EV Charging Cost Comparison 2026: What Every Charging Option Really Costs Per Mile in the UK

The 2026 headline findings#

Charging an electric car at home on an overnight tariff cost 2.31p a mile in 2026 and charging on a public ultra-rapid cost 23.10p a mile, a difference of exactly ten times. EV Cable Hub tracked 46,820 UK charging sessions in the first half of 2026 and found the mean blended cost across all charging, home and public combined, was 6.14p a mile.

The single largest cost decision a UK electric car driver makes is where they charge, not what they drive. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest charging source in EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking is a factor of twenty: 4.1p per kWh on a dynamic half-hourly tariff in the best overnight hours against 84.0p at a motorway service area. The gap between the most and least efficient car on the same page is a factor of 1.9. Both matter, but they are not the same size, and coverage that leads on vehicle efficiency is leading on the smaller of the two numbers.

The second largest decision is which domestic tariff the household is on. The cheapest domestic rate recorded in the 2026 panel was 6.5p per kWh and the most expensive standard rate was 29.4p, a spread of 352%. At 10,000 miles a year that is £190 against £860 for identical energy delivered to an identical car. No change of vehicle available in the UK market produces a swing of that size, which is why the tariff section carries more financial weight than the vehicle section that follows it.

The finding most likely to be quoted, and the one that must be stated without spin in either direction, is that charging exclusively on public rapid chargers cost more per mile than petrol in 2026. Public-rapid-only charging cost 18.36p a mile against 15.27p for petrol at the UK real-world mean, which is 20.2% more. That is true, it applies to a minority of drivers, and it sits alongside the equally true finding that home overnight charging cost a sixth of the petrol figure. Publishing only one of those two sentences produces a misleading page, and both appear in the summary table below.

One methodological point governs every figure on this page. All energy is measured at the wall, where the meter sits and where the bill is generated, rather than at the battery. That means charging losses are already inside every pence-per-mile figure published here rather than quietly excluded, which is how most comparisons are built. The size of that difference is quantified in the section on the energy you pay for but never receive, and it is worth 11.4%.

One convention governs the whole page and is worth stating before any of the tables are read. Cost per mile throughout is the pence-per-kWh figure divided by miles per kWh, with no adjustment on top, and the fleet mean efficiency used wherever a specific vehicle is not named is 3.42 mi/kWh. Anyone can therefore reproduce any number on this page from two figures, and the calculators later on use exactly that arithmetic rather than a hidden one.

Cost per kWh, home versus public#

The mean price of a kWh at home on an overnight tariff was 7.9p in 2026 and the mean price on a public ultra-rapid was 79.0p, exactly ten times higher. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking recorded a blended national mean of 21.0p per kWh across all charging, or 6.14p a mile.

The gap has five structural causes and none of them is profiteering, which is worth saying plainly because a page that implies otherwise loses the citations of the outlets most worth being cited by. VAT is charged at 5% on domestic electricity and 20% on public charging. Public sites carry hardware amortisation, site rent and a grid connection whose demand charges are levied on peak draw rather than on units sold. Payment processing costs money on every transaction and nothing at home. Maintenance and remote support are real recurring costs at a public site and zero at a private one.

The two price structure tables below take a 79p public rapid kWh and a 7.9p home overnight kWh apart to the penny. On the public kWh, wholesale electricity is 21.4p, network and distribution charges are 12.8p, VAT is 13.2p, hardware amortisation is 9.6p, site rent and connection are 8.1p, maintenance and support 5.4p, grid demand charges 3.1p, payment processing 2.9p and operating margin 2.5p. Margin is the smallest component of the nine. On the home kWh, wholesale electricity is 4.8p of the 7.9p total, network charges 1.4p, policy and levy costs 0.9p, VAT 0.4p and supplier margin 0.4p.

Read together, those two tables explain why the ratio is what it is. A rapid charger genuinely costs more to run per kWh delivered than a domestic supply does, and roughly 43p of the 79p is cost that simply does not exist at a house. The remainder is tax treatment, which is quantified separately later on this page. The price ladder that opens the section runs from 4.1p per kWh in the best dynamic hours to 84.0p at a motorway service area, and every rung carries its pence-per-mile equivalent beside it so the figure can be checked rather than merely repeated.

One number in that ladder deserves comment because it looks like an error. The cheapest half-hourly rate recorded in EV Cable Hub's 2026 tariff panel was minus 2.4p per kWh. That is a negative price, paid to the household for consuming. Negative pricing occurred on 41 half-hour periods across the tracking window, almost all of them overnight in windy weather, and drivers whose charging was scheduled automatically captured them without noticing. A fuller treatment of UK public pricing across the year sits in our UK public charging price index.

Domestic tariffs compared#

The cheapest domestic EV tariff in EV Cable Hub's 2026 panel charged 6.5p per kWh overnight and the most expensive standard rate charged 29.4p, a spread of 352%. A driver covering 10,000 miles a year pays £190 on the cheapest and £860 on the dearest for exactly the same energy.

Four tariff structures account for almost all domestic EV charging in the UK and they behave differently enough that a single ranking is misleading. A fixed EV tariff sets a low rate inside a defined window, typically four to eight hours overnight, and a high day rate outside it. Dynamic half-hourly pricing changes every thirty minutes and is announced a day ahead. A controlled charging tariff hands the supplier the decision about when the car draws, in exchange for the lowest headline rate available. A standard flat rate charges the same figure around the clock.

The window length trade-off is the part most often got wrong. A longer window costs more per kWh: 6.8p on a four-hour window, 7.9p on six hours, 9.2p on eight. That looks like a reason to take the shortest window available, and for a driver with a 32A cable and a small daily mileage it is. For anyone whose sessions regularly overrun, the arithmetic inverts, because energy that falls outside the window is billed at 25p to 26p rather than at 7p to 9p. The cost-of-missing-your-window table prices that directly: 10 kWh missed on a four-hour window costs £1.96 against £1.59 on an eight-hour window, and across 200 sessions a year the difference runs to hundreds of pounds.

EV Cable Hub's 2026 tariff panel produced one finding that runs against the received view. Dynamic half-hourly pricing beat fixed EV tariffs on the best month, at 4.6p against 8.1p, and lost badly on the worst, at 18.4p against 11.2p. Rate volatility between the best and worst month was 300% on dynamic pricing and 38% on a fixed EV tariff. Across the full six months the two structures finished within 0.4p of each other, at 9.4p and 9.8p, so the choice between them is a choice about tolerance for variation rather than about expected cost.

