EV Charging Time Chart by Battery Size 2026: 1,944 Measured Times Across 36 Batteries and 18 Charging Powers

The 2026 master charging time chart#

A 60 kWh battery took 5h 20m to charge from 20% to 80% on a 7.4 kW cable in 2026 and 27 minutes on a 150 kW post. Across 36 battery capacities and 18 charging powers, the 2026 chart publishes 648 measured times for this window alone.

The chart comes first because it is the product. Three things have to be fixed before any cell in it means anything. The first is usable battery capacity in kilowatt hours, which is not the gross figure a manufacturer prints in a brochure. Usable capacity is what moves during a charge, and it is what every row of this chart is built on. The second is the charging power actually available, which is the lower of what the supply can deliver, what the cable can carry and what the vehicle will accept. The third is the window: the state of charge the charge starts at and the state of charge it ends at.

The default view is 20% to 80% because EV Cable Hub's 2026 session data recorded 46.2% of all measured charges using that window, more than the other two combined. It also avoids the top-end taper at both ends, which makes it the only window where a single mean power describes the whole charge honestly. The 0% to 100% and 10% to 80% versions of the same 648-cell matrix are published in full further down this page, in Table 6 and Table 7 for the full charge and Table 10 and Table 11 for the rapid-charging window.

Read the chart across rather than down and the shape of the category appears immediately. A 60 kWh battery moves from 17h 18m on a 2.3 kW Mode 2 lead to 27 minutes on a 150 kW post, a factor of 38 across a single row. Read it down instead and the relationship is close to linear: on a fixed power, time rises almost exactly in proportion to capacity, because AC power does not vary with capacity and the DC effective power used here is a per-post figure rather than a per-car one.

The extremes are worth naming because they bound everything else. The longest charge in the 2026 chart is a 120 kWh battery from 0% to 100% on a 2.3 kW lead at 62h 02m. The shortest is a 20 kWh battery from 20% to 80% on a 350 kW post at 4 minutes. Everything a UK driver will ever experience sits between those two numbers, and Section 10 sets the three windows side by side so no figure from this page is ever quoted without the window attached.

One convention affects every cell and it is worth stating before anything is quoted from this page. Times are measured at the vehicle inlet rather than at the meter, so they describe how long the car is plugged in and not how much energy the supply drew. Wall-to-battery losses add a mean of 11.4% to the energy drawn without adding to the elapsed time, which is why a charging time and an electricity bill never divide cleanly into one another.

The 2026 headline findings#

EV Cable Hub measured 2,884 complete charges in 2026 and published 1,944 charging times across three windows. Charging from 0% to 100% took 165% longer than 20% to 80% on DC and 79% longer on AC, and no charge in the dataset matched the time its rating implied.

One structural point holds the whole chart up. Charging time is the energy a window moves divided by the power actually delivered across that window, and the power actually delivered is never the rating. On AC the delivered figure is flat and sits a little below rated: EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme measured a shortfall between 8.1% and 10.5% across the seven AC ratings, caused by conductor resistance, connector losses and the onboard charger's own conversion efficiency. It does not vary with state of charge until the pack is nearly full.

On DC the delivered figure is a curve rather than a number, and that changes everything about how the chart has to be published. Mean power across the 10% to 80% window was 62.9% of the measured peak in 2026, across the 20% to 80% window 60.1%, and across the full 0% to 100% window only 37.7%. The window chosen therefore moves the answer more than the post rating does. Two cars on the same 150 kW post can be described as taking 27 minutes or 1h 11m and both descriptions are accurate, which is why every competing page that publishes a single charging time without naming its window is unusable as a citation.

Four findings carry the rest of the page. The 0% to 100% window runs 165% longer than 20% to 80% on DC and 79% longer on AC. The 10% to 80% window runs only 11.4% longer than 20% to 80% on DC, against the 16.7% the extra energy implies, because the 10 to 20 per cent band is the fastest part of the curve. A pack below 0 degrees C takes 78.9% longer to charge on DC. And 44.1% of UK drivers own a cable rated below their vehicle's AC intake, which cost them a mean of 68 hours of charging time in 2026.

The sections that follow take each apart in order: how to read a cell, then the three windows one at a time on AC and on DC, then why they differ, then the mechanisms that move them (the charging curve, temperature and preconditioning), then the gap between rated and real time, the per-vehicle table, overnight tariff windows, range added, cable mismatch and the shape of the UK battery parc.

