What it really costs to charge an electric car in the UK

The cost of charging an electric car in the UK is decided by where you plug in, not by which car you buy: on the DfT assumption of 3.5 miles per kWh, a mile costs 2.17p on an off-peak home tariff at 7.6 pence per unit, 7.52p at the Ofgem price cap rate of 26.32 pence for Great Britain, and 26.29p at a public rapid charger charging 92 pence, a spread of about 12.1 times. At the top of that range a mile of electricity costs the same as a mile of petrol in a car returning 30 miles per gallon, so any petrol car more efficient than that is cheaper to fuel than that charger. Those are modelled figures, not a bill.

Home versus public, mile for mile

The arithmetic is simple enough to check by hand. Divide the price per unit of electricity by the miles the car travels on one unit, and you have the cost of a mile. At 3.5 miles per kWh, a car uses 0.286 units a mile, so a mile costs the unit price multiplied by that. The last column turns each figure back into petrol: it is the miles per gallon a petrol car would need to achieve to cost the same per mile, using the UK average pump price of 174.07 pence per litre for the week commencing 26 October 2026. That way no MPG has to be assumed for the comparison to hold.

Model, not a quote. Annual column assumes 9,400 miles a year — DfT National Travel Survey, England 2025 (self-estimated) — at 3.5 miles per kWh, which is 2,686 units of electricity. It counts electricity only: no standing charge, no vehicle tax, no insurance, no servicing, no depreciation. Nobody charges at one price all year, so a real bill sits between these rows.

What the Ofgem price cap actually caps

The cap limits what a supplier may charge per unit of electricity, and what it may charge as a daily standing charge, on a default or standard variable tariff. It does not cap your bill. Use more electricity and you pay more, without limit; the cap is a price control, not a spending ceiling.

Two further points are routinely misread. The headline figure is an average across the regional caps for England, Scotland and Wales, so the cap that applies where you live may be above or below it. And it is not a maximum anyone pays in the ordinary sense: fixed-price deals and dedicated EV tariffs are agreed outside the cap entirely, which is exactly why the off-peak rate in the table above can sit so far below it.

The standing charge is what you pay for being connected at all, every day, whether or not you charge a car. At the current rate that is £200 a year for electricity before a single unit is used, which is why it belongs in a household budget rather than in a per-mile figure.

Source: Ofgem energy price cap unit rates and standing charges. Basis in use on this page: Ofgem price cap, Direct Debit, Great Britain average, 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Dec 2026 — excludes VAT (GB domestic electricity is zero-rated 1 Oct 2026 – 30 Jun 2027).

The VAT trap

In Great Britain, domestic electricity is zero-rated for VAT from 1 October 2026 to 30 June 2027; the normal rate is the reduced rate of 5 per cent, which Northern Ireland keeps throughout. Electricity from a public charge point is standard-rated at 20 per cent, window or not. Same electrons, same car, different tax, and it applies on top of a commercial price that is already several times the domestic one.

The public rate is contested, not settled. In Charge My Street Ltd v HMRC the First-tier Tribunal held the 5% reduced rate could apply to supplies of up to 1,000 kWh a month, but at Budget 2026 the government announced legislation confirming that electricity from publicly accessible charge points is standard-rated at 20% from 1 November 2026. HMRC set that position out in Revenue and Customs Brief 4 (2026), published 12 May 2026: “The position remains that charging electric vehicles at public charge points is standard rated for VAT.” Every public-charging figure on this page is worked out at 20 per cent, because that is what you are charged; if the appeal fails, some of it gets cheaper.

HMRC set out the zero rate for Great Britain in Revenue and Customs Brief 10 (2026), published 8 September 2026 and read on 5 October 2026, for supplies to 31 March 2027. Budget 2026 (28 October 2026) extended the zero rate to 30 June 2027; the government will lay the order making that extension before Parliament in early 2027. In Northern Ireland, qualifying supplies of electricity stay at the reduced rate of 5 per cent.

The practical rule: never add VAT to a cap figure without checking which side of that window it sits on, and never chart the two periods as one line. The zero rate also does not reach public charging, which stays standard-rated throughout that window.

Northern Ireland is a different system

The Ofgem cap covers Great Britain, meaning England, Scotland and Wales. It does not apply in Northern Ireland, and neither does the temporary zero VAT rate. In Northern Ireland the Utility Regulator (UREGNI) sets a maximum average price for Power NI, through a price control and a tariff review. Both systems set a maximum; the two maximums are different things, and that is the part worth getting right. Ofgem caps the unit rate and the standing charge on the default tariff of every licensed supplier in Great Britain. The Utility Regulator limits the maximum average charge per unit across Power NI’s whole tariff, and binds that one supplier.

• Regulator: Utility Regulator (UREGNI).
• Price-controlled domestic supplier: Power NI.
• What the regulator sets: a maximum average price, not Ofgem’s default-tariff cap.
• Annual electricity bill on Power NI’s standard tariff, from 1 July 2026: about £1,093 for a domestic customer using 3,200 kWh a year. That consumption is the whole meaning of the figure; without it the number says nothing about your own bill.
• VAT on domestic electricity stays at 5 per cent throughout the Great Britain zero-rate window.

Source: Utility Regulator. Ofgem’s price cap covers Great Britain only. In Northern Ireland the Utility Regulator sets a maximum average price for Power NI, the price-regulated domestic supplier, through a price control and a tariff review.

