EV Charging Cost Calculator

Energy used = annual miles ÷ miles per kWh. Charging cost = energy × your blended price per kWh. An 8,000-mile year at 3.5 miles per kWh uses about 2,286 kWh.

For one charge rather than a year, see how much it costs to charge an electric car, which prices a full battery at home and on a rapid charger.

At the rates used here, public rapid charging costs more than nine times an overnight EV tariff. So the same car can be very cheap or fairly expensive to run depending only on where it is plugged in. That is why the calculator asks for your charging split before anything else.

A dedicated EV tariff gives several cheap overnight hours. Charging on a standard price-cap tariff at 26.32p instead costs about £601.60 a year for the same 8,000 miles, or 7.5p a mile — still well under petrol, but three times the EV tariff. Check the tariff’s day rate against the rest of your usage in the electricity cost calculator.

Use your car’s observed average, not the brochure figure. Efficiency drops in winter because of cabin heating and cold batteries, and at motorway speeds. Falling from 3.5 to 3.0 miles per kWh raises the mostly-home cost from £521.14 to £608.00 a year.

Use the petrol car’s real mpg and today’s pump price. At 42mpg, 8,000 miles burns about 866 litres, or £1,402.79 at £1.62 a litre. Flattering either side makes the comparison useless.

If you have off-street parking, a home charger and an EV tariff are the biggest saving available. Schedule charging for the cheap window in the car or charger app rather than plugging in when you get home.

Without a driveway, look for slower public chargers and supermarket or workplace charging, which are usually cheaper than motorway rapid chargers.

Charging from your own panels costs you only the 13p or so you would have earned by exporting that power. It works best if the car is at home in the day. See the solar panel calculator for what your roof generates.

Charging 80% at home saves £881.65 a year against the 42mpg petrol car in the table. If a home charger costs you £1,000 to install, that saving covers it in about 14 months.

Split evenly between home and public charging, the EV still saves £391.36 a year. Cheaper public chargers — slower destination chargers rather than motorway rapids — widen that gap.

Relying only on rapid chargers at 80p a kWh costs £425.78 a year more than the petrol car. For drivers without off-street parking, finding cheaper local charging matters more than which car they buy.

A 65kWh battery costs about £5.53 to fill on an 8.5p EV tariff, £17.11 on a standard price-cap tariff and £52.00 on a rapid charger. The annual figure above matters more: a bigger battery costs more to fill, but it is miles per kWh that decides the cost of each mile.

The saving grows with every mile. Doubling mileage to 16,000 a year doubles both costs, so the mostly-home saving doubles to about £1,763. At low mileage, the running-cost advantage is smaller and purchase price weighs more heavily in the decision.

Burning a litre of petrol releases about 2.31kg of CO₂, so 866 litres is roughly 2 tonnes a year. The EV figure uses the carbon intensity of grid electricity for your region, which is lower and falls further as the grid decarbonises.

Purchase price, finance, insurance, servicing, tyres and depreciation all differ between cars, and vary more by model than by fuel type. They are left out so the comparison stays like for like. Use the result as the running-cost part of a wider decision, not the whole of it.