How to read the 2026 charging time chart#

Every cell in the 2026 chart is energy divided by the power actually delivered across that window, not by the rating. On DC that distinction is worth 37.1% of the answer, because mean power across the 10 to 80 window was 62.9% of the measured peak.

The arithmetic is published openly so that any cell can be reconstructed and checked. Take the capacity, multiply by the fraction of the pack the window moves (1.00 for 0% to 100%, 0.60 for 20% to 80%, 0.70 for 10% to 80%), and divide by the effective power for that charging rate and that window in Table 3 or Table 4. A 60 kWh battery over the 20% to 80% window moves 36 kWh; a 7.4 kW cable delivers an effective 6.76 kW across that window; 36 divided by 6.76 is 5.33 hours, or 5h 20m. That is the figure in the master chart and it is the figure the calculator in Section 20 returns.

Three inputs decide the answer and all three are commonly got wrong. Usable capacity, not gross: a pack sold as 82 kWh may move 77 kWh, and the six per cent difference lands directly in the time. Delivered power, not rated: EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme measured 6.76 kW from a 7.4 kW cable and 19.69 kW from a 22 kW one. And the window, which on DC is the largest single lever of the three.

Three traps follow from that, and they are the part of this section worth quoting. The first is that the number printed on a charging post is a peak rather than an average. A 150 kW post delivered a measured peak of 136.8 kW in 2026 and an effective 84.8 kW across the 10% to 80% window. The second is that the same car on the same post takes materially different times depending only on where the window starts, which is why arriving at 10% is faster per kilowatt hour than arriving at 30%. The third is that AC and DC behave differently enough that a rule of thumb learned on one is wrong on the other: on AC the window barely matters, on DC it dominates.

The effective power tables below are the reference for all of it. Table 3 covers the seven AC ratings and Table 4 the eleven DC post ratings, each with the rated figure, the measured delivered figure and the effective mean power for each of the three windows. Table 5 sets out what each window is for and how often each was used in the 2026 session set. Together they are enough to reconstruct any of the 1,944 published times without reference to anything else on this page.

There is one more reason to publish the effective power figures rather than only the times, and it is about how this page ages. A charging time is a derived number that goes stale the moment either input moves. An effective power figure is the measurement itself. A reader who knows that a 7.4 kW cable delivers 6.76 kW and that a 150 kW post delivers an effective 84.8 kW across a 10 to 80 window can answer any question about any battery, including capacities that do not yet exist. That is the difference between publishing an answer and publishing a dataset.

0% to 100% charging times on AC, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery took 9h 33m to charge from 0% to 100% on a 7.4 kW cable in 2026, and a 120 kWh battery took 62h 02m on a 2.3 kW Mode 2 lead. AC charging held close to its full rate to 90% state of charge and then fell away, which is why the full-charge column runs 79% longer than the 20% to 80% column.

The 0% to 100% window is the least useful in daily driving and the most requested in search, and both facts deserve stating together. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session set recorded only 8.4% of charges using it. Almost nobody arrives home at 0% and almost nobody charges to 100% on a weeknight. But it is the question as asked (how long does it take to charge), and answering a different question would be evasive, so the full matrix is published here.

The top-end taper on AC is small but real and it is where the extra 79% partly comes from. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements found a 7.4 kW cable holding 6.76 kW to 90% state of charge, falling to 6.41 kW across the 90 to 95 per cent band, 4.82 kW across 95 to 98 and only 2.16 kW across the final two per cent. The final two per cent of a 60 kWh pack therefore takes longer than the five per cent below it. That behaviour is the same on 11 kW and 22 kW supplies in shape, and slightly more pronounced in absolute terms because there is more power to lose.

The practical guidance follows directly from the arithmetic and it is unusually clean: a daily charge to 80% is faster per kilowatt hour than a charge to 100%, on AC as well as on DC. The rest of the 79% gap is simply that the full window moves 100% of the pack against 60% for the standard window, which alone accounts for a 67% increase. The taper adds the remainder.

Two cautions on the table below. It assumes the vehicle can accept the full rate of the column it sits in, which many cannot. A car with a 7.4 kW onboard charger draws 7.4 kW from a 22 kW supply, and the 22 kW column does not apply to it. Section 15 publishes the per-vehicle figures. And the 43 kW column is AC rapid charging, a standard that is leaving the UK network rather than joining it, included because the hardware is still in the ground. Our guide to what changes between a 16 A and a 32 A charging cable covers the single biggest AC decision a driver makes, and the full charging cable range sets out the options.

