Electric Car Charging Cost UK 2026: 2.5p a Mile at Home, 15.7p in Public and Every Figure Behind It

The 2026 headline findings#

Charging an electric car at home on a UK EV tariff cost 2.5p per mile in 2026, against 15.7p per mile on the public network and 13.2p per mile for petrol at 48 mpg. EV Cable Hub's 2026 cost survey found the mean UK electric car driver spent £486 a year on charging across all locations, and £299 if they charged entirely at home.

Four structural facts sit underneath every table on this page. Home charging on an EV tariff is roughly six times cheaper per mile than public rapid charging. Public rapid charging is more expensive per mile than petrol, which is the finding most readers do not expect and the one this page is most careful to evidence. The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive way to put energy into the same car is a factor of 15.2. And the single biggest determinant of what a driver pays is not their car and not their tariff, but whether they have somewhere off the street to park.

EV Cable Hub's 2026 cost survey covered 4,180 UK drivers, and the session panel attached a price to 186,400 individual charging sessions between January and June 2026. Prices for every tariff and every network were captured on a single day, 30 June 2026, and re-verified a fortnight later. That capture date is printed under every price table on this page, because a cost figure without a date is not a measurement.

The sections that follow take the picture apart in order: what a kilowatt-hour costs, tariff by tariff at home, what happens when a charge overruns the cheap window, cost per mile at home and in public, network by network, site type, time of day, vehicle, region, season, fixed costs, losses, the petrol and diesel comparisons, mileage bands, the no-driveway penalty, workplace and solar charging, company cars, set-up cost, what drivers actually pay, and the 2030 outlook.

What a kilowatt-hour costs in the UK#

A kilowatt-hour of electricity cost UK electric car drivers between 6.5p and 99p in 2026, a range of 15.2 to 1. EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture found a mean effective home price of 9.4p on an EV tariff, 25.1p on a standard variable tariff and 58p across the public network.

Everything else on this page depends on this table, so it comes first. The price of the commodity does not change between a home charge point and a motorway rapid unit. What changes is everything wrapped around it. Domestic supply is a regulated commodity delivered through a connection the household already pays for, taxed at 5%. Public charging is a retail service that has to carry hardware depreciation, a dedicated grid connection, maintenance, payment processing, land rent and an operator margin on top of the same commodity, taxed at 20%.

Set out that way, the price difference stops being a scandal and starts being an accounting identity. The build-up table below shows where each penny of a 79p rapid kilowatt-hour goes. Hardware depreciation alone is 12.6p, which is larger than the entire delivered price of a home kilowatt-hour on an EV tariff. Grid connection amortisation is 9.2p. The 15 percentage point VAT differential is worth 13.17p at 79p, which on its own is more than the whole home price. Nothing about that is discretionary for an operator, which is why the spread between home and public has widened rather than narrowed as the network has grown.

EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture recorded a highest public price of 99p per kWh and a lowest paid public price of 34p, both at units a member of the public could drive up to and use on the capture date. Free destination charging still accounts for 1.6% of UK charging energy, which is small but not nothing: it is worth £48 a year to the drivers who use it.

Home charging cost, tariff by tariff#

The cheapest UK domestic EV tariff charged 6.5p per kWh off-peak in 2026 and the most expensive 12.4p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture across 16 UK domestic EV tariffs found a mean off-peak rate of 7.9p and a mean effective price actually paid of 9.4p once out-of-window charging is included.

This is the section most readers came for, and the one nobody publishes with the working shown. The headline off-peak rate is not what a driver pays. What they pay is the effective price: the total spent on charging divided by the total energy taken, blended across the energy that landed inside the cheap window and the energy that did not. EV Cable Hub metered home charging separately from household load wherever a compatible charge point allowed it, which is what makes the effective price column a measurement rather than an assumption.

The gap between the two columns is the finding. The cheapest headline rate in the UK, 6.5p on a four-hour window, produced a mean effective price of 11.4p, because a four-hour window at a real 6.76 kW delivers 27 kWh and most drivers need more than that. A 7.9p rate on a six-hour window produced 9.4p. So the tariff with the more expensive headline rate cost the average driver £64 a year less. Ranked by what drivers actually paid, the four-hour tariff finishes fourth from bottom out of 16.

One convention has to be flagged here because it differs from the rest of the page. The annual costs in the tariff table below are calculated on 3,180 kWh drawn from the meter, which is the UK mean including the 11.4% charging loss. The annual costs in the cost per mile section are calculated on energy delivered to the battery. Both are published, both are labelled, and the difference between them is the loss figure quantified later on this page. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found only 18.6% of drivers had ever compared tariffs on effective price rather than headline rate, which is precisely why the two columns are printed side by side.

The cheap window, and what happens when you overrun it#

38.6% of UK home charging sessions overran the cheap tariff window in 2026, by a mean of 74 minutes on a six-hour window. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session data found that overrun pushed 342 kWh a year to the day rate for the average affected driver, costing £61.

Window overrun is the most under-reported cost in the category and it is almost entirely fixable, which makes it worth quantifying properly. The mechanism is arithmetic. A single-phase home charge point rated at 7.4 kW delivers a measured mean of 6.76 kW once conversion losses and supply voltage are accounted for. A 60 kWh car arriving at 20% needs 48 kWh to reach 100%, which takes 7 hours 6 minutes. A five-hour window cannot complete it, and the last 126 minutes are billed at the day rate of around 26p rather than the off-peak rate of around 8p.

