Furnaces heat most American homes, full stop, in every state where the federal survey has enough data to say so. Cross into Canada and that single answer splits three ways: forced-air furnaces still lead nationally, but electric baseboards run entire provinces and heat pumps have quietly taken over one of them. The real picture only shows up once you stop asking for one number and start asking where.
One country runs on furnaces, the other does not
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) publishes state-level estimates for space heating, and the pattern is almost monotonous: the furnace is the most common main heating system in all 49 states for which RECS reports a number. Not most states. Not a plurality of states. All of them.
Forty-nine, not fifty, and the missing state matters. Hawaii’s estimate is suppressed in the RECS state tables, meaning the sample of homes surveyed there was too small to publish a reliable figure. That is not the same as reporting zero. It is the survey declining to guess, and the fact that it has to decline says something on its own: heating simply isn’t a big enough category of spending in Hawaii to generate a usable sample size, in a state where winter, as most of the country understands it, doesn’t really happen.
Canada’s federal data, gathered by Statistics Canada rather than the EIA, tells a structurally different story. Instead of one system dominating everywhere, the forced-air furnace leads in five provinces, electric baseboards lead in three, and the heat pump leads in two. No single technology owns the country the way the furnace owns the United States.
Resist the urge to put an American percentage next to a Canadian one and call it a comparison. RECS surveyed U.S. homes in 2020. Statistics Canada’s provincial table is from 2023. The three Canadian territories weren’t surveyed again after 2012. Beyond the mismatched years, the categories themselves don’t line up: RECS asks about “the main space heating equipment” using a specific equipment list, while the Canadian tables cut the same broad idea, primary heating system, along different lines. Treat the U.S. and Canadian figures as two separate pictures worth understanding on their own terms, not as two numbers you can divide by each other.
Where each system actually concentrates
Inside the U.S., the furnace’s dominance is wide but not flat. It shows up in almost every home in some states and in barely a third of homes in others, and the two other systems worth knowing, central heat pumps and boilers, cluster in ways that map directly onto climate and the age of the housing stock.
| System | Where it peaks | Where it’s rarest |
|---|---|---|
| Furnace | Utah, 90% of homes | Florida, 33% of homes |
| Central heat pump | South Carolina, 41% | Massachusetts, 2% |
| Steam or hot-water boiler | Alaska, 36% | California, 1% |
What drives each cluster
Heat pumps concentrate in the Southeast, not because the equipment is better there, but because mild winters and comparatively cheap electricity make an all-electric system practical without the backup a colder climate would demand. South Carolina at 41 percent, Alabama at 39, North Carolina at 38, Tennessee at 35 and Florida at 31 all sit in that same climate band. Massachusetts, at 2 percent, sits nowhere near it.
Boilers tell the opposite story: they survive in places with old, cold housing stock built before forced-air ductwork was standard. Alaska’s 36 percent, New York’s 35, Rhode Island’s 33, Maine’s 31 and Massachusetts’s 26 all reflect Northeast and far-north housing that predates the furnace era. A boiler, worth saying plainly, isn’t the same thing as a radiator. The radiator is just where the heat comes out. RECS counts the category as “steam or hot water system,” meaning the boiler itself, the appliance that heats the water or makes the steam, and that’s the unit this whole comparison is built on.
The furnace’s near-universal presence has a simpler explanation: ductwork built for a furnace also carries central air conditioning, so builders in almost every climate have a reason to install it even where a heat pump or boiler would otherwise make more sense. None of these shares is a verdict on which system performs best. They describe what got installed when each house was built, which tracked whatever fuel and technology were cheapest and most available at that moment, not what a buyer today should choose.
Why Canada looks nothing like its neighbour
Statistics Canada’s 2023 table for the provinces shows a country split roughly into thirds by technology, and the extremes are sharper than anything in the U.S. data.
| System | Highest province | Lowest province |
|---|---|---|
| Forced-air furnace | Saskatchewan, 79% | Newfoundland and Labrador, 9% |
| Electric baseboard | Newfoundland and Labrador, 56% | Ontario, 7% |
| Heat pump | Prince Edward Island, 36% | Ontario, 4% |
Saskatchewan runs almost entirely on forced-air furnaces, a pattern that lines up with a Prairie province where natural gas infrastructure is well established and winters are long enough that an all-electric system carries real cost risk. Newfoundland and Labrador flips that completely: electric baseboards heat a majority of homes there, made viable by cheap hydroelectric power in a place a gas distribution network never fully reached. Prince Edward Island stands out as the country’s heat-pump province, at 36 percent, more than triple Ontario’s 4 percent, likely reflecting a combination of milder Maritime winters and a deliberate provincial push toward electrification.
The three Canadian territories, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, were surveyed only once, in 2012, and that remains the only year available for them. Fourteen years is a long time in heating technology, particularly for heat pumps, whose cold-climate performance and adoption have both moved considerably since then. Whatever the 2012 numbers show for the territories, treat them as a historical snapshot rather than a current read.
What a share can and cannot tell you
A percentage like “41 percent of South Carolina homes have a heat pump” answers one question well: what did the neighbors install. It says nothing about what any single household should install, because that decision depends on the building’s insulation and ductwork, the local price of electricity versus gas or oil, and how long the owner plans to stay in the house.
Used for what it actually measures, though, this kind of data is genuinely practical:
- Finding a local technician: a state where boilers dominate will have more contractors experienced with steam and hot-water systems than one where furnaces are standard.
- Sizing up a house you’re touring: a home built in a heavy-furnace state in an older, boiler-heavy neighborhood is worth checking for the type of system it actually has, since the state average won’t tell you.
- Anticipating parts availability: suppliers in heat-pump-heavy regions like the Southeast stock different components than suppliers in boiler-heavy New England.
- Understanding a utility bill: knowing that your state’s typical system is electric-heavy or gas-heavy helps explain why a bill looks different from a friend’s in another region.
None of that amounts to a recommendation for any particular technology, fuel, or brand. It’s a map of what’s already out there, useful for orientation, not a substitute for an assessment of the specific building someone actually lives in.