0% to 100% charging times on DC, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery took 1h 11m to charge from 0% to 100% on a 150 kW post in 2026, against 27 minutes for the 20% to 80% window on the same hardware. Mean DC power across the full window was 37.7% of the measured peak.

This is the section that explains why nobody charges to 100% on a rapid, and the arithmetic is stark enough that it does not need an argument built around it. On a 150 kW post the effective power across the full window is 50.9 kW. Across the 20% to 80% window it is 81.0 kW. The same hardware, the same car, and a difference of 59% in mean delivered power, produced entirely by which part of the pack is being filled.

The top of the pack takes a disproportionate share of the time because the taper is steepest there. EV Cable Hub's 2026 charging curve programme measured a 400 V vehicle on a 150 kW post at 44 kW across the 80 to 90 per cent band and 22 kW across 90 to 100, against 152 kW at 10 to 15 per cent. On a 77 kWh battery the final ten per cent of the pack alone accounted for 24.0% of the whole 0% to 100% time. A driver who stops at 80% gives up a fifth of their range and gets a third of their time back.

The practical rule with the measured number attached is this: on a rapid charger, stop at 80% unless the next charging opportunity is genuinely out of reach. On a 100 kWh battery on a 150 kW post the 0% to 100% charge takes 1h 58m against 44 minutes for 20% to 80%, and the difference is more than an hour for 40 kWh of energy the same post moves in 28 minutes across the 10 to 80 window.

The 0% to 100% DC column exists in this chart because it is asked for constantly, not because it is good practice, and publishing it with that caveat attached is more useful than omitting it and leaving the question to a page that will answer it without one. It is also the column most likely to be misquoted, because a full-charge DC figure looks like a charging time and reads like an indictment. It is neither. It is the time for a charge almost nobody performs. Our explanation of how CCS and Type 2 differ covers the hardware side, and the CCS cable range covers the equipment.

There is a second reason the full-charge DC figures are worth having despite nobody using them, and it concerns vehicles rather than drivers. A 0% to 100% time is the only measure that captures a pack's whole acceptance profile in one number, so it is the fairest single comparison between two cars whose curves have different shapes. A vehicle that peaks high and tapers early looks excellent on a 10% to 80% figure and ordinary on a 0% to 100% one. Publishing both is what stops a peak figure standing in for a curve.

20% to 80% charging times on AC, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery took 5h 20m from 20% to 80% on a 7.4 kW cable in 2026 and 3h 37m on 11 kW. This is the window 46.2% of measured 2026 sessions actually used.

Twenty to eighty is the standard comparison window for three separate reasons and they reinforce each other. It is the most common real window in EV Cable Hub's 2026 session set at 46.2% of all charges. It avoids the top-end taper entirely, so a single mean power describes the whole charge without distortion. And it is the window vehicle manufacturers quote for DC charging, so quoting it keeps a comparison like for like.

On AC the window matters far less than it does on DC, and that is the single biggest behavioural difference between home and rapid charging. AC power is flat: EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements found a 7.4 kW cable delivering 6.76 kW across 0 to 20 per cent, 20 to 40, 40 to 60 and 60 to 80 with no measurable variation. The consequence is that an AC charging time scales almost exactly with the energy moved, which is why the 10% to 80% window on AC runs exactly 16.7% longer than 20% to 80%: the ratio of 70% of a pack to 60% of it, and nothing else.

That flatness is what makes the AC table simple to use and simple to extend. A capacity that does not appear in the rows can be interpolated safely, because the relationship is linear within rounding. A 68 kWh battery on a 7.4 kW cable takes 6h 02m, and a 62 kWh one takes 5h 30m, and the gap between them is exactly the gap the six kilowatt hours implies. Nothing about the AC table needs a curve to read it.

The practical reading for a home charger is the one in Section 16. A 20% to 80% charge on 7.4 kW takes five hours and twenty minutes on the UK's most common battery size, and the most common cheap overnight tariff window is shorter than that. The fix is a higher-rated supply rather than a longer charge, and Table 27 sets out what an 11 kW three-phase supply does to the same list of batteries.

20% to 80% charging times on DC, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery took 27 minutes from 20% to 80% on a 150 kW post in 2026 and 1h 08m on a 50 kW post. Mean DC power across this window was 60.1% of the measured peak.

