In this paper, the effect of non-ideal actuators on the performance of reactive control for a heaving wave energy converter is studied. The concept of the control is to cancel all or part of the reactive terms in the equation of motion. The proposed control is causal, thus it may be applied in practice. Actuators efficiencies from 50 to 100% are considered.The methodology used in the study relies on mathematical and numerical modeling. Control performance is investigated in regular waves and in irregular waves, and also from the perspective of the annual mean absorbed power at a typical Western Atlantic site. Motion constraints are not taken into account in the analysis for sake of simplicity.As already shown in previous work, it is found that reactive control can increase the mean annual power absorption at the considered site by a factor 10 in case of ideal actuators. However, it is shown that actuators efficiency is critical to control performance, because of the large amount of reactive power involved in the control strategy. Thus, for low efficiencies actuators (<80%), control performance is a fraction of what it can be with ideal actuators (approximately 10%). Even with 90% efficiency, control performance is less than 30% of the ideal case. In the range 90–100%, every percent of increase in efficiency leads to significant increase in control performance.