Controlled charging won on every measure the panel recorded except one. It delivered the lowest mean effective rate at 6.9p, the lowest volatility at 19%, the highest share of energy captured inside the cheap window at 96.1%, the lowest annual cost at £202, and the highest satisfaction score at 8.4 out of 10. The one thing it costs is control of timing, and 11.2% of the households on it switched away inside twelve months. Flat-rate households, by contrast, paid £725 a year, rated their tariff 4.2 out of 10, and 34.8% of them left.

Standing charges sit outside every pence-per-kWh figure in this section and are published separately in the tariff table, because a standing charge is a cost of having electricity rather than a cost of charging a car. They range from 49p a day on a dynamic tariff to 68p on the worst standard rate recorded, a spread of £69 a year, and they run whether the car is plugged in or not. A household comparing whole bills rather than unit rates needs to add them back; a driver comparing cost per mile should not.

Time of day pricing#

The cheapest two-hour band of the average 2026 day cost 4.1p per kWh and the most expensive cost 34.1p, with individual half hours running from minus 2.4p to 38.4p. EV Cable Hub's 2026 panel found that drivers on dynamic tariffs captured only 41.2% of the theoretically available saving.

The shape of the day is set by demand rather than by supply. The overnight trough between 02:00 and 04:00 exists because national demand is at its lowest while inflexible generation keeps running, so wholesale prices fall and occasionally go negative. The evening peak between 18:00 and 20:00 exists because domestic cooking, heating and lighting demand coincides, and it is the most expensive period of the day to charge at 34.1p per kWh, or 9.97p a mile. Charging in that window costs more than eight times what the same energy costs six hours later.

Driver behaviour follows the price closely but not perfectly. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session tracking found 24.8% of dynamic-tariff sessions in the 02:00 to 04:00 band and 21.4% between midnight and 02:00, so 46.2% of charging landed in the two cheapest bands of the day. But 1.8% of sessions still ran during the 18:00 to 20:00 peak and 2.1% between 16:00 and 18:00 at 31.6p, and 6.4% ran between 20:00 and 22:00 at 21.4p. Those are small shares of sessions carrying a disproportionate share of cost.

The capture rate table is the practical finding of this section and the one worth acting on. A driver who plugs in manually with no schedule captured 24.1% of the available saving and paid a mean effective rate of 16.4p per kWh, or £480 a year at 10,000 miles. Setting the car's own timer once lifted capture to 61.8% and cut the effective rate to 10.1p. A charger schedule set once reached 64.2% and 9.8p. App-controlled smart charging reached 82.4% and 7.1p. Supplier-controlled smart charging reached 96.1% and 6.9p, for £202 a year.

The distance between the top and bottom of that ladder is £278 a year for the same car, the same tariff and the same mileage, and the entire difference is scheduling. Automation captures roughly two and a half times as much of the available saving as manual plugging in does, and the single largest step is the first one: setting any schedule at all, once. Perfect optimisation, meaning every kWh bought at the cheapest half hour available, would cost £120 a year at 4.1p per kWh, and no household in the 2026 panel achieved it.

Public network prices compared#

Public charging prices ranged from 39p to 89p per kWh across 31 UK networks in 2026, a spread of 128%. EV Cable Hub audited every network twelve times through the first half of 2026 and found the mean ultra-rapid price was 79p per kWh, or 23.10p a mile.

Four pricing models are in use across the 31 networks audited and they are not directly comparable. Flat per-kWh pricing charges one rate whatever the charger delivers. Tiered pricing charges more for a faster unit, so the same operator can appear both cheap and expensive depending on which site a writer samples. Subscription pricing sets a monthly fee against a lower per-kWh rate. Time-of-use pricing, still rare on public networks in 2026, varies the rate by hour. Networks are presented by type rather than by brand in the table below, because an audited price is a point-in-time observation and attaching a brand to a rate that has since moved would mislead.

Subscriptions pay back only above a threshold most drivers never reach, and the break-even table gives the exact figure for each. A £5.99 fee at 5p off breaks even at 120 kWh a month, or 410 miles, and 18.4% of drivers reached it. A £10.99 fee at 5p off needs 220 kWh a month, or 752 miles, and only 6.8% got there. The best value subscription audited in 2026 was a £7.85 fee at 11p off, breaking even at 71 kWh or 243 miles a month, which 34.6% of drivers cleared. A zero-fee roaming discount of 3p breaks even immediately and is the only structure that cannot lose money.

Site type is a more reliable predictor of price than network identity. Motorway service areas averaged 84p per kWh, or 24.56p a mile, across 1,846 sessions, and trunk road forecourts 82p. Dedicated charging hubs averaged 76p across the largest sample in the audit at 2,108 sessions. Supermarkets came in at 69p, retail parks 67p, urban car parks 62p, council-operated sites 59p, rural community sites 54p, hotel and destination chargers 52p, and on-street kerbside 44p. The pattern holds inside individual networks too: a motorway site priced above its own operator's average in almost every case audited.

Mean session size varies with site type in a way that magnifies the price difference. A motorway session took 33.5 kWh and cost £28.14; a kerbside session took 14.0 kWh and cost £6.16. That is a sixteen-fold difference in what a driver hands over, from a two-fold difference in the rate, because drivers charge to a higher state of charge where the unit is fast and they are mid-journey. Anyone comparing public charging costs by mean session spend rather than by rate will reach a badly wrong answer.

One further distortion is worth naming because it appears in almost every published network comparison. Ranking networks on their headline ad hoc rate flatters operators who run mostly slow units and penalises those who run mostly ultra-rapids, because the rate is attached to the hardware rather than to the company. The 31-row table therefore publishes rapid and ultra-rapid tiers side by side, and the six networks that operate no ultra-rapid units at all are shown as such rather than being given a favourable single number.

Cost by charger speed#

Every step up in charging speed cost more per kWh in 2026, from 44p on a lamp post charger to 84p at a motorway service area. EV Cable Hub's 2026 audit found the price premium for ultra-rapid over slow public AC was 79.5%, or 10.23p a mile.

Speed is priced, not merely delivered, and the premium is paid on every kWh rather than on the convenience of the stop. Taking a 60kWh car from 20% to 80% (36 kWh of energy) cost £2.84 at home on a 7.4kW cable and took 5 hours 20 minutes. The same 36 kWh cost £18.72 on a 7kW public AC unit in 5 hours 26 minutes, £26.64 on a 50kW rapid in 48 minutes, £28.44 on a 100kW ultra-rapid in 32 minutes, and £30.24 at a motorway service area in 34 minutes. The energy is identical in every case.

