UK Public EV Charging Data

Public charging provision is the single most quoted statistic in the electric car debate, and one of the most slippery. The Department for Transport publishes it monthly for Great Britain and quarterly for every local authority and constituency.

The figures are good. What people do with them often is not, because the headline count answers a narrower question than it appears to.

What actually gets counted

DfT counts charging devices at publicly available locations. Three things follow from that definition, and all three affect how the number should be read.

• A device is not a connector. Many devices can serve two cars, so the count is not the number of vehicles that can charge at once — it understates that.
• Publicly available means what it says. Chargers in private car parks, at workplaces or on driveways are excluded, and those are where the large majority of charging actually happens.
• A device counted is not a device working. The statistics record provision, not reliability. A broken charger counts the same as a working one.

Public charging across Great Britain

National figures are monthly; the area breakdowns are quarterly and published on a different cycle, so the two are shown separately rather than as one series.

Charging in your area

Provision varies enormously between neighbouring authorities. Enter a postcode to see your local authority and constituency — the postcode is resolved to an area code and never stored, logged or put in the URL.

Why the rapid figure matters more

DfT reports devices of 50kW and above separately, and for anyone thinking about longer journeys that is the number to look at.

The distinction is practical rather than technical. A slow device is useful where a car is parked for hours anyway — a station car park, a supermarket, a residential street overnight. It is no use at all when you have 200 miles left to drive. Rapid devices add meaningful range in the time it takes to have a coffee, and they are what makes an electric car workable for people without a driveway or with long regular journeys.

A local authority with many devices but few rapid ones has solved a different problem from one with the reverse. The totals alone will not tell you which.

The devices-per-head trap

DfT publishes a devices-per-100,000-population rate, and it is the fairest simple comparison available — but it has a flaw worth knowing.

Charge points are used by whoever drives past, not only by residents. A rural authority on a trunk road may host chargers serving people who live elsewhere entirely, and score well per head as a result. A dense urban authority with high demand from residents without driveways may score badly while genuinely needing far more. The rate is a useful comparison, not a measure of adequacy.

The other thing per-head figures cannot see is where a charger sits. Provision concentrated in one town centre reads identically to the same number spread evenly across an authority, and those are very different experiences for a driver.

Most charging does not happen here at all

It is worth ending on the thing these statistics deliberately exclude. For a household with off-street parking, the overwhelming majority of charging happens at home overnight, and never appears in any figure on this page.

That matters for cost as much as convenience. Home charging on an off-peak or half-hourly tariff is far cheaper per mile than public rapid charging, which carries a higher unit price and is charged VAT at the standard rate rather than the 5% domestic energy rate. The gap between the two is large enough to change what running an electric car costs.

Which is why the public figures matter most for the households that cannot do it: no driveway means depending on the provision counted above. If you can charge at home, a working smart meter and a tariff that prices by time of day do more for your running costs than anything else — see the Octopus Agile review for how half-hourly pricing works in practice, and typical household energy use for what a car adds to a home’s consumption.