Understanding the EU Energy Label

Walk into any appliance page on this site and you’ll see a letter, A through G, sitting next to a kWh figure. It looks simple. It is simple, once you know what it’s actually measuring.

What the letter means

The EU energy label rates how efficiently an appliance uses energy for its size and category, not how much energy it uses in absolute terms. A is the most efficient, G the least. Since the March 2021 rescale, the old A+, A++ and A+++ tiers are gone, every appliance sold in the EU carries a straight A-to-G rating, and manufacturers had to genuinely improve their best models to reach A again.

That rescale is also why you’ll rarely see an A-rated appliance yet: regulators deliberately left headroom at the top so the scale doesn’t get squeezed the same way it did last time.

The number that actually predicts your bill

The letter alone doesn’t tell you what you’ll pay. Look for the accompanying figure:

• Annual energy (kWh/yr) for appliances that run continuously or on a fixed daily pattern, refrigerators and freezers.
• Energy per 100 cycles (kWh) for appliances you run occasionally, washing machines and dishwashers. Divide by 100 to get the per-cycle figure, then multiply by how often you actually run it.

Two models can share the same letter and still differ by a fifth or more on this number, because the letter is a relative grade within a size band, while the kWh figure is the absolute number your electricity meter cares about. We publish both on every spec page, and our running-cost calculator turns either one into an actual annual cost using your own tariff.

Category-specific companions to the label

A few categories carry extra label metrics worth knowing:

• Washing machines and dishwashers run their test cycle on ECO 40-60 or an equivalent eco programme, the slow, efficient cycle the energy figures are based on, not the fast “daily” cycle you might actually use day to day.
• Tumble dryers carry a separate condensation class, A to G, that measures how well the machine keeps moisture out of the room rather than how much electricity it uses.
• Washing machines also show a spin efficiency class, which predicts how damp your laundry comes out and therefore how much extra drying it’ll need afterwards.

The one rule that matters most

Energy class is only comparable within the same appliance category. A’s threshold for a dishwasher is not the same threshold as A for a washing machine or a fridge, they’re calculated against entirely different reference values. That’s a hard rule in how we build every category page and the compare tool here: you can only ever compare energy class, and every other spec, within one category at a time.