The driveway problem

Every cheap number on this page assumes a charger at home. A smart overnight tariff needs a smart meter, an eligible car or charger, and somewhere to park the car while it is plugged in. Many UK households have no off-street parking, and for them the off-peak rate is not a saving that is hard to reach: it is not reachable at all. Their realistic range starts at the public rows of the table.

We are not going to put a percentage on that group. Figures circulate widely, they disagree with each other, and we have not been able to verify one against a primary source, so the honest answer is that the size of the group is material but not something we can state. What matters for a buying decision is simpler: work out where you would actually charge before you assume any of these numbers apply to you. On-street charging, workplace charging and a friendly relative’s driveway all produce completely different arithmetic.

Charging losses, and why two official efficiency figures disagree

Not all the electricity you buy reaches the battery. Some is lost in the charger, the cable and the car, and more of it goes to heating or cooling the battery in cold weather. You pay for what passes through the meter, not for what arrives in the cells, so any honest cost figure has to be measured at the wall.

The two official assumptions differ on exactly this point. DfT uses 3.5 miles per kWh for a 70 to 80 kWh battery and states that it includes charging losses. HMRC uses 3.59 for its advisory rate and does not say whether losses are included. Applied to the same cap rate, DfT’s figure gives 7.52p a mile and HMRC’s gives 7.33p, about 2.6 per cent apart on identical electricity, purely from the assumption used.

The percentage gap is fixed by the two assumptions, so it does not move with the electricity price; what grows with the price per unit is the gap in pence, and it is small on one mile and larger over a year. The rule we follow: state which assumption is in use, and never mix one source’s efficiency figure with another’s price. This page uses the DfT figure throughout, because it is the one measured on the side of the meter you pay for.

The HMRC Advisory Electricity Rate is not your cost

The Advisory Electricity Rate is an employer reimbursement rate. It sets what an employer may pay an employee per business mile in a company electric car, and what an employee may repay for private mileage, without a tax charge arising. It is a tax convention, not a measurement of what a private motorist spends.

• From 1 September 2026: 7p a mile for home charging and 15p a mile for public charging.
• Built on HMRC’s assumptions of 3.59 miles per kWh, 24.47 pence per unit at home and 54 pence per unit in public.
• That public figure is not an average of all public charging. HMRC takes the Zapmap public charging price index for chargers under 50 kW — what HMRC still calls slow or fast charging, and what the Department for Transport now calls Standard and Standard plus — and uprates it with the latest Office for National Statistics estimate of electricity prices. The rapid and ultra-rapid units in the table above, charging up to 92 pence a unit, are left out of it altogether.
• Reviewed on 1 March, 1 June, 1 September, 1 December.

Note that HMRC’s domestic input of 24.47 pence is not the cap rate of 26.32 pence in force now, which is another reason the advisory rate and your bill will not agree. If you drive a company car, the advisory rate is the number your employer works to. If you own the car, the rows in the table above describe your position and the advisory rate does not. HMRC advisory fuel rates.

Public charge points must show the price per unit

Under the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023, every public charge point in the UK must display its price in pence per kilowatt hour. That is what makes the comparison on this page possible at all, and it is the only figure worth comparing between operators: a session fee, a connection fee or a per-minute rate tells you nothing until it is converted back to a price per unit. Because these are commercial offers rather than regulated prices, they move without notice; the ones here were checked on 9 September 2026 and should be confirmed on the operator’s own page before you rely on them.

Why this matters more every year in the used market

Electric cars are no longer a rounding error in the used market. In 2025 there were 274,815 used battery electric transactions in the UK, a record 3.5 per cent share of all used-car sales, up from 2.5 per cent in 2024 (SMMT, published 10 February 2026). Most of those buyers are inheriting a car whose running cost was worked out by somebody else, on somebody else’s driveway, on a tariff they may not have.

So the useful question when you are looking at a used electric car is not “what does this car cost to charge” but “what will it cost to charge where I will charge it”. The car changes the miles per unit by a modest amount. Where you plug in changes the price per unit by a factor of about 12.1.

Work out your own figure

Read next

• Is an electric car actually cheaper to run than petrol? — the same comparison in pence a mile, in one paragraph.
• Should I buy a used electric car? — the driveway question, battery health and what the tax now costs.
• Buying a car in Northern Ireland — where the electricity market, the testing and the zone rules all differ.

Where these figures come from

• Regulated electricity prices: Ofgem default-tariff cap, Direct Debit, Great Britain average of the regional caps. Verified 9 September 2026.
• Northern Ireland: Utility Regulator (UREGNI), Power NI regulated domestic tariff.
• Public and off-peak prices: operator and supplier published rates — commercial offers, not regulated prices. Public operators checked 9 September 2026; Intelligent Octopus Go read on its own page on 5 October 2026.
• Efficiency: 3.5 miles per kWh, DfT charging infrastructure statistics FAQ. An assumption, applied consistently, not a measurement of any particular car.
• Petrol comparison: UK average pump price, week commencing 26 October 2026, from DESNZ weekly road fuel prices, converted at 4.54609 litres to the imperial gallon.
• Mileage used in the annual column: 9,400 miles — DfT National Travel Survey, England 2025 (self-estimated).
• Used market: SMMT used-car transactions, full year 2025, published 10 February 2026.