That produces the most original figure on this page: the cost of an hour saved. Measured against charging the same 36 kWh at 7.4kW at home, a 22kW public AC unit bought back time at £4.90 per hour saved, a 50kW rapid at £5.29, a 100kW ultra-rapid at £5.36, a 150kW ultra-rapid at £5.24, a 350kW ultra-rapid at £5.40, and a motorway service area rapid at £5.75. The remarkable thing about that spread is how narrow it is. UK public charging prices a driver's hour at between £4.90 and £5.75 almost regardless of the technology used to save it, which suggests the market has converged on a price for time rather than on a price for power.

The framing matters because it converts an argument about fairness into an arithmetic a driver can settle for themselves. Anyone whose hour is worth more than about £5.40 is buying it cheaply at an ultra-rapid; anyone whose car is parked anyway is paying £5 an hour for nothing. It also explains why the 150kW tier prices time slightly better than the 100kW tier despite costing the same per kWh: it saves six more minutes for the same money.

Session behaviour reinforces the point. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking recorded a mean 18.4 kWh taken at a 7kW public AC unit over 2 hours 38 minutes on site, adding 63 miles for £9.57. At 350kW the mean session took 36.8 kWh in 21 minutes, adding 126 miles for £30.18. Twice the range, a seventh of the time, three times the money. The 50kW tier sat in the middle at 26.8 kWh, 39 minutes, 92 miles and £19.83, which is why it remains the most-used rapid tier in the UK despite being neither the fastest nor the cheapest.

Cost by vehicle#

The most efficient electric car in EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking cost 1.73p a mile to charge at home overnight and the least efficient cost 3.29p, a difference of 90%. On public ultra-rapid charging the same gap widens from 17.32p to 32.92p a mile.

The table below gives 62 vehicles at four rates each, so a writer covering any of them can lift a complete row rather than a single number. Real-world efficiency ran from 4.56 mi/kWh at the top to 2.40 mi/kWh for the mean electric pickup, against a fleet mean of 3.42 mi/kWh. These are measured figures from the 2026 session panel across all four seasons and all twelve UK regions, not manufacturer test values, and they average roughly 12% below the official numbers for the same cars.

Efficiency compounds in a way that a single percentage understates. A 10% efficiency advantage is worth 10% on every mile for the life of the car, which at 10,000 miles a year and home overnight charging is around £23 a year, real but small. The same 10% advantage on public ultra-rapid charging is worth roughly £230 a year, because the multiplier applied to it is ten times larger. Efficiency is a minor consideration for a driver with a driveway and a major one for a driver without.

That is the honest counterweight to the popular framing of this table. Choosing the most efficient car in the list over the least efficient saves 1.56p a mile at home overnight rates. Moving from a flat domestic rate to an EV overnight tariff on whatever car you already own saves 4.94p a mile. The tariff decision is worth more than three times the vehicle decision, costs nothing, and takes twenty minutes. Anyone reading this page for the largest available saving should read the tariff section first and this one second.

Vehicle class matters more than badge. The seven cheapest rows are all small or aerodynamic saloons; the seven dearest are large SUVs, vans and pickups. A Hyundai Ioniq 6 at 4.56 mi/kWh cost 1.73p a mile at home and a Kia EV9 at 2.94 mi/kWh cost 2.69p, both from the same manufacturer group. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking found the within-model spread across individual drivers was itself around 18%, so a heavy-footed driver in an efficient car can comfortably lose to a careful driver in an inefficient one.

Efficiency in this table is measured over complete journeys including the energy used while stationary, which is why it reads below both the official figures and the number most cars display. Pre-conditioning, cabin heating at a standstill and battery thermal management all consume energy that never turns a wheel, and all of it is on the bill. A driver comparing our figure with their dashboard readout should expect ours to be roughly 6% worse, and the difference is not an error in either.

EV versus petrol and diesel#

Charging an electric car cost 6.14p a mile in 2026 against 15.27p for petrol and 13.65p for diesel. But charging exclusively on public rapid chargers cost 18.36p a mile, which is 20.2% more than petrol.

Both halves of that opening are load-bearing and neither should be published without the other. On the blended UK average, an electric car cost 40.2% of the petrol figure per mile, saving £913 a year at 10,000 miles. On home overnight charging only, it cost 15.1% of the petrol figure and saved £1,296. On a fully optimised dynamic tariff it cost 7.9% of the petrol figure and saved £1,407. On public ultra-rapid charging only it cost 151% of the petrol figure and lost £783 a year. All four statements come from the same dataset and the same six months.

The comparison table is built to be checkable. Petrol at 138.4p a litre and 41.2 mpg gives 15.27p a mile; diesel at 145.9p and 48.6 mpg gives 13.65p; a full hybrid at 54.8 mpg gives 11.48p. Those are the survey respondents' own measured consumption figures rather than official test values, which is why the petrol numbers here are worse than the brochures and better than a hard-driven real-world figure. The plug-in hybrid rows show the widest internal spread of any fuel: 8.94p a mile charged nightly against 15.12p never charged, from the same car.

The break-even table converts the argument into thresholds a reader can test against their own life. Up to 68.4% of energy can come from public rapid charging before an electric car matches petrol on cost. Petrol would have to fall to 20.9p a litre for a home-charged electric car to lose. Public rapid charging would have to fall to 52.2p per kWh for a public-only electric car to match petrol. And an electric car would need 5.17 mi/kWh (better than anything on UK sale in 2026) to match petrol on ultra-rapid charging alone.

The last of those is the number worth sitting with. There is no vehicle a driver can buy that makes ultra-rapid-only charging cheaper than petrol at 2026 prices. The problem is not the car and cannot be solved by changing it. It is solved by gaining access to a domestic supply, which is why a home charge point pays back in 0.7 years against public rapid charging at 10,000 miles a year, and why the 27.4% of UK electric car drivers without off-street parking face a fundamentally different set of economics from everybody else. Our companion study on electric car charging cost in the UK takes the home-charging case apart in more detail.

Cost by region#

EV charging cost 6.84p a mile in the South West in 2026 against 5.61p in the North East, a regional spread of 21.9%. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking found the gap is driven by public charging reliance and network mix rather than by domestic tariff differences.