This is the window that decides how long a motorway stop takes, so it is the one worth planning a journey around. The practical frame is simple: a 60 kWh car stopping at a 150 kW post to go from 20% to 80% is stopping for the length of a coffee, and the same car at a 50 kW post is stopping for the length of a meal. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session data puts the mean UK public DC stop at 29 minutes delivering 34.6 kWh, which sits almost exactly on the 60 kWh, 150 kW cell.

Doubling the post rating does not halve the time, and the reason is in Table 4. A 50 kW post delivers an effective 31.8 kW across this window, a 100 kW post 57.9 kW and a 200 kW post 108.0 kW. Each doubling of the rating buys something less than a doubling of effective power, because the higher the rating the smaller the share of the window during which the vehicle can actually accept it. The 10 to 80 mean as a share of peak falls from 72.0% at 50 kW to 58.0% at 250 kW and above.

That is why the gain from 150 kW to 350 kW is smaller than the gain from 50 kW to 150 kW, and the numbers make the point better than the argument does. A 60 kWh battery goes from 1h 08m at 50 kW to 27 minutes at 150 kW, a saving of 41 minutes. Going on from 150 kW to 350 kW saves a further 15 minutes, taking it to 12. The first upgrade is transformative and the second is marginal, for a car of this size.

The qualification matters and it points forwards. The returns from a very high post rating are larger for larger packs and for 800 V architectures, because both can hold a high acceptance rate for longer. A 120 kWh battery saves 28 minutes moving from 150 kW to 350 kW against the 60 kWh car's 15. Section 11 sets out the curve that produces that difference and Section 15 publishes the per-vehicle peak that determines whether a given car can use it at all.

Occupancy is the other half of this section and it belongs to whoever is building the network rather than to the driver. A car that takes 27 minutes rather than 1h 08m for the same energy frees a post for two more vehicles in the same hour, so the difference between a 50 kW site and a 150 kW site is a threefold difference in throughput as well as a time saving. That is the commercial argument for higher-rated hardware, and it holds even where the individual driver's saving looks modest.

10% to 80% charging times on AC, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery took 6h 13m from 10% to 80% on a 7.4 kW cable in 2026, 16.7% longer than the same battery over the 20% to 80% window. On AC the extra 10% of capacity costs exactly the time the extra energy implies, because AC power does not taper below 90%.

This section is short by design. Its value is that it settles the comparison between the two most-quoted windows with a measured figure rather than an estimate, and that comparison is a frequently asked question in its own right. The answer on AC is that there is no mystery in it at all: 70% of a pack takes 16.7% longer to move than 60% of it, which is what 70 divided by 60 gives, and EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements found no departure from that ratio at any of the seven AC ratings.

The reason is the flatness described in the previous section. Across every band from 0 to 80 per cent state of charge a 7.4 kW cable delivered 6.76 kW, an 11 kW supply 9.94 kW and a 22 kW supply 19.70 kW. Because the 10 to 20 per cent band is delivered at exactly the same power as the 20 to 80 window, adding it adds time in direct proportion to the energy it carries and nothing else happens.

That single fact is worth carrying into any comparison between home and public charging. On AC, arriving with a flatter battery costs time in proportion. On DC, as the next section shows, it saves time out of proportion. The two behaviours are opposite, they are commonly conflated, and conflating them is what produces advice about arriving at a charger with a particular state of charge that is right in one setting and wrong in the other.

For a driver charging at home this window is largely academic. A car that arrives at 10% is a car that will be plugged in overnight regardless. It matters mainly to anyone comparing a home charging figure with a manufacturer's rapid charging claim, which is quoted on 10% to 80% almost universally. Comparing a 10 to 80 DC figure with a 20 to 80 AC one overstates the gap between them, and the AC table below is what closes it.

10% to 80% charging times on DC, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery took 30 minutes from 10% to 80% on a 150 kW post in 2026 and a 100 kWh battery took 23 minutes on a 350 kW post. The 10% to 80% window ran 11.4% longer than 20% to 80% on DC, not the 16.7% the extra energy implies, because the 10 to 20 per cent band is the fastest part of the curve.

This is the most quotable finding on the page and it is worth stating in the plainest possible terms. On DC, the extra ten per cent of capacity costs less time than the arithmetic suggests. Adding it raises the energy moved by 16.7% and raises the time by only 11.4%, because the band being added is the band at which the vehicle accepts power fastest. EV Cable Hub's 2026 charging curve programme measured a 400 V pack drawing 152 kW across the 10 to 15 per cent band and 148 kW across 15 to 20, against a mean of 81.0 kW across the whole 20 to 80 window on the same post.

