Key takeaways
- Check for a GFCI first, and check it in other rooms. A dead outlet is frequently downstream of a tripped GFCI somewhere else entirely, often in a garage, bathroom or exterior wall.
- Half-hot and switched outlets are a real answer, not a joke. An outlet controlled by a wall switch reads dead until somebody flips the switch nobody uses.
- Back-stabbed connections are the most common failure inside the box. The wire is pushed into a hole in the back of the device rather than wrapped under the screw, and the contact degrades with heat cycling.
- Any burning smell, scorch mark, warmth or buzzing changes the job. Stop, turn the circuit off at the panel, and get it looked at rather than working through a checklist.
One outlet stopped working. You went to the panel and every breaker looks exactly like its neighbours. Nothing tripped, nothing is warm, nothing happened that you know of.
There are five usual causes, and checking them in this order will find most of them without opening anything.
One: a GFCI in another room
This is the answer far more often than anything else, and it is the one people skip because the dead outlet is in a bedroom and there is no GFCI in the bedroom.
A GFCI receptacle protects everything wired downstream of it. That chain can leave the room, cross the house, and include ordinary-looking outlets with no test button on them. When the GFCI trips, every outlet downstream goes dead and the breaker never moves, because nothing about a GFCI trip involves the breaker.
So go and find every GFCI in the house. Garage, bathrooms, kitchen counters, laundry, exterior walls, and any crawlspace or utility access. Press reset firmly on each until it clicks. In houses where circuits have been extended over the decades, the chain frequently makes no sense from the floor plan.
Two: it is a switched outlet
Plenty of rooms have an outlet, or half of one, wired to a wall switch so a lamp can be controlled from the door. If nobody in the house uses lamps that way, that switch has been off for years and the outlet reads dead.
Flip every switch in the room, including the one you assume does nothing. If half the outlet works and half does not, that is the half-hot arrangement and it is working as designed.
Three: the connection inside the box
If the circuit is live and the outlet is not, the failure is usually at a connection rather than in the wire.
The common one is a back-stabbed connection. Most receptacles have small holes in the back that accept a stripped wire pushed straight in, held by a spring clip. It is fast, it is permitted, and it makes a much smaller contact area than a wire wrapped under the screw terminal. Years of heating and cooling as load comes and goes degrade that contact, and eventually it stops making. When a back-stab fails on an outlet that feeds others downstream, everything past it dies too.
The other one is a loose neutral, which produces stranger symptoms: lights that dim and brighten as other things switch on, outlets that work intermittently, or devices that behave oddly rather than simply not running.
Four: the device is worn out
Receptacles are mechanical. The contacts inside grip a plug's blades, and after enough insertions they do not grip. A plug that falls out under its own weight is telling you the contacts are worn, and worn contacts mean intermittent connection and heat.
Inexpensive builder-grade devices in a high-use location are the usual candidates. It is a straightforward replacement, and it is worth doing rather than living with.
Five: the breaker failed without tripping
Uncommon, and real. A breaker can fail internally and stop passing current while its handle sits in the same position as everything else on the bus. The tell is that the whole circuit is dead rather than one outlet, and cycling the breaker fully off and back on does nothing.
When to stop working through the list
Any of these changes it from a puzzle to a hazard: a warm faceplate, a burning or fishy smell, discoloration or scorch marks around the slots, buzzing, or a plug that sparks on insertion beyond the small snap that is normal.
Turn that circuit off at the panel and leave it off. Heat at a connection is a problem that gets worse with load rather than better, and the checklist above is not the right response to it.
One note on scope, because these questions sit close together. This post is about an outlet with no power. If your outlet works but a tester is reading open ground, that is a different condition with a different fix and it has its own post: what an open ground reading means. If your outlets have two slots rather than three, the decision you are facing is in two prong outlets in older San Antonio homes.
If a GFCI is what tripped and it will not stay reset, the cause matters and that is covered in why your GFCI keeps tripping. If more than one room went dark rather than one outlet, start with half your house lost power instead. Otherwise, dead outlets and the connections behind them are outlet and GFCI work.