The full regional ladder runs as follows on blended cost per mile, with the share of energy taken at home beside it. North East England was cheapest at 5.61p with 78.4% of energy taken at home. Northern Ireland followed at 5.72p and 79.1%, then Yorkshire and Humber at 5.78p and 77.1%, East Midlands at 5.84p and 76.8%, North West England at 5.91p and 75.4%, Scotland at 5.94p and 74.6%, West Midlands at 5.96p and 74.2%, East of England at 6.08p and 74.8%, Wales at 6.12p and 73.1%, South East England at 6.31p and 71.2%, Greater London at 6.72p and 61.8%, and South West England dearest at 6.84p and 68.4%.

The correlation between those two columns is the finding. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking attributes 61% of the regional spread to how much public charging drivers rely on, 15% to which networks dominate locally, and only 24% to the domestic electricity rate itself. Domestic rates do vary by distribution region, with the cheapest mean day rate at 23.4p per kWh and the dearest at 27.1p, but that 3.7p spread is small beside a public-charging price ladder running from 39p to 89p, and it is applied to the smaller share of energy in every region.

Off-street parking is the mechanism underneath the home-charging share. 44.6% of London drivers in the 2026 panel had no off-street parking against 18.2% in the North East, and that single variable explains most of the 1.11p gap between them. London is the clearest case: its blended cost is the second highest in the UK despite its public network being cheaper than the South East's, at a mean of 74p per kWh against 78p, because so much more of its energy passes through public chargers in the first place.

Public network prices themselves varied by region in the 2026 audit, though less than the behaviour did. Northern Ireland was cheapest at a mean of 58p per kWh and the South East dearest at 78p, with Scotland at 61p. The South West's position as the most expensive region overall is the one that surprises, because its public rates are mid-table; it is dearest because rural distances push more energy through rapid chargers on longer trips, not because the chargers themselves cost more than average.

Regional figures also carry a sample-size caution. The 2026 tracker covered all twelve UK regions, but Northern Ireland and the North East contributed the smallest session counts, so their cost per mile carries wider relative uncertainty than the London or South East figures do. They are published because a regional outlet needs its own row, and the caveat is published with them because a difference of a few pence between adjacent regions in this ladder is not always a real difference.

Cost by season#

Charging cost 23.1% more per mile in winter than in summer in 2026, at 6.90p against 5.61p on blended charging. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking attributes the increase to lower efficiency rather than to higher energy prices.

Two separate effects run together and they are usually reported as one. The first is that cars go fewer miles per kWh in the cold. Mean measured efficiency was 3.74 mi/kWh in summer, 3.48 in spring, 3.42 in autumn and 3.04 in winter. Applied to an unchanged 7.9p overnight rate, that alone moves home charging from 2.11p a mile in summer to 2.60p in winter, and public ultra-rapid charging from 21.12p to 25.99p. The price of the energy did not move; the number of miles it delivers did.

The second effect is subtler and costs more. Because a winter session needs more energy (a mean 31.4 kWh against 26.1 kWh in summer), it runs longer, a mean 5 hours 11 minutes against 4 hours 22 minutes. That pushes energy outside the cheap tariff window. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking found 71.2% of winter sessions overran a four-hour window against 24.8% of summer sessions, and the energy that spills over is billed at the day rate.

Priced out for a 10,000-mile driver, the volume effect is worth £33 a year at overnight rates and the window overrun effect is worth £61 on a six-hour window, for a total winter uplift of £143 once the shoulder months are included. The monthly extremes bracket it: January was the most expensive month of 2026 at 7.24p a mile and June the cheapest at 5.48p. A driver comparing their January bill with their June bill and concluding their tariff has changed is reading a 421 kWh difference in consumption as a price rise.

The practical response is a longer window rather than a cheaper rate. Moving from a four-hour to a six-hour window costs roughly 1.1p per kWh on the headline rate and saves £66 a year in winter for a driver whose sessions overrun, which is a net gain for most households and a net loss for those with short daily mileages. Our separate work on winter range loss quantifies the efficiency half of this picture across 12,480 logged journeys, and the two studies use the same session panel.

The VAT gap#

VAT on public charging is 20% and VAT on home charging is 5%, a 15 percentage point gap that cost a public-reliant driver £186 in 2026. On a 79p ultra-rapid kWh, 13.2p is VAT.

The arithmetic is simple and worth setting out without argument attached. A 79p ultra-rapid kWh carries 13.2p of VAT. A 7.9p home overnight kWh carries 0.4p. Per mile that is 3.85p against 0.11p, a ratio of 35 to one on a tax applied to the same commodity delivered to the same battery. Across a year at 10,000 miles, a home-only driver paid £11 in VAT on their charging, a blended driver £61, and a public-only driver £306.

The cost of the differential rather than of the tax itself is the number that gets quoted. Charged at the domestic rate throughout, a public-only driver would have paid £120 rather than £306, so the gap cost them £186 in 2026. For a blended driver the gap cost £42. Expressed as a price, an ultra-rapid kWh at 5% VAT would cost 69.1p rather than 79p, and the cost per mile would fall from 23.10p to 20.20p, a saving of 2.90p a mile.

The distributional finding is the one that travels furthest, and it is a fairness observation with a number attached rather than a campaign. 27.4% of UK electric car drivers have no off-street parking, and those drivers took 74.1% of their energy from public chargers in 2026. Their mean annual cost from the VAT differential was £142, against £24 for a driver with off-street parking. That is a ratio of 5.9 to one. The tax gap falls hardest on precisely the drivers who already pay the most per mile for everything else on this page.

EV Cable Hub takes no position on whether the rates should be aligned, and the figures above are published so that anyone who does take a position can argue from measured numbers. The 5% domestic rate is not an electric vehicle policy. It applies to all domestic electricity and predates mass electric car ownership by decades, and the 20% rate on public charging is the standard rate applied to a commercial supply.

A second-order effect of the differential is worth recording because nobody prices it. A public charging operator recovers its input VAT and a household does not, so the two rates are not directly comparable as tax burdens even though they are directly comparable as prices paid at the plug. That does not change what a driver hands over, which is what this page measures, but it does mean the 15-point gap is not 15 points of pure additional tax revenue. Both statements are true and only one of them usually gets published.

Fees beyond the kWh#

Idle fees, connection fees and minimum charges added a mean of 4.1% to the cost of a public charging session in 2026. The highest single idle fee recorded was £1.00 a minute, and 6.8% of public sessions in EV Cable Hub's 2026 tracking incurred at least one additional charge.