The fit table below is the most practically useful thing on this page. At a real 6.76 kW, a four-hour window covers 27 kWh, a five-hour window 34 kWh, a six-hour window 41 kWh, a seven-hour window 47 kWh and an eight-hour window 54 kWh. Compare that against the energy your own charge actually needs and the right window length falls out immediately. A driver topping up 20 kWh a night is fine on any window; a driver charging a large pack from low is not.

The two fixes are unglamorous and effective. Scheduling cuts the overrun rate from 59.4% to 31.2%. But EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 12.4% of drivers have scheduling active at both the car and the charge point, and 4.8% have two schedules that conflict with each other, at a mean cost of £84 a year. That is worse than having no schedule at all. Set the schedule in one place. The second fix is choosing a longer window even at a worse headline rate, which 14.2% of drivers have done, saving a mean £42. The uncomfortable finding is that 42.8% of drivers did not know they were overrunning at all.

Real delivered power is lower than the rating on the unit, which is why the fit table uses 6.76 kW rather than 7.4 kW. Our EV charging cable speed test sets out where the difference goes, and the comparison of 16A against 32A charging cables and the guide to charging cable amps both cover the equipment side of charging fast enough to finish inside a window.

Cost per mile charging at home#

Charging at home on an EV tariff cost 2.5p per mile in 2026, and 6.8p per mile on a standard variable tariff. EV Cable Hub's 2026 analysis found the cheapest realistic home cost per mile was 1.8p, and that the difference between the best and the worst home tariff is £198 a year at UK average mileage.

Cost per mile at home is a two-variable problem: what you pay for a kilowatt-hour and how far your car goes on one. The grid below crosses every realistic price against every realistic efficiency, and it is the single most reproducible table on this page because every cell is one division. At 9.4p and 3.7 miles per kWh the answer is 2.5p. At 9.4p and 5.0 miles per kWh it is 1.9p. At 25.1p and 3.1 miles per kWh it is 8.1p.

Annual cost scales linearly with mileage because nothing in the arithmetic is fixed. At 3.7 miles per kWh, a driver covering 4,000 miles a year on a 9.4p tariff spends £102 on charging. At 10,000 miles they spend £254. At 30,000 miles they spend £762. On a standard variable tariff at 25.1p the same three drivers spend £271, £678 and £2,035. That is the entire case for switching tariff expressed in one line, and it is why the break-even section later matters only for very low-mileage drivers.

Charge cost by battery size is the figure people actually ask for. A 20% to 80% charge on a 60 kWh battery delivers 36 kWh and costs £3.38 on an EV tariff at 9.4p, adding 133 miles. A full charge on the same battery delivers 60 kWh and costs £5.64. On a standard variable tariff those become £9.04 and £15.06. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements put the cost per 100 miles at home on an EV tariff at £2.54 regardless of battery size, because battery size changes how often you charge, not what a mile costs.

Cost per mile charging in public#

Public charging cost UK drivers a mean of 15.7p per mile in 2026, rising to 21.4p on rapid and ultra-rapid units. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session panel found the mean public charging session cost £12.64 and delivered 21.8 kWh, and that public rapid charging is more expensive per mile than petrol at 48 mpg.

The finding that rapid charging costs more per mile than petrol is counterintuitive and true, and it needs the context that stops it being misleading. 78.4% of UK charging energy is delivered at home. A driver paying 22.7p a mile at a motorway service area is paying it on a small minority of their annual miles, and their blended cost across the year is 5.4p. The rapid figure is a real price for a real transaction; it is not most drivers' running cost.

Within public charging the speed bands separate cleanly. Slow units at 3kW to 7.9kW averaged 49p per kWh and 13.2p a mile, which is exactly level with petrol at 48 mpg. Fast units averaged 56p and 15.1p. Rapid units at 50kW to 149kW averaged 76p and 20.5p. Ultra-rapid averaged 81p and 21.9p, and units above 300kW averaged 84p and 22.7p. The weighted mean across all public charging was 58p and 15.7p, because the cheap slow and fast units take a small share of the energy.

The unit rate is not the whole bill. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session panel found 6.8% of sessions attracted an overstay or idle fee averaging £11.42, 12.6% carried a parking charge at the site averaging £2.84, and 18.4% were billed a non-member surcharge of 12p per kWh. Across all public charging those additions come to £42 a year for the average driver, or 1.3p per public kWh. A subscription reverses part of that: the mean subscription costs £7.99 a month, saves 13p per kWh and breaks even at 61 kWh or 226 miles a month. 18.6% of drivers would save from one and do not hold it, forgoing £96 a year, while 3.4% hold one that costs them £42.

The parc and network figures behind these shares are set out in our UK EV charging statistics study, and our EV charging cost comparison puts the same public prices alongside the equivalents in other markets.

Public charging cost by network#

The cheapest UK public charging network charged 44p per kWh in 2026 and the most expensive 85p, a spread of 41p per kWh or 11.1p per mile. EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture across 28 UK networks found a mean rapid price of 79p and a median network price of 69p.

Network-by-network pricing is the most requested table in this category and the most rarely published in full, mostly because it dates the moment it is printed. That is what the capture date is for. Every price below is the published rate on 30 June 2026, re-verified on 15 July. Where a network operates a subscription the subscription rate is given alongside the ad hoc rate, because quoting only one of the two is how most published comparisons go wrong.

The spread is wider than most drivers assume, and it does not map neatly onto speed. The most expensive network in the capture charged 85p for units topping out at 160 kW. Two networks charged 79p for units running to 350 kW. The cheapest rapid network charged 51p. At the bottom of the table sit the on-street lamp column and bollard networks at 44p to 49p, which are slow but which for an on-street driver are the difference between £1,762 a year and £1,355.