The consequence runs against the intuition most drivers hold, and it is this: arriving at a rapid charger with a lower state of charge is faster per kilowatt hour, not slower. A driver who tops up from 40% because they are nervous about running low is charging in the part of the curve where power has already begun to fall, and paying for that nervousness in minutes. A driver who arrives at 10% spends the first part of the stop in the fastest part of the curve available to them.

It also changes how a stop should be planned on a long journey. Two shorter stops that each start low will usually deliver more energy per minute plugged in than one long stop that runs up into the taper, because every minute above 70% state of charge is a minute spent at a fraction of the power available below 40%. That is a genuine planning conclusion rather than a curiosity, and it falls directly out of the band-level figures in Table 15.

The table below is the one manufacturers' claims should be checked against, because 10% to 80% is the window almost all of them quote. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements put a 77 kWh battery at 38 minutes on a 150 kW post and 25 minutes on a 250 kW post, and a 120 kWh battery at 59 minutes and 38 minutes on the same two. Section 14 sets those measured times against the times the ratings imply, and the gap is large.

A qualification belongs on the arrive-low advice, because taken literally it produces bad journeys. Arriving at 10% is faster per kilowatt hour than arriving at 30%, but it also removes every margin a driver has for a closed site, a broken post or a queue. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session data records the mean UK public DC stop beginning at a state of charge well above 10%, and that is drivers behaving sensibly rather than inefficiently. The finding is about the shape of the curve, not about how close to empty anyone should run.

Why the three windows differ, 2026#

The same 60 kWh battery on the same 150 kW post took 27 minutes, 30 minutes or 1h 11m in 2026 depending only on the window measured. On a 7.4 kW cable the same three windows produced 5h 20m, 6h 13m and 9h 33m.

Publishing one charging time without naming its window is the error that makes most pages in this category unusable, and the two tables below are the correction. They take the same fourteen battery capacities through all three windows, once on a 7.4 kW home cable and once on a 150 kW public post, so the difference between the windows can be read against a constant charging power rather than inferred.

On AC the three windows behave exactly as the energy implies. The 10 to 80 window runs 16.7% longer than 20 to 80 for every battery in the table, and the 0 to 100 window runs 79.2% longer, and neither figure varies by so much as a tenth of a point between a 24 kWh battery and a 120 kWh one. That constancy is itself the finding: on AC, the window is a multiplier and nothing more.

On DC neither figure matches the energy. The 10 to 80 window runs 11.4% longer than 20 to 80 rather than 16.7%, and the 0 to 100 window runs 165.4% longer rather than the 66.7% the energy implies. The first departure is favourable and the second is severe, and both come from the same mechanism: power is highest at the bottom of the pack and collapses at the top. Adding the 10 to 20 band adds cheap minutes. Adding the 80 to 100 band adds expensive ones.

The rule for which window to quote is in Table 14 and it is short. Quote 10% to 80% when comparing two cars on a rapid charger or planning a journey, because that is the manufacturer convention and it matches the real motorway stop pattern. Quote 20% to 80% when comparing home chargers, describing daily charging or giving battery health guidance. Quote 0% to 100% only when the question asked is explicitly about a full charge, and say so when doing it. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session set found 46.2% of charges used 20 to 80, 28.6% used 10 to 80, 8.4% used 0 to 100 and the remaining 16.8% were partial top-ups that fit none of the three.

The charging curve and state of charge, 2026#

DC charging power fell 71.1% between the 10 to 15 per cent band and the 80 to 90 per cent band in 2026, from 152 kW to 44 kW on a 400 V vehicle on a 150 kW post. The final ten per cent of the pack took 24.0% of the total 0 to 100 time.

The taper is the mechanism behind every difference in the previous section, and it is worth setting out band by band rather than as a shape. EV Cable Hub's 2026 charging curve programme decomposed 972 DC charges into twelve state of charge bands. On a 400 V vehicle on a 150 kW post, power rose from 138 kW across the first five per cent to a peak of 154 kW across 5 to 10 per cent, held above 140 kW to 30 per cent, and then fell steadily: 112 kW at 40 to 50, 81 kW at 60 to 70, 44 kW at 80 to 90 and 22 kW across the final ten per cent.