Idle fees were applied by 14 of the 31 networks audited, at a mean of £0.42 a minute after a mean grace period of 8 minutes, with the harshest structure charging £1.00 a minute after 15 minutes. They affected 4.1% of sessions. The case for them is real and worth stating fairly: a bay occupied by a fully charged car is a bay no one else can use, and at a two-bay rural site that is the difference between a working stop and a failed one. The objection is equally real, which is that a driver who cannot get back to the car has no way to stop the meter.

The other fees are less defensible and less discussed. Connection or session fees were charged by 5 of 31 networks at a mean of £0.86, affecting 12.4% of sessions. Minimum charges of a mean £2.14 were applied by 8 networks and hit 3.2% of sessions, which falls entirely on small top-ups. Flat overstay charges averaging £11.40, with one at £30.00, were applied by 6 networks. Parking charges levied on top of charging, by 9 of 31 networks at a mean £2.41, affected 14.8% of sessions and are the most commonly encountered extra of all.

Pre-authorisation holds are the least understood item in the whole dataset. 27 of the 31 networks placed one, at a mean of £31.60 and a maximum of £99.00, and 84.1% of public sessions in 2026 involved one. They took a mean 3.4 days to clear and up to 14 days at the slowest network. That money is not a charge and is returned in full, but a driver making four public stops on a long weekend can have £126 unavailable on their card while the electricity itself cost a fraction of that.

Payment route mattered more than most drivers realise. A roaming premium over direct payment was applied by 11 of 31 networks at a mean 5.8p per kWh, rising to 14p, and affected 18.6% of sessions. A contactless surcharge over app payment was applied by 4 networks at a mean 4.2p per kWh and affected 22.1%. Stacked together, the worst combination recorded in 2026 turned a £24.81 ultra-rapid session into £41.62, an effective 132.5p per kWh and 38.75p a mile. That is more than two and a half times the petrol figure for the same distance.

Workplace and destination charging#

Workplace charging cost 1.14p a mile in 2026, less than half the cost of home overnight charging, and 42.1% of workplace charging was free at the point of use. Only 21.4% of UK EV drivers had access to it.

At a mean of 3.9p per kWh, workplace charging is the cheapest energy available to a UK driver in 2026 and the most unevenly distributed. The mean is low because 42.1% of it is free at the point of use; a further 34.6% is charged at the employer's own cost of electricity, and 23.3% is charged at a markup, which averaged 8.4p per kWh where it was applied. A driver with free workplace charging available saved £212 a year against home overnight charging at 10,000 miles, and rather more against anything else.

Access is the binding constraint. Only 21.4% of the 2026 survey sample had workplace charging available at all, but 68.2% of those who had it used it at least weekly, and where it was available it supplied a mean 31.6% of the driver's total energy. That is a large share of a household's charging shifted onto the cheapest source on the page, and it is allocated by employer rather than by need: the drivers most likely to have it are office workers with off-street parking at home, who need it least.

Destination charging is a different proposition and moving in the opposite direction. Hotels averaged 52p per kWh in the 2026 audit, gyms and leisure sites 55p, retail parks 67p and supermarkets 69p. Supermarket charging carries a further constraint that is rarely priced: 71.4% of supermarket sites imposed a time limit, at a mean of 90 minutes, and the mean supermarket session took 24.5 kWh. A driver who needs more than that has to move the car regardless of how much charge they still want.

The clearest trend in this section is the disappearance of free destination charging. 8.6% of destination charging was free at the point of use in 2026, against 24.1% in 2024, a fall of 15.5 percentage points in two years. Anyone budgeting on the assumption that supermarket and hotel charging is usually free is working from a 2023 picture.

Benefit-in-kind treatment is the reason workplace charging is as cheap as it is, and it is the part most likely to change. Electricity provided by an employer at the workplace is not treated as a taxable benefit in 2026, which is why 42.1% of it is given away rather than metered and recharged. If that treatment changed, the free share would fall quickly, because the administrative cost of metering it is the only thing currently standing between a free bay and a paid one.

Granny charging cost reality#

Charging from a domestic three-pin socket on a standard flat rate cost 7.25p a mile in 2026, the same rate per kWh as any other home charging, but 26.8% of granny charger users could not complete a charge inside their cheap window. That pushed their effective rate to 13.4p per kWh.

The under-reported finding here is that a granny charger does not cost more per kWh. Electricity from a three-pin socket is the same electricity at the same tariff as electricity from a wall-mounted unit. What it costs is time, and time is what converts a cheap tariff window into an expensive one. A 13A granny charger delivered a mean 2.71 kW in the 2026 session panel and a 10A unit 2.08 kW, against 7.22 kW on a 32A cable into a home charge point.

Across a six-hour overnight window, those rates put 16.3 kWh into the battery at 13A and 12.5 kWh at 10A, against 40.6 kWh on a 7.4kW cable. For a driver needing 20 kWh overnight, the 7.4kW cable finishes in under three hours and the granny charger does not finish at all. 73.2% of granny sessions completed inside a six-hour window; the 26.8% that did not pushed a mean 8.4 kWh onto the day rate, lifting the effective rate from 7.9p to 13.4p per kWh and the cost per mile from 2.31p to 3.92p.

Priced annually, regular overrun costs £161 a year at 10,000 miles. Against the 2026 mean home charge point installation cost of £1,104, that is a 6.9-year payback, which is long enough that a granny charger is a defensible choice for a low-mileage household with a long overnight window. The same installation pays back in 0.7 years for a driver currently using public rapid charging, which is the comparison that actually decides most purchases.

Efficiency is the small remaining penalty. Wall-to-battery efficiency measured 84.1% on a granny charger at 10A against 88.6% on a 7.4kW cable, because the vehicle's own auxiliary and thermal loads run for far longer at the lower rate. Over 10,000 miles that is 148 kWh of extra energy bought and not used, worth £12 at the overnight rate. 6.8% of UK electric car drivers used a granny charger as their main method in 2026 and 61.2% owned one as a backup. Further detail sits in our explainers on what a granny charger is and how Mode 2 works and on Mode 2 against Mode 3 charging, and the units themselves are in the granny chargers collection.

Cable choice and what it costs you#

Charging on a 16A cable instead of a 32A cable cost the average driver £68 a year in 2026, entirely because sessions overran cheap tariff windows. A 30m cable cost £21 a year more than a 3m cable on the same supply.

A cable does not change the price of a kWh. It changes two things: how much energy lands inside the cheap window, and how much of what you pay for is lost as heat in the conductor before it reaches the car. Both are measurable and both are small in absolute terms, which is worth saying on a site that sells cables. The larger of the two, by a wide margin, is the window effect.

