How much does it cost to charge an electric car?

Published on 2026-08-10

There is no single price for charging an EV. The same kilowatt-hour can cost you three or four times more depending on where you plug in, and the headline p/kWh figure is rarely the whole bill.

Three very different prices for the same kWh

Charging at home on a domestic tariff is almost always the cheapest option, and an off-peak EV tariff makes it cheaper still. If you can charge overnight on a driveway, that single fact matters more than every other tip on this page combined.

Slow and fast public AC charging — lamp posts, car parks, destination chargers at hotels and supermarkets — sits in the middle. It is more expensive than home but usually well below rapid charging, and some destination chargers are free while you shop or stay.

Rapid and ultra-rapid DC charging at motorway services is the most expensive way to buy electricity for your car, often two to four times the home rate. You are paying for the hardware, the grid connection and the convenience of adding range in twenty minutes.

The costs that are not in the advertised price

Connection or session fees: a fixed charge just for starting a session. On a short top-up this can dominate the bill, which is why small rapid charges are disproportionately expensive per mile.

Per-minute rather than per-kWh billing: where a network charges by time, a car that accepts a lower charging rate pays more for the same energy. Your car's maximum DC rate, and how fast it tapers as the battery fills, become part of the price.

Idle fees: a per-minute penalty for staying plugged in after the session finishes. Reasonable in principle, expensive if you walk off for lunch.

Subscription versus ad-hoc: many networks have a monthly plan with a lower unit rate. That only pays back above a certain monthly mileage, so check where your break-even actually is before subscribing.

Roaming: paying through a third-party card or app rather than the network's own can carry a surcharge on top of the network's rate.

Working out your real cost per 100 miles

The arithmetic is simple: take your car's real consumption in kWh per 100 miles, multiply by the price per kWh you actually pay, and you have the cost. A car doing 30 kWh/100 miles at 25p/kWh costs £7.50 per 100 miles; the same car at 79p/kWh on a rapid charger costs £23.70.

Two corrections keep the number honest. Use your real consumption, not the official figure — cold weather, motorway speeds and a roof box all push it up, sometimes by 30% or more. And remember that AC charging loses roughly 10 to 15% of the energy between the meter and the battery, so your household bill reflects more kWh than the car received.

If you are comparing against petrol or diesel, make sure both sides use the same basis: real-world consumption, current prices, and the same distance.

Where the savings actually are

Charge at home overnight on an off-peak tariff whenever you can, and treat rapid charging as what it is — a tool for long journeys, not a routine.

On a long trip, plan around a smaller number of longer stops rather than many short top-ups: session fees hurt most on small charges, and most cars charge fastest in the lower part of the battery, so going from 10% to 60% twice beats going from 60% to 90% four times.

And check the price before you plug in, not after. Rates on the same network can differ from site to site, and the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive rapid charger on a given route is easily wide enough to be worth a few minutes of planning.

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