What It Costs to Charge an EV at Home

Charging an EV at home is dramatically cheaper than fueling a comparable gas car - usually by a wide margin - but "cheaper" is not a number. This guide gives you the number, with the formula shown so you can check it against your own electricity bill, a worked example, a table across a range of rates, and a calculator you can run for your exact car. It is the guide not one competitor we surveyed bothers to publish, and it is the one that makes the switch make sense.

The formula

Cost to charge is genuinely simple. The energy your battery needs, divided by charging efficiency (some energy is lost as heat), times your electricity rate:

The charging loss matters: roughly 10 percent of the electricity you pull from the wall does not make it into the battery, so a "60 kWh" charge actually draws around 67 kWh from your meter. Ignore that and your estimate comes out too low. Our calculator includes it.

A worked example

Say you drive a car with a 65 kWh usable battery and you refill it from 10 percent to 80 percent - a typical top-up of about 70 percent, or ~45 kWh. At the US residential average rate, which has recently been in the neighborhood of 16 to 17 cents per kWh (check your own bill - rates vary a lot by state and utility), the arithmetic is:

• Energy into the battery: 65 kWh x 0.70 = 45.5 kWh
• Energy drawn from the wall: 45.5 / 0.90 = ~50.6 kWh
• Cost at $0.16/kWh: 50.6 x $0.16 = about $8.10

Roughly eight dollars to add around 200 miles of range in an efficient EV. For cost per mile, take your efficiency (say 3.5 miles per kWh): (1 / 3.5) / 0.90 x $0.16 = about 5 cents per mile, or about $5 per 100 miles. Those are the numbers that make EV ownership pencil out - and the ones the calculator below computes for your own inputs.

How your rate changes everything

The single biggest variable is your electricity rate, which varies widely by state and utility. Here is roughly what a 45.5 kWh (10-to-80 percent) charge on a 65 kWh car costs across a range of rates, including the ~10 percent charging loss:

Even at a high 35 cents per kWh, charging is competitive with gas for most drivers; at typical rates it is a fraction of the cost. And if your utility offers a time-of-use plan, you can push that number lower still by charging overnight - see off-peak and time-of-use charging. For the direct comparison against a gas car, with the assumptions laid out, read EV vs gas cost.

What this means for buying a charger

Notice what does not appear in the math: the charger itself. Every home Level 2 charger delivers the same energy to your car, so the running cost is identical whether you buy a budget unit or a premium one - the difference is features, not cents per mile. The one place a smart charger lowers your bill is by automatically shifting charging to cheaper off-peak hours. If you are deciding whether a Level 2 install pays off at all, the answer is almost always yes: home charging is so much cheaper than public fast charging or gas that the hardware pays for itself over time. Our best Level 2 chargers is where to start.