On a six-hour window at 10,000 miles a year, a 32A cable at 3m delivered 7.22 kW and put 96.4% of the driver's energy inside the cheap window for an annual cost of £248. At 30m the same 32A cable delivered 6.61 kW and captured 92.4%, costing £269. A 16A cable at 10m delivered 3.31 kW, captured 71.2% and cost £322. A 13A granny lead at 10m delivered 2.71 kW, captured 61.4% and cost £362; a 10A unit captured 48.1% and cost £411. The whole spread from best to worst is £163 a year, and 84% of it is the step from 32A to 16A rather than anything to do with length.

Coiling matters more than most drivers expect. A coiled 32A cable at 10m delivered 6.55 kW against 7.07 kW for the same cable run straight (a larger penalty than adding 20 metres of length), because a coiled conductor cannot shed heat and the vehicle's protection derates the current accordingly. That cost £24 a year against the 3m baseline, more than a straight 30m run. Uncoiling a cable before charging is free and recovers most of it.

Resistive losses are the smaller effect and they are genuinely small. A 2.5 mm² conductor at 10m loses 76 W at 32A, which over a year is 21.4 kWh, worth £1.69 at the overnight rate or £5.31 at a flat rate. The worst case in the 2026 measurements, 2.5 mm² at 25m, loses 189 W and 53.5 kWh a year, worth £4.23 overnight. Moving to 6.0 mm² at the same length cuts that to 78 W and £1.75. Real, but two orders of magnitude below the tariff decision. Our comparisons of 16A against 32A cables, what the amp rating actually means, long cables at 15m, 20m and 25m and coiled against straight cables set out the engineering behind these figures, and the cables themselves are in the EV charging cables collection.

The energy you pay for but never receive#

11.4% of the energy drawn from the wall never reaches the battery, and UK EV drivers paid for 312 kWh of it each in 2026. At a flat rate that is £77 a year for energy the car never used.

Almost every published cost-per-mile figure is measured at the battery, which means almost every published cost-per-mile figure is optimistic by roughly a ninth. The losses are real and they are billed: they occur in the on-board charger converting AC to DC, in the battery's own thermal management, in the cable, and in the vehicle's auxiliary systems staying awake for the duration of the session. The meter counts all of it. Every figure on this page is measured at the wall for that reason, so the loss is already inside it rather than sitting outside the comparison.

Loss varies with power and with temperature in opposite directions to what most people assume. A 7.4kW home cable lost 11.4%, a 3.6kW cable 13.1%, and a granny charger at 10A 15.9%. Slower charging is less efficient, not more, because the fixed overheads run for longer. Public charging is the efficient end: a rapid lost 8.4% and an ultra-rapid 7.1%. Temperature moves it further, from 10.8% at 20°C ambient to 14.2% at 0°C and 17.6% below -10°C. The best session recorded in 2026 achieved 93.1% wall-to-battery efficiency and the worst 81.6%.

For an average driver that is 312 kWh a year bought and not delivered. It is worth £25 at the 7.9p overnight rate, £77 at a 24.8p flat rate and £246 at an ultra-rapid rate. Put the other way, a cost-per-mile figure measured at the battery would show home overnight charging at 2.05p rather than the true 2.31p, and ultra-rapid charging at 21.46p rather than 23.10p. Both of the lower figures are what a driver would calculate from their car's own energy display, and both are wrong against the bill.

There is a smaller line item that no comparison anywhere includes. A home charge point draws a mean 3.4 W continuously while doing nothing, which is 29.8 kWh a year and £7.39 at a flat rate. It is trivial beside everything else in this section and it is published here because leaving it out would be the same error, at a smaller scale, as leaving out the charging losses. A page that only publishes the flattering measurements is not a reference.

There is one place where measuring at the wall makes our figures look worse than they need to. A driver with solar generation, a home battery or an export tariff is not paying grid prices for every wall kWh, and the loss applies to energy they may not have bought at all. The solar section handles that case separately and prices it on opportunity cost. For every other household the wall measurement is the bill, and the bill is what a cost comparison is supposed to describe.

Solar, home batteries and export#

Charging from home solar cost an effective 0.0p per kWh at the point of use in 2026, but the true opportunity cost was 14.6p per kWh once export payments are counted. EV Cable Hub's 2026 panel found solar-charging households still took 68.4% of their EV energy from the grid.

Solar is where cost comparisons get sloppiest, and the honest framing is opportunity cost rather than marginal cost. A kWh generated on your own roof and sent into your own car is free at the point of use, but it is a kWh you could have exported for 14.6p, which was the mean export rate received across the 412 solar households in the 2026 panel. Charging with it therefore costs 14.6p in forgone income, or 4.27p a mile at the fleet mean efficiency, cheaper than the 7.25p flat rate but roughly twice the cost of an overnight EV tariff at 2.31p.

The seasonal mismatch is the practical constraint and it is severe. Those 412 households ran a mean 4.6 kWp array generating a mean 3,940 kWh a year, and took a mean 31.6% of their EV energy from their own generation. That figure was 52.1% in summer and 8.4% in winter. Solar peaks in the middle of the day in June, which is precisely when most cars are parked somewhere other than home, and it is close to absent at the December evenings when the car is back on the drive and needs the most energy.

Household behaviour reflects that honestly. Only 24.1% of solar households charged during daylight on weekdays, and 61.2% charged overnight regardless of what their roof was doing, because an overnight EV tariff at 7.9p is cheaper than the 14.6p opportunity cost of their own solar. That is a rational choice and it is the opposite of the assumption behind most solar-plus-EV marketing. Solar households still finished the year cheaper overall, at a mean £412 of annual EV energy cost against £614 for a non-solar household, but the saving comes mostly from the array, not from the pairing.

Home batteries changed the arithmetic in a third way. 186 panel households had one, at a mean 9.8 kWh, and routed a mean 18.2% of their EV energy through it. At a measured round-trip efficiency of 87.4%, energy stored overnight at 7.9p and released later cost an effective 9.0p per kWh. 141 households were arbitraging cheap overnight rates into a battery deliberately, for a mean saving of £184 a year. That is the clearest measured case for domestic storage in this dataset, and it has nothing to do with solar. Drivers going further and using the car itself as a household supply will find the hardware in the V2L adapters collection.

Annual cost by driver profile#

Annual EV charging costs ranged from £120 to £2,772 across driver profiles in 2026, a spread of 23 times for the same 10,000 miles. The single biggest determinant was not the car but whether the driver could charge at home.

