The Cheapest Way to Cook in Nigeria (2026): Kerosene vs Gas vs Electricity

Kerosene used to be the default Nigerian cooking fuel — the cheap, accessible option, the thing you fell back on. That hasn't been true for a while, and most households haven't recalculated.

At current national average prices, kerosene is now the most expensive common way to cook in Nigeria. Not slightly. Roughly three times the cost of cooking gas for the same amount of heat in the pot.

The short answer

Cost to put one kilowatt-hour of useful heat into your food:

| Method | Cost per useful kWh | |---|---| | Electric, Ikeja Electric Band E | ₦44.63 | | Electric, Ikeja Electric Band C | ₦65.43 | | Cooking gas (LPG) | ₦231.11 | | Electric, Band A | ₦299.29 | | Kerosene | ₦641.20 |

Kerosene costs about 2.8× what cooking gas costs for the same heat delivered.
Gas beats even Band A electricity — the most expensive grid tariff in Nigeria — by roughly 23%.
If you're on Bands C, D or E, electric cooking is far cheaper than anything else — between three and fourteen times cheaper, depending on which alternative you're comparing against. The catch is obvious: those are the bands with the least reliable supply.
These are national averages and standard stove efficiencies. Your local prices and your actual stove will shift the numbers — the ranking is the durable part.

Why "cost per litre" is the wrong comparison

You can't compare ₦2,971.94 a litre of kerosene against ₦8,706.93 for a 5kg gas cylinder directly, because a litre and a kilogram deliver different amounts of energy, and stoves waste different fractions of it.

So the honest comparison has three steps: what you pay, how much energy that buys, and how much of that energy reaches the pot rather than the kitchen air.

Prices (latest national averages published by the National Bureau of Statistics, from its monthly Household Kerosene and Liquefied Petroleum Gas Price Watch surveys, which sample outlets across all 774 local government areas):

Kerosene: ₦2,971.94 per litre
Cooking gas: ₦8,706.93 per 5kg cylinder — which is ₦1,741.39 per kg

Electricity tariffs are NERC's: ₦209.50/kWh on Band A across all 11 NERC-regulated DisCos, with Ikeja Electric's Band C at ₦45.80 and Band E at ₦31.24.

Energy content and stove efficiency. A kilogram of LPG holds about 13.7 kWh; a litre of kerosene about 10.3 kWh. But a gas burner delivers roughly 55% of that into the pot, a kerosene stove about 45%, and an electric hotplate around 70%. These efficiency figures are standard cookstove ranges rather than measurements of your specific stove — treat them as reasonable middles, not precision.

Putting it together for gas: ₦1,741.39 per kg ÷ (13.7 kWh × 0.55) = ₦1,741.39 ÷ 7.535 = ₦231.11 per useful kWh.

Same arithmetic for kerosene: ₦2,971.94 ÷ (10.3 × 0.45) = ₦2,971.94 ÷ 4.635 = ₦641.20.

And electricity is simplest, since you buy kWh directly: ₦209.50 ÷ 0.70 = ₦299.29 on Band A.

What that means for a month of cooking

A household using roughly 60 kWh of useful cooking heat a month — a reasonable figure for daily cooking for a family:

| Method | Monthly cooking cost | |---|---| | Electric, Band E | ₦2,677.71 | | Electric, Band C | ₦3,925.71 | | Cooking gas | ₦13,866.38 | | Electric, Band A | ₦17,957.14 | | Kerosene | ₦38,471.72 |

Switching from kerosene to gas saves that household roughly ₦24,600 a month, or about ₦295,000 a year. In physical terms, 60 useful kWh is about 8kg of gas — two-thirds of a 12.5kg cylinder — versus about 13 litres of kerosene.

That gap is large enough to pay back a gas cylinder and burner within the first month or two, which is the real point: the barrier to switching is the upfront cost of the equipment, not the running cost, and the running-cost gap now closes that gap quickly.

The uncomfortable part

The households still cooking on kerosene are, overwhelmingly, the ones who can least afford the most expensive option. Kerosene persists because it's divisible — you can buy ₦500 worth when you have ₦500. A gas cylinder demands a lump sum upfront for the cylinder, the burner, and a full refill before it saves you anything.

That's a cash-flow problem, not a maths problem, and it's the same pattern as generators, where the cheap machine to buy produces the expensive electricity. The poorest option to enter is usually the most expensive to run.

Electric cooking shows the pattern most sharply of all. It's the cheapest method in the table for anyone on Bands C through E — roughly 3.5× cheaper than gas and nearly 10× cheaper than kerosene on Band C — but those are precisely the bands defined by getting 4 to 15 hours of supply a day. You can't build dinner around power that may not be there at 7pm. Band A customers, who can rely on supply, face the one electricity tariff that gas beats.

What to actually do with this

If you cook on kerosene and can raise the cylinder cost, that's likely the highest-return switch available to your household budget right now — the monthly saving is larger than most people expect.

If you're on gas already, you're on the most sensible default for most Nigerian households: cheaper than kerosene, cheaper than Band A power, and independent of the grid.

If you're on Band C, D or E with reasonably predictable supply hours, an electric hotplate for the hours power is on is genuinely cheap — worth using opportunistically alongside gas rather than as a full replacement.

Run the electricity side of this against your own band and DisCo, since Band B–E rates differ by DisCo:

Check your DisCo's tariff and what a recharge buys →

Fuel prices are the latest national averages published by the National Bureau of Statistics from its monthly Household Kerosene and Liquefied Petroleum Gas Price Watch surveys, checked as of August 2026; state-level prices vary substantially around these national figures. Electricity tariffs are from NERC's published Multi-Year Tariff Orders — Band A has been ₦209.50/kWh across all 11 NERC-regulated DisCos since July 2024, and Ikeja Electric's Bands C and E have been ₦45.80 and ₦31.24 since December 2022; other DisCos differ, and Enugu State is regulated separately by EERC. Energy-content and stove-efficiency figures are standard published ranges, not measurements of specific appliances — the cost rankings are robust to reasonable variation in them, but the exact naira figures are illustrative. This article is general information, not financial advice.