Note the same broker's cost table uses a 27p per kWh electricity assumption; at that rate the range is about £470 to £950 per bed per year, which sits inside the modelled £480 to £1,300 on our care home energy costs per bed page.

Why per bed misleads

Three things move a care home's electricity use more than its bed count.

• How the building is heated and how hot water is made. Electric heating or electric hot water can double electricity use against a gas-heated home of the same size. Always separate electricity from heating fuel before comparing.
• On-site laundry and kitchens. A home that washes all its own linen and cooks from scratch runs commercial machines for much of the day. A home that outsources laundry does not.
• Resident dependency. Nursing and dementia settings run hoists, profiling beds, pressure mattresses, call systems and medication fridges continuously. Sheltered housing and extra-care schemes put much of the domestic load on residents' own meters, not the landlord supply.

Compare like with like: your own homes against each other, a dementia unit against a dementia unit. If you want to compare against the published benchmarks, use the per-square-metre method and the CIBSE tables rather than bed counts.

How to get your own number

1. Collect twelve months of electricity. The kWh figure on twelve consecutive bills works. Half-hourly data from your supplier or smart meter portal is better, because it shows the daytime and overnight split.
2. Divide by registered beds (or by occupied beds if you want the figure per resident) and note which you used.
3. Record heating fuel separately (gas, oil, electric). A home on gas has two numbers, not one.
4. Check the unit rate on your bill. A rate well above 27p per kWh or a high standing charge changes the £ per bed without changing the kWh.

If you are heading toward solar, half-hourly data is the single most useful thing to have, because it shows how much of what an array generates the building would use at the time. Our care home solar cost ladder shows what arrays of different sizes cost, and the care home solar grants and funding page shows the tax, VAT and rates routes that apply.

What size of array covers part of your electricity

Solar generation is seasonal and daytime-weighted. The Midlands yield used here, about 970 kWh per kWp per year, comes from the EU's PVGIS v5.3 tool at 35 degrees tilt, due south, with 14 per cent system losses: Leicester 981, Birmingham 968, Nottingham 970, Shrewsbury 971 and Northampton 1,017 kWh per kWp. Sites further south or further north differ by around ten per cent; run PVGIS for your postcode. The calculator above uses 970 and tells you the array that would generate 30, 40 and 50 per cent of your annual electricity over a year.

That is annual generation, not annual savings. A care home runs round the clock, so a high share of the generation is used on site, but exactly how much depends on the half-hourly profile, roof orientation and shading. For the full picture of what a project looks like for a home, see the guide to solar panels for care homes, and for the tax relief on the spend, the capital allowances for care home solar page.

Claims table

Every figure on this page, with its type. Published means a number someone else printed; derived means our arithmetic on a published number; assumed means an input you can change.

Cite this page as: SEO Dons, "Care home energy use per bed: what is published, and how to measure yours", solarpanelsforcarehomes.co.uk/care-home-energy-benchmark/, last verified 29 October 2026.