The purposes of this paper are to analyze winter energy use of residential buildings in different cities of China, and to figure out the influence factors of winter residential energy use. The investigated residences were located in seven typical cities of five architectural thermotechnical design zones. Questionnaire surveys revealed building characteristics, household characteristics, the utilization of domestic appliances, and thermal environment in winter. Winter energy consumption in different cities bears obvious regional characteristics. In south China, Hong Kong has the largest mean household energy use amount, and Changsha and Chongqing follow Hong Kong; Kunming in the warm zone has the small energy use. In north cities, if district space heating is excluded from total energy use. Urumqi and Xi'an have the energy use at the smallest level, but space heating use is very huge. The energy use amounts of space heating of Tangshan, Urumqi and Xi'an are several times as large as the amounts of all the end uses in the southern cities. The analysis on influence factors of winter energy use are made for Chongqing and Hong Kong, respectively, by Quantification Theory I, and the results show there exist obvious differences in influence factors between the two cities. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.