EV home charger running costs (2026)

How much does it cost to charge an electric car at home?

Charging a typical 60kWh electric car at home costs about £15.67 on the Ofgem capped rate, £8.40 on an Economy 7 night rate, or as little as £4.20 on a smart EV tariff. That is a full charge from empty — roughly 210 miles of real-world range. The single biggest lever is not the charger you buy, it is the tariff you charge on.

The cost of charging an electric car at home, three ways

Assumes 3.5 miles/kWh, a 60kWh usable battery and the Ofgem cap electricity rate of 26.11p/kWh in force to 30 September 2026. Your own rate varies by region and payment method.

Why the tariff matters more than the charger

A 7kW home charger costs roughly the same to buy whichever tariff you are on, and it will refill most cars overnight either way. What changes your running cost by three or four times is whether those kilowatt-hours are billed at the capped day rate or at a smart off-peak rate. On a smart EV tariff the same 200-mile week costs about £4 instead of £15.

Two practical conditions apply. You need a working smart meter sending half-hourly readings, and for the cheapest rates you usually need a compatible car or charger so the supplier can schedule charging. If your hardware is not on the compatibility list, a fixed-window tariff such as Economy 7 still roughly halves the cost against the standard rate.

What a year of home charging actually costs

At the UK average of about 7,400 miles a year, the annual electricity cost to run an EV from home works out at roughly:

• £148 a year on a smart EV tariff at 7p
• £296 a year on an Economy 7 night rate
• £553 a year at the capped standard rate
• £1,135 a year in petrol at 40mpg

The gap between the first and third line — around £400 a year — is available to almost any EV driver with a smart meter, and it needs no new hardware. That is why the tariff is the first thing to check, not the last.

Charging at home vs public charging

Public rapid charging in the UK typically runs from about 45p to 85p per kWh, so the same 100 miles costs roughly £13–£24 — comparable with petrol, and up to twelve times the cost of charging overnight at home on a smart tariff. Home charging is where the economics of an EV are actually won; public charging is convenience you pay a premium for on longer trips.