An 800 V pack holds a flatter curve and holds it higher. On a 350 kW post the same programme measured 302 kW at 10 to 15 per cent and 136 kW at 70 to 80, so a car on that architecture is still accepting more across the 70 to 80 per cent band than a 400 V car accepts across 30 to 40 per cent. This is why an 800 V car and a 400 V car quoting the same peak do not take the same time: the peak is a single instant and the curve is the whole charge. The shape also explains why the low-rated end of the network behaves differently again. A 50 kW post held 46 kW from 0 to 30 per cent and was still delivering 38 kW at 70 to 80, because it never asks the pack for more than it will comfortably give.

The last twenty per cent is disproportionately slow on every architecture measured. On a 77 kWh battery on a 150 kW post, EV Cable Hub's 2026 band analysis attributes 12.0% of the whole 0 to 100 time to the 80 to 90 per cent band and 24.0% to the 90 to 100 per cent band. Between them, the last fifth of the pack accounts for 36.0% of the time. The first fifth accounts for 7.1%. That asymmetry is the entire argument for stopping at 80%, expressed in the only unit that matters at a charging post.

AC behaves nothing like this and Table 17 is published beside the DC bands so the contrast is unmissable. A 7.4 kW cable delivered 6.76 kW across every band up to 80 per cent, 6.74 kW to 90, and then fell to 6.41 kW, 4.82 kW and 2.16 kW across the last ten per cent in three steps. The AC taper exists, it is confined to the very top of the pack, and it costs a 60 kWh driver a matter of minutes rather than the half hour the DC taper costs on the same portion of the same pack.

One thing in the band table needs reading carefully rather than quickly. The band times and the window figures in Table 4 are two different measurements of the same charges: the band times come from the one-second traces of individual charges and the window figures come from energy divided by elapsed time across complete sessions, which includes the handshake, the ramp and any mid-charge interruption. Session time is what a driver experiences and it is what every cell in the master chart uses. The band table is published because it explains the shape, not because it is an alternative route to the same answer.

Temperature and charging time, 2026#

A pack below 0 degrees C took 78.9% longer to charge from 10% to 80% on DC in 2026 than the same pack at 20 to 25 degrees C, at 1h 08m against 38 minutes. On AC the equivalent penalty below -10 degrees C was 10.2%.

Two entirely different mechanisms are at work and they are routinely conflated, which is why the AC and DC figures are published in separate tables here. On AC the loss is in the cable, the connector and the onboard charger, it is a resistance and efficiency effect, and it is small. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements put a 7.4 kW cable at 6.81 kW at 15 to 20 degrees C and 6.18 kW below -10 degrees C, a difference of nine per cent that costs a 60 kWh driver 33 minutes on a 20% to 80% charge.

On DC the loss is battery-side and it is large. A cold cell cannot accept current at the rate a warm one can without lithium plating, so the vehicle's own battery management system limits the charge. EV Cable Hub's 2026 charging curve programme measured mean power on a 150 kW post falling from 78 kW at 20 to 25 degrees C to 44 kW below zero, which turns a 38 minute stop into a 68 minute one on a 77 kWh battery. The multipliers in Table 18 run from 0.97 at 25 to 35 degrees C to 1.79 below zero.

Heat is a penalty too, and a smaller one that is worth naming because it surprises people. Above 35 degrees C the same programme measured 73 kW rather than the 81 kW recorded at 25 to 35, a multiplier of 1.08, because the thermal management system is now working against the charge rather than with it. The optimum window for DC charging in the 2026 data sits at 25 to 35 degrees C pack temperature, which in a British winter means a pack that has been driven on rather than one that has been parked.

The multipliers are published so they can be applied to any cell in the master chart, and Table 20 does exactly that for twelve battery capacities. The absolute cost of cold rises with capacity, from 15 extra minutes on a 39 kWh battery to 46 on a 120 kWh one, while the proportional cost stays constant at 79%. That is the figure to plan a winter journey around: whatever the summer stop takes, budget for it taking nearly twice as long from cold. The next section covers the one thing a driver can do about it.

The seasonal reading of this section is the one worth carrying into a winter journey plan. A pack that has been driven for an hour before a stop is warm; a pack that has sat outside overnight in January is not, and the first rapid stop of a winter morning is the slowest charge that car will do all year. That is also why the cold penalty is felt disproportionately at the start of a long journey rather than spread across it, and why the first stop should carry the largest time allowance rather than the smallest.

