Abstract Exergy of electromagnetic radiation has been studied by a number of researchers for well over four decades in order to estimate the maximum conversion efficiencies of thermal radiation. As these researchers primarily dealt with solar and blackbody radiation, which have a low degree of coherence, they did not consider the partial coherence properties of thermal radiation. With the recent development of surface structures, which can emit radiation with high degree of coherence, the importance of considering the partial coherent properties in exergy calculation has become a necessity as the coherence properties directly influence the entropy of the wave field. Here in this paper we derive an expression for the exergy of quasi-monochromatic radiation using statistical thermodynamics and show that it is identical with the expressions derived using classical thermodynamics. We also present a method to calculate the entropy, thereby the exergy of partially coherent radiation using statistical thermodynamics and a method called matrix treatment of wave field.