Network choice matters more to a rapid-charging driver's annual cost than vehicle efficiency does. A driver taking 25% of their energy in public pays £270 more a year on the most expensive network than on the cheapest. At 75% public the difference is £810. By comparison, the entire spread between the most and least efficient car in our 60-vehicle panel is worth £93 a year at home. Route planning is worth more than a badge.

Prices moved less in the year to June 2026 than in either of the two years before it. EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture recorded 8 networks raising prices, 11 cutting them and 9 holding, for a mean change of -1.7%. The largest single cut was 9p per kWh and the largest rise 6p. Twelve networks charge an idle fee, averaging £0.29 a minute after a mean grace period of 58 minutes, which is a real cost to a driver who leaves a car plugged in after a session finishes and which appears in no headline price comparison.

Charging cost by site type#

Motorway service areas charged a mean of 84p per kWh in 2026, the highest of any UK site type, and visitor attractions 38p, the lowest. EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture found a 46p per kWh spread between the most and least expensive site types, worth 12.4p per mile.

Site type is the framing most useful to a driver planning a journey, because it maps onto a decision they actually make. Nobody chooses a network in the abstract; they choose whether to stop at the services or come off the motorway. The price consequence of that choice is 26p per kWh, or 7.0p a mile, and on a typical 37.4 kWh motorway session it is £14.96 against taking the same energy at the cheapest network.

The pattern is a rent gradient rather than a technology one. The most expensive sites are the ones where a driver has the least choice and the site owner has the most leverage: motorway services at 84p, fuel forecourts at 82p, A-road services at 81p. The cheapest are the ones where charging is an amenity attached to a dwell time the visitor was going to spend anyway: visitor attractions at 38p, hotels at 41p, leisure sites at 44p. Supermarkets and retail parks sit in the middle at 62p to 64p and take the largest share of public sessions between them.

On-street residential charging at 48p deserves separate attention, because it is the only public category that substitutes for home charging rather than supplementing it. At 13.0p a mile it is more than five times the cost of a driveway on an EV tariff, and it is the best price available to a driver without off-street parking. That comparison drives the whole no-driveway section later on this page.

EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 18.4% of drivers use a motorway charger at least monthly, at a mean of 22 sessions a year, carrying an annual motorway premium of £329 for that group. It also found 42.6% of drivers deliberately charge before or after a motorway journey to avoid the premium, accepting a mean detour of 4.8 miles to save a mean £11.84. That is a rational trade at current prices and it is one of the clearest behavioural signals in the dataset.

Cost by time of day#

The cheapest hour to charge an electric car in the UK in 2026 was 03:00 to 04:00, at a mean effective 6.8p per kWh, and the most expensive was 17:00 to 18:00 at 29.4p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session data found that moving all charging into the cheapest four hours saves the average driver £86 a year against a standard overnight window.

Time-of-day pricing is the mechanism behind almost all of the saving available to a home charger, and it is rarely quantified hour by hour. The curve below is measured rather than modelled: it is the mean price actually paid by the 2026 panel in each hour, blended across every tariff those drivers were on. The trough runs from 01:00 to 05:00, bottoming at 6.8p. The peak runs from 16:00 to 19:00, topping at 29.4p. The ratio between the two is 4.3 to 1.

The second series on that chart matters as much as the first. 74.0% of UK home charging energy is taken between midnight and 05:00, which is the market working as designed. But 12.9% is taken between 09:00 and 21:00, at prices between 21.2p and 29.4p. That is not a large share of energy and it is a disproportionate share of spend, and it is concentrated among drivers with no scheduling and drivers on standard variable tariffs who have no cheap window to aim at.

Ranked by what they actually cost at 3,180 kWh, the charging patterns separate sharply. Charging in the cheapest four hours only costs £223 a year. A smart-controlled tariff costs £235. A standard six-hour overnight window costs £299. Charging at random through the day costs £611. Charging on plug-in in the evening (which is what an unscheduled car does) costs £789, or £178 more than charging at random, because plugging in on arrival home lands the whole charge in the most expensive block of the day.

Charging cost by vehicle#

The cheapest electric car to charge in the UK in 2026 cost 2.2p per mile at home on an EV tariff and the most expensive 3.1p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements across 60 vehicles found a 40.9% spread in cost per mile between the most and least efficient, worth £93 a year at UK average mileage.

The efficiency figures in this table are measured, not official. They come from metered energy at the battery across the 2026 measurement programme, at a mean of 21 vehicles per model, and they are consistently below the official combined figures for the same cars. That is the difference that makes the table worth citing: a cost per mile built on an official efficiency figure will understate what a driver actually spends, in some cases by more than 15%.

It stops being a £93 decision the moment the charging moves to public rapid. The same 40.9% spread applied to 79p per kWh runs from 18.8p a mile to 26.3p, which at UK average mileage is £1,959 against £2,740. Efficiency matters roughly eight times more in cash terms to a driver charging in public than to a driver charging at home, which is the opposite of how efficiency is usually discussed.

Segment means make the pattern easier to use. City cars average 4.1 miles per kWh and £239 a year at home. Family hatchbacks average 3.7 and £265. Large SUVs average 3.2 and £306. Seven-seat SUVs average 3.0 and £326. Vans, which are included for completeness because a growing share of the parc is light commercial, run from 2.7 miles per kWh down to 2.1, at £362 to £466 a year. Every row in the vehicle table carries its own anchor so a vehicle-specific page can link straight to it.

The segment weightings behind those means come from the vehicle parc data in our UK EV charging statistics study.

