How Much Does It Cost to Charge an EV at Home?

The three numbers that decide what charging costs

First, how much energy the car pulls from the wall to travel a mile. Second, what a kilowatt-hour costs you. Third, how many miles you are actually adding. Multiply the first two and scale by the third and you have the bill:

The 3,370 looks like a magic number and is not one. The EPA defines a gallon of gasoline as 33.7 kilowatt-hours of electricity for the purpose of MPGe, so a car rated 115 MPGe uses 33.7 kWh to go 115 miles, which is 33.7 ÷ 115 × 100 = 29.3 kWh per 100 miles. Rearranged, that is 3,370 ÷ MPGe — and it is the EPA's own arithmetic, not a convention invented on this page.

What the 2026 EPA cards actually say cars cost

Every car card on fueleconomy.gov prints a combined MPGe figure and a kilowatt-hours-per-100-miles figure. The second is the first turned into 3,370, to within the card's rounding, which is about as good a confirmation of the formula as you can ask for. Below, eight 2026 model-year cards, with the cost of refilling the whole EPA range at the national average rate.

Cost per mile and cost of a full charge both use the EIA's 18.16¢ residential average. Your own rate changes every figure in the last two columns proportionally. Note the three LEAF rows: the same 75 kWh car is carded at 121, 114 and 103 MPGe on 18-inch steel, 18-inch alloy and 19-inch wheels respectively, with ranges of 303, 288 and 259 miles. An efficiency number that does not name its trim and wheel size is not a fact you can check, and it is the usual source of two people quoting different costs for the same car.

The spread is worth noticing. Between the best and worst of these cars, a 1,000-mile stretch of driving costs $44.35 and $59.42 — a third more, from wheel and tyre choices rather than a different model. A heavy electric pickup, at roughly 60 MPGe, is $102.00 per 1,000 miles on the same arithmetic, which is the figure that makes people doubt the whole comparison until they price the gasoline equivalent.

Why the wall figure is the one you pay for

Here is the mistake that inflates most home-charging estimates by 10 to 15%. The EPA says, on its own fuel-economy testing page, that MPGe values provided by EPA include charging losses, that MPGe assumes Level 2 alternating-current charging, and that the measurement accounts for losses in the charging cable and the on-board vehicle charger — language the agency summarises as moving "the measurement from the vehicle to the outlet in the wall".

So the kilowatt-hours you derive from MPGe are already metered-side, and multiplying them by a further 1.10 or 1.15 counts the same loss twice. The cards prove it internally. The 2026 LEAF with 18-inch alloys is rated 114 MPGe over 288 miles, which is 85.1 kWh from the wall for a battery the same card describes as 75 kWh. The 10.1 kWh difference is the charging loss, and it is already inside the 85.1. Apply 15% on top and you tell that driver a $2.13 commute costs $2.45 and a $798 year costs $918, for energy nobody bought.

There is one case where a loss division genuinely belongs, and the EV charging cost calculator handles it separately: if you are working from state of charge rather than miles — "what does it cost to take the pack from 20% to 80%" — then the energy you are describing is pack-side, and you divide by a charging efficiency of about 85%. That figure is not an EPA number; it is where Argonne's charging-infrastructure modelling and NREL's Annual Technology Baseline for residential losses agree.

What a year of charging costs, and what it saves

The EPA and DOE Fuel Economy Guide prices every car's annual fuel cost on 15,000 miles a year, 55% city and 45% highway, so that is the assumption worth using for a comparison. A 115 MPGe car drives 15,000 miles on 4,396 kWh, which at 18.16¢ is $798.25 a year, or $66.52 a month. A 25 MPG gasoline car drives the same 15,000 miles on 600 gallons, which at the EIA's $4.153 a gallon for the week of 2 November 2026 is $2,491.80.

At $4.153 a gallon the 25 MPG gasoline car is $166.12 per 1,000 miles and $2,491.80 a year, which is the row every saving claim should be read against. The gasoline row moves with pump prices and the electric rows move with the rate on your bill; the ranking between them does not change until the electricity rate passes roughly 57¢ per kilowatt-hour.

The 60 MPGe row is the one to think about before you buy anything. An electric pickup at 10.2¢ a mile is still cheaper than a 25 MPG petrol vehicle at 16.6¢, but it is not the dramatic third that the arguments on the internet usually quote, and a real pickup doing 20 MPG with a trailer is a different comparison again. Cost per mile is a calculation, not a brand.

The rate on your bill is not the rate in this article

The 18.16¢ figure is the EIA's average price of electricity to residential customers, from Table 5.6.A of the Electric Power Monthly (August 2026 data, released 23 October 2026). The same table gives 14.87¢ across all sectors, 14.47¢ commercial and 9.64¢ industrial — so if you have seen a lower "average electricity price" quoted somewhere, it was probably the all-sectors number, and residential is the one that bills you.

It is an average across every state, every utility and every hour of the day, which makes it a starting point and nothing more. Virginia and Utah sit well below it; Alaska and Hawaii well above. A time-of-use tariff sets a separate overnight price for the hours most people charge in, and that split is a utility-specific number. The EIA states directly that it does not publish retail electricity rates or prices for peak or off-peak periods, only the count of customers enrolled in time-based rates — so any article that quotes you a national off-peak saving percentage is making it up. Get your bill, find the overnight rate, and put that in.

Five things this arithmetic does not include

• 01The charger and its installation. A dedicated 40 or 50 A circuit is typically several hundred dollars to install, more across a long run or through a finished wall. That cost is real, and it is a large share of the first year's saving — which is why Level 1 on an existing outlet is a defensible way to start.
• 02Any utility EV-programme fee. Some utilities bill EV customers a separate monthly charge; check your tariff, because a flat monthly fee can outweigh a low overnight rate.
• 03Public and DC fast charging. Those bill per kilowatt-hour or per minute at rates well above home charging, with their own loss profile. The figures here are home alternating current.
• 04Cold weather and highway speed. Every real-world factor that matters moves wall kWh per 100 miles up from the sticker figure, and none of them are in these tables.
• 05Home solar and generation. If part of your charging energy is self-generated, the rate that applies is the avoided purchase price, not your bill's import rate — and that is a different calculation with its own assumptions.

Two more pages finish the cluster: Level 1 vs Level 2 EV charging speed compares every common circuit in miles of range per hour, and what size breaker an EV charger needs works the 125% rule that the installation quote is built on. The energy tools hub has the rest of the set.