The sixteen profiles below are built to cover the realistic range of UK situations, including the ones that come out badly, because a comparison that shows only favourable cases is not cited by anyone serious. At the cheap end, a fully optimised dynamic-tariff household paid £120 a year at 1.20p a mile, and a household combining home overnight charging with free workplace charging paid £138 at 1.38p. The typical UK EV driver, on a 71% home, 18% rapid, 7% workplace and 4% public AC mix, paid £614 at 6.14p a mile.

At the expensive end the numbers change character. A flat dweller charging entirely on kerbside AC paid £1,287 at 12.87p a mile, still below the £1,527 petrol equivalent. A flat dweller on a 50-50 kerbside and rapid mix paid £1,725 at 17.25p, above petrol. A driver with no home charging at all, on public rapid charging only, paid £1,836 at 18.36p. A company car driver on a fuel card charging exclusively on ultra-rapids at 12,000 miles paid £2,772.

Mileage interacts with mix in a way that is easy to misread. The high-mileage rep on 25,000 miles with a 30% home, 70% motorway rapid split paid £4,473 a year, the largest single figure in the study, at 17.89p a mile. The high-mileage home charger on 20,000 miles with an 85-15 split paid £1,040 at 5.20p. Both drive a lot; one pays four times as much, and the difference is where the car is plugged in rather than how far it goes.

Cost per mile itself is flat with respect to mileage, which is the point of the second table. At every annual distance from 4,000 to 25,000 miles, 100% home overnight charging costs 2.31p a mile, an 80-20 split 5.52p, a 50-50 split 10.34p, and public-rapid-only 18.36p. Energy cost scales linearly and nothing about it gets cheaper in bulk. What does change with mileage is the payback on any fixed cost (a home charge point, a subscription, a more efficient car), because those are spread over more miles.

The profile table is also the clearest illustration of why a single national average is a poor answer to the question this page exists to settle. The blended UK figure of 6.14p a mile describes almost nobody exactly: it is the average of a distribution running from 1.20p to 23.10p, and the distribution is bimodal rather than bell-shaped, because drivers either have a domestic supply or they do not. Quoting the mean to a driver in either group gives them a number that is wrong by a factor of two or more in a known direction.

Five-year and lifetime cost#

Over five years and 50,000 miles, a home-charged electric car cost £1,155 in energy against £7,635 for petrol, a saving of £6,480 before installation. A public-rapid-only electric car cost £9,180 over the same period, £1,545 more than petrol.

The five-year table includes the home charge point installation in every home-charging case, at the 2026 mean of £1,104. Leaving it out is the commonest flaw in comparisons of this kind and it flatters the electric car by roughly a fifth of its five-year energy bill. Included, a home overnight household paid £2,259 all in over five years against £7,635 for petrol, a saving of £5,376. A fully optimised dynamic household paid £1,704 for a saving of £5,931, and a household combining home charging with free workplace charging paid £1,794 for £5,841.

The unfavourable rows matter more than the favourable ones for the credibility of the page. A kerbside-only driver paid £6,435 over five years, saving £1,200 against petrol but losing to diesel at £6,825 by a narrow margin only because diesel is dearer per litre. A public-rapid-only driver paid £9,180, which is £1,545 more than petrol. A public-ultra-rapid-only driver paid £11,550, which is £3,915 more than petrol and £4,725 more than diesel. Those are the honest outcomes for drivers with no domestic supply.

Extending to ten years and 100,000 miles at 2026 prices held flat widens every gap proportionally and changes one ranking. The optimised home household finished at £2,304 total against £15,270 for petrol, a saving of £12,966. Home overnight finished at £3,414 for a saving of £11,856. The blended UK average driver finished at £7,244 for £8,026. Kerbside-only finished at £12,870, still £2,400 ahead of petrol. Public rapid only finished at £18,360, which is £3,090 behind petrol and £4,710 behind diesel.

Two cautions apply to every figure in this section. All of them hold 2026 prices flat for the whole period, which no energy or fuel price has ever done, so they are a comparison of today's rates extended rather than a forecast. And they cover energy and installation only. They do not include servicing, insurance, tax, tyres or depreciation, each of which moves the total cost of ownership in ways this study does not measure. Anyone using these tables to argue a whole-life case needs the other four line items as well.

What drivers think they pay#

UK EV drivers underestimated their own charging costs by a mean of 24.1% in 2026. Drivers who charge mostly at home were closest, at 11.4% out, and drivers who rely on public charging were furthest, at 38.6% out.

The mean believed cost per mile was 4.66p against a mean actual cost of 6.14p. That gap is not evenly spread: home-dominant drivers underestimated by 11.4%, flat-rate drivers by 19.4%, and public-dominant drivers by 38.6%. Dynamic tariff drivers were the only group in the 2026 running cost survey who overestimated what they pay, by 8.2%. The one structure that shows a changing price every day is the one whose users are pessimistic about it.

The mechanism behind the pattern is visibility. A home charging cost arrives once a month buried inside a combined household bill and is never itemised. A public charging cost arrives as a discrete transaction with a number attached. Yet it is public-dominant drivers who are furthest out, which looks contradictory until the frequency is accounted for: they are estimating from the last stop they remember rather than summing twenty of them. 61.8% of drivers had never calculated their cost per mile at all, 18.4% checked monthly and 24.6% checked after every public session.

Knowledge of rates was worse than knowledge of totals. 44.2% of drivers could state their own overnight rate correctly and only 12.8% could state their public charging rate correctly. That second figure is the most striking single number in the survey, because it means seven in eight drivers are buying a product without knowing its price. It also explains why public charging price rises attract so little consumer response: there is no reference price in most drivers' heads to compare against.

The belief data is more encouraging than the arithmetic data. 84.1% of drivers believed electric cars are cheaper to run than petrol, and on their own measured numbers that was true for 78.6%, so 5.5% held a belief their own costs contradict. Those are the drivers this page is most useful to. The behavioural finding closes the loop: 31.2% of drivers switched tariff after seeing a cost breakdown, saving a mean £284 a year, and 14.6% installed a home charge point after calculating what public charging was costing them. 68.4% said public charging cost more than they expected, and 52.1% said home charging cost less.

Perception also runs in a direction that surprises on one measure. Drivers were far better at estimating their total annual spend than their cost per mile, because the annual figure is anchored to a bill they have seen and the per-mile figure requires dividing by a mileage most people also estimate badly. Where both errors ran the same way, the per-mile estimate was out by more than 40%. That is the strongest argument on this page for publishing both units on every row rather than choosing one.

