Energy · LED Lighting

Haitz’s Law: LED Lumens per Dollar

The Moore’s Law of lighting: ~10× per decade in lumens per dollar, half that after 2014.

Ended — The last cool-white package price the US DOE observed rather than projected.

• DOE: $1.40→$0.54/klm, 2014–2020
• Law: ~10×/decade; DOE rows: ~5×/decade
• Red-LED trend spliced to white packages
• Ends 2020 — later figures are projections

Haitz’s Law, set out by Roland Haitz and colleagues in a 2000 Sandia report, is the LED counterpart to Moore’s Law: the cost per lumen of an LED falls about tenfold each decade while the light per package rises twentyfold or more. It held for most of five decades, from the faint red indicator LEDs Haitz charted from their first sales in 1968 to the white chips that have since replaced much of incandescent and fluorescent lighting. The line spans a change of technology. The early points trace Haitz’s red-LED trend rather than his tabulated values, and the later ones are package prices for white LEDs, the light people actually buy. The curve is an order-of-magnitude trend, not a precise price sheet: exact dollars per kilolumen depend on whether you count the bare package or the finished lamp, cool white or warm, and which report you read, so the individual years here are commonly-cited figures that can shift by a third or more depending on the definition. The long-run shape is robust; the rate through it is not constant. Haitz’s own Sandia record has the cost per lumen of red LEDs falling about tenfold per decade from the first LED sales in 1968 to roughly six cents per lumen in 2000, and white LEDs then repeated that descent from a higher starting price. The pace slowed over the record’s last six years: in DOE’s package-price tables cool white went from $1.40 per kilolumen in 2014 to $0.54 in 2020, a 2.6-fold gain in lumens per dollar, nearer fivefold than tenfold per decade. The price barely moved between 2016 ($0.90) and 2019 ($0.88), as LED efficacy approached its physical ceiling and package prices approached a commodity floor. The line stops in 2020 because that is where the first-party record stops: DOE’s two February 2022 roadmaps are still its newest, both report prices collected in 2020, and every later figure in them is a projection.

Source: Haitz et al., Sandia SAND2000-1612 / DOE SSL roadmaps

Download the data: haitz_law.csv · haitz_law.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.