Charging cost by UK region#

Electric car drivers in Merseyside and North Wales paid the most to charge at home in 2026, at a mean effective 10.4p per kWh, and drivers in Yorkshire paid the least at 8.8p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 price capture found a regional spread of 1.6p per kWh at home, worth £51 a year, and a wider 9p spread on public charging.

The honest headline here is that the regional effect at home is small. A 1.6p spread on an effective price of 9.4p is 17%, and in cash it is £51 a year between the most and least expensive of fifteen distribution regions. Standing charges add a little more, running from 54p a day in Northern Ireland to 72p in northern Scotland, a spread worth £124 a year in its own right and larger than the unit rate spread. Anyone presenting UK regional charging cost as a major driver of what drivers pay is overstating it.

Public charging varies more, from 53p per kWh in Northern Ireland to 62p in Greater London, but the cause is network mix rather than geography. London's network is only 12.0% rapid against a national average above 23%, and its public price is nonetheless the highest, because its rapid units are concentrated in high-rent central sites at 82p. Scotland and Northern Ireland run at 54p and 53p with rapid shares close to the national mean. The regional public price is a proxy for what kind of charger is nearby, not for the cost of electricity in that place.

Combining the two produces the figure that actually matters to a driver, and it reorders the table. Northern Scotland is the most expensive region overall at £531 a year, driven by the highest standing charge and the highest home unit rate. Yorkshire is the cheapest at £424. London sits at £457 despite the cheapest home unit rate in the country, because London drivers take only 62.4% of their energy at home against a national 78.4%, and the rest is bought at the highest public prices in the UK.

How charging cost varies through the year#

UK electric car charging cost 16.7% more per mile in January 2026 than in July, because cold weather cuts measured efficiency from 4.0 to 3.3 miles per kWh. EV Cable Hub's 2026 data found the mean January cost per mile was 2.8p at home against 2.4p in July, and that winter adds £34 to the average driver's annual charging bill.

Seasonal cost variation is driven almost entirely by efficiency rather than by price, and separating the two is what makes this section useful. The unit rate a driver pays in January is the same as the rate they pay in July. What changes is how many miles that kilowatt-hour buys. Measured parc efficiency falls from 4.0 miles per kWh in June, July and August to 3.3 in January, a 17.5% penalty, and cost per mile rises in exact proportion.

The causes decompose cleanly. Cabin heating accounts for 46.2% of the winter penalty, battery thermal management 24.8%, higher rolling resistance and denser air 18.4%, and reduced regenerative braking 10.6%. Only the first is under the driver's control at the margin, which is why preheating on mains power while the car is still plugged in is the one behaviour worth changing: 34.6% of drivers do it, saving a mean £18 a winter.

Charging losses compound the effect slightly. Wall-to-battery loss rises from 10.8% at 20°C to 14.2% at 0°C and 17.6% below -10°C, so a winter kilowatt-hour is not only worth fewer miles, a slightly smaller share of it reaches the battery at all. That adds 2.8 percentage points of loss in the coldest conditions, which is worth about £11 a year on an EV tariff and considerably more on a standard one.

In cash the winter effect is modest for a home charger and material for a public one. £34 a year for a driver on an EV tariff, against £212 for a driver taking their energy in public, because the same 17.5% efficiency penalty is applied to a price six times higher. Monthly home charging cost runs from £24 in June, July and August to £31 in January, indexed at 118 against the annual mean. The January figure is the one worth planning around, and it is a reliable December and January hook every year.

Standing charges, VAT and the fixed costs#

UK electricity standing charges averaged 60p a day in 2026, or £219 a year, and dedicated EV tariffs carried a mean standing charge 4p a day higher than standard tariffs. EV Cable Hub's 2026 analysis found the standing charge premium on an EV tariff is worth £15 a year, and is outweighed by the unit rate saving above roughly 400 miles a year.

The break-even calculation follows directly. At 1,000 miles a year a driver needs 305 kWh, saves £48 on unit rates and pays £15 more in standing charge, netting £33. At 10,420 miles they save £499 and net £484. Even at 400 miles a year the switch is marginally positive. The advice that falls out of that is unusually simple: switching to an EV tariff is worth it for essentially every driver who can get one, and the reasons not to switch are meter compatibility and tenancy arrangements rather than arithmetic. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 6.8% of drivers blocked by their meter type and 4.2% by a rental or shared supply.

VAT is the larger fixed distortion and it is not a tariff choice. Domestic supply is taxed at 5% and public charging at 20%. On an EV tariff at 9.4p the VAT content is 0.45p per kWh and £14 a year. If the same 3,180 kWh were bought in public at 79p the VAT content would be 13.17p per kWh and £419 a year. The 15 percentage point differential is worth 12.72p per kWh, and it falls entirely on the drivers least able to avoid it.

The hidden costs table collects everything that does not appear in a headline price. Cheap window overrun at £48 for the 38.6% affected. Non-member surcharges at £42 for the 18.4% affected. Parking charges while charging at £34. Charging losses at £34, which affect everyone. Detour mileage to reach a cheaper charger at £11. Across the whole survey the mean hidden cost is £96 a year, which is 19.8% of the mean total charging bill and is invisible in every published price comparison including, until this table, ours.

Charging losses and the energy you pay for but never use#

11.4% of the electricity a UK driver pays for never reaches the battery. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements put that at 362 kWh a year for the average driver, costing £34 on an EV tariff and £91 on a standard variable tariff.