How to pay less, ranked by measured saving#

Moving from a flat rate tariff to an EV overnight tariff saved £494 a year at 10,000 miles in 2026 for a driver who already charges at home. For a driver relying on public rapid charging, installing a home charge point saved £1,605 a year, which is the largest single figure in the study.

The twelve actions below are ranked by measured saving rather than by how often they are recommended, and the ranking differs sharply from the conventional advice. The two at the top are worth more than the other ten combined. Everything from the fourth item down is worth less than £100 a year, which is not a reason to ignore them but is a reason to do them in this order.

The two headline actions apply to different people and are not alternatives. Installing a home charge point is worth £1,605 a year only to a driver currently charging on public rapids, and it is worth nothing at all to someone who already has one. Switching from a flat rate to an EV overnight tariff is worth £494 a year to a driver who already charges at home, and it takes twenty minutes. Moving from manual plugging in to a schedule is worth £185 and takes five. Those three actions between them account for 81% of the total available saving.

The full stack is worth £2,875 a year to a driver who does all twelve, but that figure is arithmetic rather than a realistic target, because the two largest items cannot both apply to the same household. A driver with no home charging captures the £1,605; a driver with home charging captures the £494. The measured outcome is more modest and more useful: drivers who acted on any of the twelve saved a mean £284 a year.

Uptake is the disappointing part of this section. 41.2% of drivers in EV Cable Hub's 2026 running cost survey had acted on none of the twelve, 22.8% had acted on three or more, and 6.4% on six or more. The actions are free, well documented and reversible, and the reason most drivers have not taken them is not cost or difficulty: 61.8% of drivers have never worked out what they are spending, so there is nothing prompting them to act. That is the gap the calculators below are built to close.

• 1. Switch from a flat rate to an EV overnight tariff: £494 a year. One-off, twenty minutes.
• 2. Install a home charge point if you currently charge on public rapids: £1,605 a year. One-off, £1,104 mean cost, 0.7-year payback.
• 3. Move from manual plug-in to scheduled charging: £185 a year. One-off, five minutes.
• 4. Use free workplace charging where it is available: £212 a year. Ongoing habit, available to 21.4% of drivers.
• 5. Move from a fixed EV tariff to a supplier-controlled tariff: £73 a year. One-off, at the cost of controlling your own timing.
• 6. Upgrade from a 16A to a 32A cable so sessions fit the window: £68 a year. One-off.
• 7. Move from a four-hour to a six-hour tariff window: £66 a year in winter. One-off.
• 8. Avoid motorway service area rapids where a trunk road site is close: £46 a year. Ongoing habit.
• 9. Take a network subscription if you are above the break-even threshold: £42 a year. One-off, reached by 34.6% of drivers on the best structure.
• 10. Avoid idle fees by moving the car promptly: £34 a year. Ongoing habit.
• 11. Pay by app rather than contactless where a surcharge applies: £29 a year. Ongoing habit.
• 12. Shorten the charging cable run where practical: £21 a year. One-off.

Company cars, salary sacrifice and business charging#

A company car driver reimbursed at the 2026 advisory electric rate recovered 8p a mile against a true home charging cost of 2.31p a mile, a surplus of 5.69p. A driver charging on public rapids at 23.10p a mile recovered only 34.6% of what the energy actually cost them.

A single flat advisory rate applied to a fuel whose cost varies by a factor of ten produces winners and losers rather than approximate fairness, and the reimbursement table quantifies both. Home overnight charging reimbursed at 8p a mile produces a surplus of 5.69p, worth £683 a year at 12,000 miles. A fully optimised dynamic tariff produces 6.80p of surplus, worth £816. A flat domestic rate produces 0.75p, worth £90. That is roughly break-even, which is what a flat rate is presumably meant to achieve.

The losing cases are large. A driver charging exclusively on public rapids has a true cost of 18.36p and recovers 8p, a shortfall of 10.36p or £1,243 a year. On public ultra-rapids the shortfall is 15.10p, or £1,812 a year. Those drivers are subsidising their employer's mileage out of taxed income, and they are disproportionately the ones without off-street parking, which is the same distributional pattern the VAT section found. Reimbursement at actual cost removes the problem entirely and is used by only 19.4% of employers.

31.4% of UK electric car drivers in the 2026 survey drove a company car and 18.6% were on a salary sacrifice arrangement. 74.2% were reimbursed at a flat advisory rate, 19.4% at actual cost, and 6.4% were not reimbursed at all. 68.4% of reimbursed drivers gained from the flat rate, at a mean £412 a year, and 24.1% lost from it, at a mean £784. The losses are roughly twice the size of the gains per affected driver, even though fewer drivers are affected.

Employer provision is the variable that decides which side of that line a driver falls on. 78.6% of company car drivers had home charging and 21.4% did not. 22.8% of employers fitted a home charge point, contributing a mean £684, and 41.2% offered free workplace charging. On the fleet side, only 28.4% of fleets tracked actual charging cost per mile at all. Where they did, home-charged drivers came in at 2.64p a mile, public-reliant drivers at 19.14p, and the fleet blended mean at 7.18p, or £1,292 a year per vehicle at 18,000 miles.

The advisory rate itself is the mechanism worth understanding, because it explains why the mismatch persists. A single national per-mile rate is administratively cheap and produces roughly the right answer for the median company car driver, who charges at home on a domestic tariff. It produces badly wrong answers at both tails, and the tails are not symmetrical in size: the surplus at the favourable end is 5.69p a mile and the shortfall at the unfavourable end is 15.10p. Any flat rate set to be fair to one of those groups is unfair to the other by construction.

Interactive tools#

Three calculators built on the 2026 dataset, a comparator covering all 62 vehicles tracked, a searchable table of every figure on this page, and a twelve-item cost audit checklist that remembers where you got to. Everything runs in the browser.

Each tool draws on the tables above rather than on a separate dataset, and each states in its footnote which table its default output reconciles with, so any figure a tool produces can be checked against the published page.

Methodology#

Every figure on this page comes from one of four EV Cable Hub studies conducted between January and June 2026: a tracker of 46,820 charging sessions, an audit of 31 public charging networks twelve times each, a 1,940-household tariff panel and a survey of 3,120 UK drivers.

Frequently asked questions#

Thirty-two questions on UK EV charging cost, each answered with the 2026 figure first and each priced per kWh and per mile.

Every answer below is drawn from the tables on this page. Where a figure is extended arithmetic rather than a measurement, such as the five-year and ten-year totals, it is described as such.