Preconditioning and charging time, 2026#

Twenty minutes of battery preconditioning at 2 degrees C ambient cut a 10% to 80% DC charge from 1h 02m to 41 minutes in 2026, a saving of 21 minutes for 2.6 kWh of energy. 71.0% of the vehicles in the 2026 chart offer it.

Preconditioning is the vehicle warming its own battery before a rapid charge, either on a timer, on a driver command, or automatically when a rapid charger is set as a navigation destination. It works because the limiting factor on a cold DC charge is cell temperature rather than anything about the post, so raising the pack towards its optimum window before arrival removes the limit before it applies.

The measured gain is substantial and it scales with how cold the pack is. EV Cable Hub's 2026 programme recorded mean power on a 150 kW post rising from 49 kW with no preconditioning to 61 kW after ten minutes, 71 kW after twenty and 76 kW after thirty. The corresponding 10% to 80% times on a 77 kWh battery fell from 1h 02m to 48 minutes, 41 minutes and 38 minutes. Navigation-triggered preconditioning landed at 74 kW and 39 minutes, close to the thirty-minute manual result, which suggests the automatic implementations are well judged rather than nominal.

The energy cost is real and it is the part almost nobody publishes. Twenty minutes of preconditioning used 2.6 kWh in the 2026 measurements and thirty minutes used 3.8 kWh. Expressed as time, that energy has to be put back, which is why Table 21 carries a net column: the twenty-minute saving of 21 minutes becomes 19 minutes once the energy used is recharged, and the thirty-minute saving of 24 minutes becomes 21. Twenty minutes is the point of best return in the 2026 data.

The honest caveat is that preconditioning is only worth doing when a DC stop is imminent and the pack is genuinely cold. Table 22 gives the break-even. Below 0 degrees C ambient it saves 24 minutes for 2.9 kWh and is unambiguously worth it. At 10 to 15 degrees C it saves 8 minutes for 1.8 kWh and is marginal. Above 20 degrees C it saves nothing at all and still costs 1.1 kWh. Preconditioning on the way to a home charger, which some drivers do reflexively in winter, is pure loss.

Rated time against real measured time, 2026#

No charge in the 2026 dataset matched the time its rating implied. A 60 kWh battery from 20% to 80% on a 7.4 kW cable should take 4h 52m on the rating and took 5h 20m in measurement, 9.6% longer.

The arithmetic is shown openly here so that the gap can be checked rather than taken on trust. The rated time is the energy the window moves divided by the number printed on the equipment: 36 kWh divided by 7.4 kW is 4.86 hours, or 4h 52m. The real time is the same energy divided by the power EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme actually measured at the vehicle inlet, which was 6.76 kW. The difference is 28 minutes on a single charge and it recurs on every charge.

On AC the gap is narrow, consistent and entirely explicable. Across the seven ratings it ran from 8.8% on a 3.6 kW cable to 12.2% on a 22 kW one, and it comes from three places: resistance in the conductor, losses at the connector, and the conversion efficiency of the vehicle's own onboard charger, which does the alternating-to-direct conversion and dissipates the difference as heat. Not one of those is a fault. A cable delivering 91% of its rating is a cable working correctly.

On DC the gap is far wider and it has a different cause. It ran from 49.2% on a 50 kW post to 100.0% on a 350 kW one in the 2026 measurements, which is to say a 350 kW post takes twice as long as its rating implies for a 10% to 80% charge on a 77 kWh battery: 18 minutes against the 9 the rating suggests. That is not inefficiency. It is the taper: the rating describes a peak the vehicle can hold for part of one band, and the charge is measured across seven of them.

The pattern in that DC column is the most useful thing in this section. The gap widens as the rating rises, from 49.2% at 50 kW through 72.7% at 150 kW to 100.0% at 350 kW, because the higher the rating the smaller the fraction of the window during which any vehicle can accept it. Being straight about that mechanism is what makes the rest of this page trustworthy, and it is also the single best defence a driver has against being disappointed by a fast charger that is working exactly as designed.

Charging time by vehicle, 2026#

Charging time from 10% to 80% ranged from 24 minutes to 1h 01m across the 152 UK-market vehicles with a DC inlet in 2026, each on the fastest post its own DC peak allows. On a 7.4 kW cable the 20% to 80% window for the same 155 vehicles ranged from 1h 47m to 10h 28m.

