General anaesthesia is an essential anaesthetic technique used in most of the patients taken to surgery. Although the cost of the anaesthesia is a lower percentage compared with the total cost of the surgical patient’s service, the great quantity of procedures carried out represents an important total cost for any healthcare system. The objective of this research is to quantify and compare the direct costs of the balanced anaesthetic techniques with isoflurane, sevoflurane and desflurane, and the intravenous general anaesthetic in Colombia. An economic cost reduction analysis was carried out, based on an economic model made with the determinant variants of the differential costs for the general anaesthetic techniques, using values adjusted to the Colombian context. 10.000 possible scenarios were simulated using the Monte Carlo method and it was found that, on average, balanced general anaesthesia with desflurane was the most expensive of the techniques, total intravenous anaesthesia was cheaper only compared to balanced general anaesthesia with desflurane, and the cheapest anaesthetic technique was isoflurane, followed by sevoflurane and TIVA. The main difference between the techniques used for the administration of general anaesthesia in a simulation of adult patients taken to a non-cardiac surgery was their cost. Therefore, rational decision making should take into account such difference, permitting a better cost-opportunity relation for the use of scarce resources, available for healthcare attention.