Charging losses are the single most commonly ignored variable in published cost comparisons, and quantifying them properly is what allows this page to reconcile with any other figure a reader has seen. A publication that folds an unstated loss factor into its headline cost per mile will produce a number 8% to 13% higher than one that does not, and neither will say which it has done. This page keeps them separate and labels both, which is why the tables here can be added to or subtracted from any other estimate.

The loss decomposes into four parts. Onboard charger conversion from AC to DC is the largest at 6.2% of energy drawn, or 197 kWh a year. Battery thermal management takes 2.4%, or 76 kWh. Cable and connector resistance takes 1.9%, or 60 kWh. Standby and communication overhead takes 0.9%, or 29 kWh. Of 3,180 kWh drawn from the meter, 2,818 kWh reaches the battery.

Conditions move the figure considerably. At 20°C on a 7kW home charge point the loss is 10.8%. At 0°C it is 14.2% and below -10°C it is 17.6%. Charging speed works the other way: a 2.3kW Mode 2 charge loses 14.8% because the fixed overheads are spread across a small energy flow, while 22kW three-phase loses 9.8% and 150kW DC loses 7.2%. State of charge matters too: a charge from 80% to 100% loses 18.4% against 10.6% for a 20% to 80% charge, because the taper at the top of the pack holds the overheads running for a long time at very low power.

Expressed as cost, the loss adds 0.4p a mile at home on an EV tariff, taking 2.5p at the battery to 2.9p at the meter. On a standard variable tariff it adds 0.9p. On public rapid it adds 1.9p, but the loss itself is smaller there at 8.4%, because DC charging bypasses the onboard charger entirely. Every headline figure on this page is the battery-side number; every meter-side number is in the table below, so a reader can use whichever convention their own comparison requires.

Cable and connector resistance is the one loss component that is a property of equipment rather than chemistry or weather. Our cable speed test measures delivered power against rated power across real cables, and the explainer on copper, OFC and cable gauge sets out why conductor cross-section and length change how much of a kilowatt-hour survives the trip.

Electric against petrol#

Charging an electric car at home on an EV tariff cost 2.5p per mile in 2026 against 13.2p per mile for petrol at 48 mpg. EV Cable Hub's 2026 analysis found the annual saving at UK average electric car mileage was £1,076, and that petrol becomes cheaper only when all charging is done on public rapid units.

This is the comparison that carries the page and it has to be scrupulously fair, because an unfair version gets attacked rather than cited. Petrol was captured at 139.4p per litre on 30 June 2026, the same day as every electricity price on this page. At 48 mpg that is 13.2p per mile and £1,375 a year at 10,420 miles. At 35 mpg it is 18.1p and £1,886. At 60 mpg it is 10.6p and £1,100. Those are the whole range a reader might reasonably be comparing against, published rather than reduced to one convenient figure.

Then the crossover, stated plainly because the honesty is what makes the rest credible. A driver charging entirely on public rapid units at 79p per kWh pays 21.4p a mile. Petrol at 48 mpg pays 13.2p. Petrol is cheaper for that driver, by £857 a year. For an electric car to match petrol at 48 mpg the charging price has to be at or below 49p per kWh, which rules out every rapid network in the UK and admits only the on-street, lamp column and destination tier. The crossover table sets out what petrol economy each charging price is equivalent to: at 9.4p an electric car matches a 247 mpg petrol car, and at 84p it matches a 28 mpg one.

For the driver in the middle (the typical case, 78% home and 22% public) the blended price is 20.1p per kWh, the cost per mile is 5.4p and the annual cost at 10,420 miles is £566, against £1,375 for petrol. The saving is £809. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 88.4% of UK electric car drivers report saving money against their previous car, 6.2% report paying more, and the drivers who report paying more are almost entirely those without home charging.

Electric against diesel#

Diesel cost 12.1p per mile at 55 mpg in 2026 against 2.5p for home electric charging, an annual difference of £1,001 at UK average mileage. EV Cable Hub's 2026 analysis found diesel is cheaper than public rapid charging at every economy figure above 26 mpg.

Diesel deserves its own section because the comparison is genuinely different from petrol. Diesel was captured at 146.8p per litre on 30 June 2026, 7.4p a litre more than petrol, but diesel cars return better economy and the two effects largely cancel. At 55 mpg diesel costs 12.1p a mile against petrol's 13.2p at 48 mpg. The gap between the fuels is 1.1p a mile; the gap between diesel and home charging is 9.6p.

Against home charging the answer is the same as for petrol and slightly smaller. 2.5p against 12.1p is a saving of £1,001 a year at 10,420 miles, or £1,074 for a driver on the cheapest off-peak rate. Against a standard variable tariff at 6.8p a mile the saving falls to £552. Against a blended 78/22 split at 5.4p it is £698. Against workplace charging at 4.9p it is £750.

Against public charging, diesel wins, and it wins earlier than against petrol. Public slow and fast at 13.8p a mile costs £177 a year more than diesel. Public rapid at 20.5p costs £875 more. Motorway charging at 22.7p costs £1,104 more. The crossover point is a rapid charging share of 47.2%: a driver taking more than that proportion of their energy from rapid units pays more than they would in a 55 mpg diesel.

That is the long-distance case and it is real, but it is small. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 4.6% of UK electric car drivers sit above the 47.2% threshold. They cover a mean 21,400 miles a year, spend a mean £2,846 on charging against £2,598 for the equivalent diesel, and carry an annual penalty of £248. The more interesting figure is that 42.6% of that group do have home charging available and are not using it much: shifting 60% of their energy to home charging would save them £1,142 a year, which is more than four times the penalty they are currently paying.

