What a pool actually costs, with the arithmetic shown

Why this hub exists

We read the pages that currently rank for pool buying advice, and the pattern was consistent: the ones that help you choose a pool never price the season, and the ones that teach you to look after a pool never help you choose one. Neither side answers the question a family sitting at a kitchen table is actually asking, which is not “which pool is best” but “what is this going to cost us, all in, and can we keep up with it?”

So that is what this hub does. Every figure here is arithmetic with its inputs shown, so you can substitute your own electricity rate, your own gallons and your own season length and get a number that is true for your yard rather than for an average one. We have not tested these pools and we do not claim to. What we can do is show the working.

The four lines that make up a pool year

Once the pool is bought, ownership resolves into four recurring costs and one occasional one.

Electricity is usually the largest and is entirely computable: pump wattage multiplied by hours per day, multiplied by days in your season, divided by a thousand, multiplied by your rate per kilowatt-hour. Every input is on your pump’s label and your power bill. A heater, if you add one, dwarfs everything else on this list.

Chemicals scale with gallons and with sunshine. Chlorine is the standing cost; shock, algaecide and pH adjusters are the occasional ones. This is where a cover quietly pays for itself, because evaporation carries chemistry away with the water.

Water is the cost people forget entirely. Filling is a one-time hit each season, but evaporation and splash-out mean topping up all summer, and every gallon you add is a gallon you then have to balance.

Consumables — filter cartridges, replacement gaskets, a new skimmer net — are small individually and add up to more than people expect. Liner replacement is the occasional one: rare, avoidable with care, and expensive enough to matter when it happens. We price it in liner replacement cost.

Where to start

The annual cost-to-run guide is the flagship: it takes a typical seasonal above-ground pool and prices a full year, line by line, with the formula printed so you can redo it with your own numbers. If you are still at the buying stage, what an above-ground pool costs covers the purchase side including the accessories that are not in the box, and maintenance cost isolates the upkeep half if that is the part you are worried about.

And if the honest answer for you is “no”, we would rather you found that out here than in August. Are backyard pools worth it makes the case against as carefully as the case for.

How to read our numbers

Three things to know. First, every figure is a computation, not a measurement — we state the assumption behind it and you should change the ones that do not match your situation. Second, electricity rates vary enormously by state, and a national average is a starting point rather than an answer; your own bill has the real number on it. Third, we never write a product price into body copy. Prices on this site come from a live data layer and are stamped with the date they were checked; where no live price is available, the button says so rather than showing you a number from last month. Our methodology page spells all of that out, including how to reproduce our figures yourself.

What we could not price, and say so

Two gaps are worth naming up front, because pretending they do not exist is how this category ends up publishing confident numbers that are not true.

Pump wattage is not published. We checked both brands that dominate this market. Intex and Bestway each publish flow rate in gallons per hour on their product pages, and neither publishes power draw. That means the single largest input to your annual running cost is unavailable before you buy, from either of them. The figure is printed on the pump itself, so we publish a table across the plausible range and tell you to read your own label rather than inventing a number and dressing it up as research.

Evaporation rates are not something we will average for you. How much water your pool loses depends on your climate, your wind exposure, your sun hours and whether it is covered, and we could not find a figure for domestic above-ground pools that we would stand behind. So instead of a fabricated national average, we tell you how to measure your own: mark the water line, note the date, and read it again two weeks later without topping up. Ten seconds of work, and it is the only number that is actually true for your yard.

Documenting a gap is part of the method rather than an admission of weakness. A page that tells you what it does not know is considerably more useful than one that quietly fills the hole with an estimate.