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 for washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and televisions, and most major appliance categories now carry a straight A-to-G rating, with manufacturers having had to genuinely improve their best models to reach A again.

Two categories we cover haven’t made that jump: ovens and air conditioners still carry the legacy A+++-to-D label, so an oven’s “A+” is not the same claim as a washing machine’s “A.” Tumble dryers moved over more recently than the rest, Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/2534 made the rescaled A-to-G label the only one legal to display from 1 July 2025, so an older “A+++” badge you still see on a dryer may already be retired rather than accurate.

Even inside a category that has rescaled, A isn’t automatically rare or automatically common, it depends entirely on how hard that category’s own scale was reset. In our own database, all five washing machines we track land at A and so do the top dishwashers, but the best refrigerator we track only reaches D, because fridges were rescaled the hardest and regulators deliberately left A and B almost empty there. We break that category-by-category gap down in full here: the letter alone tells you nothing until you know which scale, and which category, you’re reading it on.

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.

A concrete example from our own dishwasher data: the Siemens iQ700 SN27TI02CE uses 54 kWh per 100 cycles, the AEG 6000 SatelliteClean FSS64907Z uses 75 kWh per 100 cycles, and both are 13-to-14-place-setting machines. That 21 kWh gap per 100 cycles works out to roughly 44 kWh a year on a household running four dishwasher loads a week, a real difference on your bill that the energy class letter alone never shows you.

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. An A energy class is a band of scores, not one fixed value, which is exactly why four A-class washing machines in our own database share the identical letter while their real water and energy use per load still spreads noticeably: the class confirms a machine cleared a similar bar, not that two A-rated machines behave identically once you check the absolute figures. We publish both the class and the underlying figure 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. That trade-off is bigger than it looks: the most efficient dishwasher eco cycle in our database also runs the longest, close to five hours, because washing at a lower temperature for longer is what actually cuts the energy draw.
• 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.

Where the numbers actually come from

Every current label carries a QR code that links straight to the appliance’s own entry in EPREL, the EU’s public product registry and the source every manufacturer is legally required to register their figures with. It’s also the registry we link to from our own spec pages where a registration is known. In July 2026 the European Commission added a built-in comparison tool to EPREL itself, letting you filter and sort the registry’s own energy class, noise and capacity data across more than two million registered products. EPREL doesn’t carry price or day-to-day features, which is the gap our own category pages and compare tool are built to fill, using the same registered figures.

The one rule that matters most

Energy class is only comparable within the same appliance category, and only within categories that share the same scale. 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, and an oven or air conditioner’s legacy A+++ label isn’t on the same scale as either. 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.