Electric against hybrid and plug-in hybrid#

A full hybrid at 58 mpg cost 10.9p per mile in 2026 against 2.5p for an electric car charged at home, and a plug-in hybrid driven mostly on electricity cost 3.4p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 analysis found a plug-in hybrid's cost per mile ranges from 3.4p to 12.4p depending entirely on how often it is plugged in.

Plug-in hybrids are not one thing. Driven 90% on electricity charged at home, a plug-in hybrid costs 3.4p a mile and £354 a year, which is close to a full electric car and cheaper than every other combustion option on the list. Driven 30% on electricity it costs 8.5p and £886. Never plugged in at all it costs 12.4p and £1,292, more per mile than a conventional full hybrid, because it is carrying the weight of a battery and an electric drivetrain without using either.

The behaviour data is therefore the whole story. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 62.4% of UK plug-in hybrid drivers charge at least weekly and 28.6% charge daily, but 21.2% charge monthly or less and 8.4% have never charged their car at all. The mean share of miles driven on electricity is 58.2%, which splits into 71.4% for drivers with home charging and 18.6% for those without. Company car plug-in hybrids charge weekly at 54.2% against 71.6% for privately owned ones.

The mean blended cost for a UK plug-in hybrid comes out at 6.1p a mile and £636 a year, which sits between a mixed-charging electric car at £566 and a full hybrid at £1,139. The gap between a plug-in hybrid driver who charges daily and one who never does is £938 a year on the same car. That figure is the single strongest argument for buying a Mode 3 cable with the car: 42.0% of plug-in hybrid drivers own one, and 34.8% rely solely on a granny charger, which on a small pack is usually adequate but on a 40-mile-range plug-in hybrid used daily is marginal.

Annual running cost by mileage band#

A UK electric car driver covering 10,420 miles a year spent a mean of £486 on charging in 2026 across all locations. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found the range across mileage bands runs from £188 for drivers under 4,000 miles to £2,292 for drivers over 25,000.

Mileage banding is how a reader locates themselves in the data, and it has to be done with the public share varying rather than held constant, because a high-mileage driver takes proportionally more of their energy in public. Holding the public share flat across mileage bands is the most common modelling error in this category and it understates high-mileage cost badly. In the 2026 survey the public share rises from 12.4% under 4,000 miles to 36.2% above 25,000.

The effect compounds. The mean effective price rises from 15.4p per kWh in the lowest band to 27.3p in the highest, so annual cost rises faster than mileage does. A driver covering three times the mileage of another does not spend three times as much; they spend closer to four times as much. From 4,000 to 6,000 miles the cost is £249; from 20,000 to 25,000 it is £1,752, a factor of seven for a factor of four in distance.

The petrol comparison moves the other way and stays favourable throughout. A driver under 4,000 miles saves £340 a year against petrol. A driver over 25,000 saves £1,338. The absolute saving grows with mileage even as the effective charging price rises, because petrol cost rises linearly with mileage and no petrol driver gets a cheaper rate for buying more of it.

Circumstance explains far more of the variance than mileage does, which is the point of the second table. A driver with a driveway, an EV tariff and working scheduling pays £369 a year and takes 92.4% of their energy at home. A driver with a driveway on a standard tariff pays £903. That is more than twice as much, for the same access, purely on tariff choice. A driver in a flat with allocated parking and a charge point pays £782. A rural driver more than 20 miles from a rapid unit pays £439, because distance from public charging pushes them onto their own driveway, which is cheaper.

The cost penalty of having no driveway#

A UK electric car driver with no driveway and no local charger paid £1,762 a year to charge in 2026, against £369 for a driver with a driveway on an EV tariff with smart scheduling. That is a penalty of £1,393 a year, or 13.4p a mile, for the same car and the same mileage.

This is the most important social finding on the page. Two drivers with identical cars covering identical distances pay 4.8 to 1 different prices for the same commodity, and the only variable is where they park. The effective price per kWh runs from 11.6p in the best case to 55.4p in the worst. Over a five-year ownership the penalty is £6,965. Over eight years it is £11,144, which is a material fraction of the price of the car.

The mitigations help and none of them close the gap. Using public slow and fast units where they exist rather than rapid brings the effective price to 49p and the annual cost to £1,558, leaving £1,189 of penalty. A local on-street lamp column charger at 42.6p brings it to £1,355, leaving £986, roughly a third of the penalty removed. Adding workplace charging for half the energy brings it to £999. The only mitigation that nearly closes the gap is a cross-pavement channel connected to the household supply, at 14.2p and £452 a year, leaving £83. That is the answer, and it depends on a council permission that 18.4% of on-street drivers have applied for and 22.6% of applications have produced, after a mean wait of 14 months.

The population affected is larger than the current owner base suggests. 26.4% of UK households, about 7,684,000 of them, have no off-street parking, against 18.6% of current electric car owners, or around 267,000 drivers, who pay a combined £372m a year in penalty. The gap between those two percentages is the problem in one number: electric car ownership has so far been concentrated among the households that can charge cheaply, and 84.2% of on-street drivers say they would install home charging if they could.

Reaching a kerbside or lamp column charger from a car parked a few spaces away is a practical problem as well as a financial one. Our guide to 15m, 20m and 25m charging cables covers what length actually reaches, and cable extensions cover the cases where it does not.

Workplace and destination charging cost#

UK workplace charging cost employees a mean of 18p per kWh in 2026, and 42.6% of employers charged nothing at all. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found workplace charging saves the average user who has it £186 a year, and £312 a year where the employer charges nothing.

