EV Charging Cost Calculator

Charging an electric car at home is usually the cheapest way to fuel it, but the figure people quote each other varies enormously — and almost all of that variation is the tariff rather than the car.

Pick a car, set the charge you actually do, and add your unit rate. The calculator shows what the charge costs, what it costs per mile, and how much energy your meter records rather than how much your car reports.

The kWh your car reports is not the kWh you pay for

This is the single most common error in EV cost calculations, and it runs one way: it always makes charging look cheaper than it is.

Your car reports the energy that arrived in the battery. Your electricity meter records the energy that left the wall. Between the two sit the onboard charger converting AC to DC, resistance in the cable, and the battery management system warming or cooling the pack while it charges. On a home AC charger that gap is typically around a tenth of the total.

So a charge that puts 35 kWh into the battery draws closer to 39 kWh through the meter. At 26p that is a pound of difference on a single charge, and several times a week over a year it stops being trivial. Rapid DC chargers lose less, because the conversion happens in the charger rather than the car.

Why the tariff matters more than the car

Run the same car through the calculator at an overnight EV rate and at a standard variable rate and the annual figure can differ by a factor of three. No difference between two electric cars comes close to that.

That is why the useful question is not which car is cheapest to charge but whether you can move your charging into a cheap window. A car that sits on a driveway overnight is close to an ideal load for a time-of-use tariff — large, flexible, and completely indifferent to when it happens.

To see what the rates actually look like where you live, the price cap by region page gives the standard-rate ceiling, and when to use electricity shows the hours that are typically cheapest and cleanest.

Home charging against public charging

This calculator is built for home charging, where you pay your own domestic unit rate. Public charging is priced by the network and is usually several times higher — a rapid charger rate is set commercially rather than by your supplier, and the price cap does not apply to it.

You can still use the calculator for a public charge by entering the network's advertised price per kWh as the unit rate and dropping the losses figure, since a DC rapid charger bills the energy it delivers rather than what your house draws. Compare that result with your home figure and the gap is the real cost of not charging at home.

What this calculator assumes

The presets are typical usable capacities and real-world efficiency for each body style, not any specific model — they are a starting point to edit, and your own car's trip computer beats them.

The annual estimate holds your unit rate constant for twelve months. That is this site's assumption for the purpose of the estimate, made on 7 August 2026, and not a published forecast. There is no reliable public forward price series for domestic electricity, and a calculator that invents one silently is worse than one that admits it has not. If rates move, rerun it.

Efficiency also varies with the season by more than most people expect. A car managing 4.0 miles per kWh in July can drop below 3.0 in January, so an annual figure built from a summer average will read low. Full workings for every calculator on this site are on the methodology page.