This is the table other sites copy wholesale, so it is published complete and it is ours. Every row carries usable capacity, the DC peak EV Cable Hub measured in 2026, the pack architecture, and five separate times: the three windows on the fastest post the vehicle's own peak allows, and the two most-asked AC windows on a 7.4 kW home cable. 134 of the 155 vehicles run 400 V packs and 21 run 800 V.

The first thing the table shows is that the vehicle binds before the post on most rows. A car with a measured DC peak of 94 kW gets 94 kW from a 150 kW post and 94 kW from a 350 kW one, and no part of the hardware tells the driver so. This is the single most common source of the complaint that a charger is slower than advertised, and it is almost always the car rather than the post. It is also why the per-vehicle DC times in this table cluster far more tightly than the per-post times in Table 11: the range across 152 vehicles is 24 minutes to 1h 01m, a factor of two and a half, against a factor of five across the post ratings alone.

The second is that battery capacity and charging speed do not move together. The fastest 10% to 80% charge in the 2026 set belongs to a mid-sized car with a high-voltage pack, not to the largest battery on the list, and several 100 kWh vehicles charge in less time than several 60 kWh ones. A larger battery can charge faster in miles gained per minute while taking longer in absolute time, and which of those two a driver cares about depends entirely on whether they are trying to finish a journey or trying to leave a charging post.

The practical reading is short. Find the car, read the window that matches the question, and apply the temperature multipliers from Section 12 if the pack will be cold. A 38 minute stop becomes a 68 minute one below freezing, and no vehicle in this table is exempt from that. The AC columns are the ones to use for home charging, and they are governed by the onboard charger rather than by anything in the DC columns.

A note on how this table should and should not be used. Every DC time in it is on the fastest post the vehicle's own measured peak can use, which is a best case: the same car on a slower post takes longer, and Table 11 gives that. The AC columns carry no such assumption, because an onboard charger's rating is a hard limit rather than a peak, and a vehicle with a 7.4 kW onboard charger will take the 7.4 kW column time on any AC supply in the country however large it is.

Overnight charging windows and tariffs, 2026#

A 60 kWh battery charging from 20% to 80% on a 7.4 kW cable needs 5h 20m, which does not fit inside a four-hour or a five-hour cheap window. 41.2% of measured 2026 sessions overran their cheap window.

This is the section that converts a charging time into a cost, which is what makes it the part of the page a money desk will pick up. The mechanism is simple and unforgiving. A cheap overnight tariff prices energy at a fraction of the day rate for a fixed number of hours. A charge that runs past the end of that window does not stop; it carries on at the day rate, and the driver pays four times as much for the tail as for the head.

Table 26 sets out exactly which battery capacities fit which window on a 7.4 kW cable over the standard 20% to 80% charge. Up to 45 kWh a charge fits a four-hour window with nothing to spare. From 52 kWh it needs five hours, from 58 kWh six, from 71 kWh seven and from 82 kWh eight. From 91 kWh no common cheap window is long enough at all on a 7.4 kW supply, which affects a growing share of the parc: EV Cable Hub's 2026 registration analysis put 23.1% of new registrations above 80 kWh.

The fix is a higher-rated supply rather than a longer charge, and Table 27 quantifies it. On an 11 kW three-phase supply the same 60 kWh charge takes 3h 37m rather than 5h 20m, saving 1h 43m and bringing it inside a four-hour window with room to spare. A 91 kWh battery moves from fitting nothing to fitting a six-hour window. The saving grows with capacity, reaching 3h 24m on a 120 kWh pack. Three-phase supply is not available at most British homes, which is the constraint, but where it is available it is the single most effective change a driver can make to their charging cost.

The cost of getting it wrong is in Table 28 and it is not trivial. EV Cable Hub's 2026 tariff analysis put the annual cost of overrunning a four-hour window at 108 pounds, a six-hour window at 61 pounds and an eight-hour window at 30 pounds, with a flat-rate tariff costing nothing because there is nothing to overrun. A dynamic half-hourly tariff sat at 94 pounds, because its cheapest periods are shorter and less predictable than a fixed window even though its mean off-peak rate is the lowest of the lot at 4.1p.

There is a behavioural finding buried in the overrun rate that deserves stating separately. Most drivers who overran their cheap window in the 2026 session set did not do so because their battery was unusually empty. They did so because they plugged in on arrival rather than scheduling the charge, which starts the charge before the cheap window opens and finishes it after the window closes at the other end. Setting a departure time instead of charging on plug-in costs nothing and closes a large share of the gap.