Workplace charging is the cheapest energy available to a driver after their own home supply, and it is systematically under-quantified because it sits outside both the domestic and the public price series. At 18p per kWh it is 4.9p a mile: roughly twice the cost of home charging on an EV tariff, and roughly a third of the cost of public rapid. 42.6% of employers charge nothing, 31.2% charge at cost and 26.2% charge at a margin, at a mean 28p per kWh where they do.

Availability is the constraint rather than price. 28.4% of UK electric car drivers have workplace access, and those who do take a mean 24.6% of their energy there. There is no benefit in kind on workplace charging in the UK, which makes free workplace provision an unusually efficient employee benefit: it costs the employer about 25p per kWh delivered and is worth £312 a year to a driver who would otherwise be on a standard tariff, with no tax consequence on either side.

Free destination charging is a smaller and shrinking category. There were 14,211 free connectors in the UK in 2026, 14.4% of the public network, but they delivered only 1.6% of public charging energy because they are mostly slow units at sites with short dwell times. The mean free session delivered 12.8 kWh, and free charging is worth a mean £48 a year to the drivers who use it. 18.6% of drivers say they deliberately shop where charging is free, accepting a mean detour of 2.4 miles.

The direction of travel is clear and is worth stating without editorialising. Free connectors were 23.6% of the UK network in 2023 and are 14.4% now, a decline of 9.2 percentage points in three years. Free charging was a customer acquisition cost during the period when charging was scarce and electric cars were rare; it is being withdrawn now that neither is true. A driver planning around free destination charging in 2026 is planning around a category that is halving every few years.

Solar, home batteries and export#

UK electric car drivers with solar panels charged at an effective 4.2p per kWh in 2026, and those with solar plus a home battery achieved 2.8p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found 14.8% of drivers have solar, and that the mean solar owner takes 34.6% of their charging energy directly from generation.

Solar is the cheapest charging available in the UK and it is under-reported because the arithmetic is awkward. The effective price is not zero, because most charging happens when the sun is not shining and because the generation used for the car has an opportunity cost equal to the export rate forgone. Netting those off, a solar owner without a battery charged at an effective 4.2p per kWh in 2026: 1.1p a mile, £134 a year, £165 less than the same driver on an EV tariff alone.

The honest qualification is seasonal and it is large. Direct solar charging is a summer phenomenon for most UK households. The share of charging energy taken directly from generation runs from 4.2% in January and 3.8% in December to 58.2% in July, and the effective price runs from 8.7p in December to 3.4p in July. The annual mean of 34.6% conceals a five-month period in which solar contributes almost nothing to charging a car and the driver is back on grid prices.

Ownership economics are worth stating plainly because they are frequently overstated. Mean installed solar cost among owners is £6,842 and mean installed battery cost is £5,184. Payback on solar attributable to EV charging alone is 11.2 years; including household use it is 7.4 years. Mean annual export earnings are £284 at a mean export rate of 12.4p per kWh, with the best available rate at 24p. Solar is a good investment for a household; it is not a good investment made solely to charge a car, and anyone presenting an 11-year payback as a charging cost saving is selling something.

Vehicle-to-load and vehicle-to-grid remain marginal at 0.4% of drivers, though the 412 pounds a year those drivers earn suggests the economics are not the barrier. Our vehicle-to-load adapters cover the hardware side of taking power back out of a car.

Company cars, salary sacrifice and business mileage#

The advisory electric rate for reimbursing business mileage in an electric company car was 8p per mile in 2026, against a measured mean home charging cost of 2.5p per mile. EV Cable Hub's 2026 analysis found that gap is worth £573 a year to a driver covering 10,420 business miles who charges at home.

Company car charging cost is a distinct question with a distinct answer, because the person paying for the energy and the person setting the reimbursement rate are usually not the same. A single flat advisory rate applied to a cost that varies by a factor of nine produces systematic winners and losers, and the 2026 data quantifies both sides of that rather than only the side that suits an argument.

The winners charge at home. At 2.5p a mile reimbursed at 8p, a driver is 5.5p a mile ahead, or £573 a year at 10,420 business miles. A driver who charges free at the workplace and claims 8p is 8.0p a mile ahead, or £834. A driver on a standard variable tariff at 6.8p is 1.2p ahead, or £125. That is close enough to break even that the reimbursement is doing its job.

The losers charge in public, and they lose heavily. At 13.8p a mile on public slow and fast, reimbursed at 8p, a driver is 5.8p a mile out of pocket, or £604 a year. On public rapid at 20.5p they are 12.5p out, or £1,303. On motorway rapid at 22.7p they are 14.7p out, or £1,532. That group is 18.6% of company car drivers, and they are disproportionately the ones without home charging, so the flat rate transfers money from drivers with no driveway to drivers with one.

The structural picture: 68.4% of company car drivers are reimbursed at the advisory rate, 18.2% at actual cost, 9.4% at a bespoke pence-per-mile rate averaging 9.4p, and 4.0% are not reimbursed at all. Benefit in kind on a fully electric company car is 3%, there is no benefit in kind on workplace charging, and there is none on employer-reimbursed home charging for business miles. 42.6% of company car drivers now use a salary sacrifice scheme, at a mean gross £486 a month, a mean net £312 after tax and national insurance relief, and a mean total of £352 a month including charging.

What it costs to get set up for home charging#

Installing a home charge point in the UK cost a mean of £892 in 2026 for a standard installation, or £1,046 all-in once the additions and accessories are counted. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found the installation pays for itself in 21 months against charging at home on a standard tariff, and in five months against charging entirely on public rapid.

Set-up cost is the barrier a prospective buyer thinks about, and the payback calculation is what resolves it. A standard installation is £486 of hardware and £406 of labour. The additions are where quotes diverge: a consumer unit upgrade at £312 affects 21.6% of installs, an additional cable run beyond 10 metres at £164 affects 18.4%, an earth rod at £142 affects 12.4%, groundwork or trenching at £486 affects 6.2%, and a supply upgrade from the network operator at £1,842 affects 3.8%. It is that last one, rare and expensive, that produces the horror-story quotes.

Payback depends entirely on what the alternative is. Against charging at home on a standard variable tariff the annual saving is £499 and the payback is 21 months, or 13 with grant support. Against charging entirely on public slow and fast units the saving is £1,259 and the payback is nine months. Against charging entirely on public rapid it is £2,213 and five months. Against a Mode 2 granny charger on the same EV tariff there is no energy saving at all (the electricity costs the same) but the driver recovers about 68 hours a year in charging time. The mean across all UK installs is £942 saved and 11 months to payback.

The cable question is worth answering separately because it determines whether a driver ever needs to think about it again. A tethered unit is simpler and always attached; an untethered unit takes any cable and is future-proof against a change of car. Our comparison of tethered against untethered charging cables sets out the trade, the granny charger guide covers what a Mode 2 unit can and cannot do, and Mode 2 against Mode 3 explains why the £118 cable is not optional on an untethered install. The full range of EV charging cables and granny chargers covers both, and the equipment cost data behind these figures is in our UK EV charging cable statistics study.

What UK drivers actually pay, the whole-year picture#

The mean UK electric car driver spent £486 on charging in 2026 across all locations, at a blended effective price of 15.3p per kWh. EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey found the cheapest quartile spent £248 and the most expensive quartile £1,142, a difference of 4.6 to 1 for broadly similar mileage.

An average conceals more than it reveals here, so this section publishes the distribution instead. The four quartiles cover mean annual mileages of 9,840, 10,240, 10,680 and 10,920 (a spread of 11%) and mean annual charging costs of £248, £386, £568 and £1,142, a spread of 360%. Mileage explains almost none of the difference between what UK drivers pay to charge.

What does explain it is in the home share column. The cheapest quartile takes 94.2% of its energy at home at a blended 8.6p per kWh. The most expensive quartile takes 42.4% at home and pays 32.4p. Access to a domestic supply is the variable, and everything else is second order. That is why the mean of £486 is a poor description of any individual driver and why this page publishes the driver-circumstance table alongside it.

Decomposing the mean bill makes the components visible. Home charging energy on an EV tariff is £234, or 48.1% of the bill. Public rapid and ultra-rapid is £164, or 33.7%, on 5.2% of the energy. Public slow and fast is £42. Charging losses attributable to home charging are £34. Cheap window overrun is £48. Additional public fees are £42. The standing charge premium on an EV tariff is £15. Free destination charging is a credit of £48. The total is £486.

The correlation table settles the argument about what determines charging cost. The share of energy taken in public correlates with annual cost at 0.86, which is very strong. Having off-street parking correlates at -0.74 and being on a dedicated EV tariff at -0.62. Annual mileage correlates at only 0.41. Vehicle efficiency correlates at 0.28 and battery size at 0.19. Both are weak. Region correlates at 0.12 and vehicle price at 0.14, which is to say not at all. The car you buy is close to irrelevant to what you pay to charge it. Where you park is nearly everything.

The 2030 cost outlook#

On EV Cable Hub's 2026 modelling, home charging on an EV tariff costs 10.6p per kWh by 2030 and public rapid charging 74p, narrowing the ratio between them from 10.0 to 1 today to 7.0 to 1. Petrol reaches 15.4p per mile on the central case, widening the home charging advantage to 12.5p a mile.

These are modelled figures, not measured ones, and they are labelled as such throughout. The central case assumes the domestic unit rate rises 3.1% a year, the off-peak differential widens 2.4% a year, public rapid pricing falls 1.6% a year, both VAT rates are unchanged, petrol reaches 162.8p a litre and diesel 171.4p, and mean parc efficiency improves from 3.7 to 3.9 miles per kWh. Cost per mile on this page continues to be quoted at 3.7 miles per kWh so the 2026 and 2030 figures stay comparable.

The structural call is the narrowing ratio, and it is the most quotable line in the section. Home and public prices are moving in opposite directions: home slowly up as domestic rates rise, public slowly down as utilisation improves and hardware costs amortise across more sessions. The ratio between them falls from 10.0 to 1 to 7.0 to 1 over four years. Public charging does not become cheap on this path, but it stops getting relatively more expensive, which it has done every year since 2022.

The scenarios show what would have to change. A low energy price case puts home charging at 8.4p per kWh and £267 a year. A high case puts it at 14.2p and £452. A public VAT cut to 5% would take public rapid from 74p to 61p without changing home cost at all. It is the single largest available intervention in the whole model, and the one that falls almost entirely on drivers without off-street parking. Road pricing on electricity at 3p a mile would take home cost per mile from 2.9p to 5.9p and the annual bill from £337 to £649, roughly doubling it and still leaving electric charging well below petrol.

Interactive tools#

Three calculators and a network comparator built on the 2026 dataset, a tariff ranking tool covering all 16 UK domestic EV tariffs, a searchable table of every figure on this page, and a forty-two item cost reduction checklist. Everything runs in the browser.

Every tool below uses the arithmetic set out at the top of this page: cost per mile equals price per kWh divided by miles per kWh, with the 11.4% wall-to-battery loss applied only where you ask for it. That means the outputs match the published tables rather than approximating them, and each tool names the table it draws on, so any figure it returns can be checked against the data above. Annual costs are shown to the nearest pound.