No driveway? You pay 12 times the price to charge your car
£3
Home
vs
£30
Public charger
A year of driving · 7,100 miles
What it costs to run a family car
- Electric, charged at homeOvernight£148
- Petrol carAverage£1,594
- Electric, public chargersNo driveway£1,687
How big is the gap?
Topping up a typical family electric car from 20% to 80% costs about £3 overnight at home. The same top-up at a public rapid charger costs about £30.
Over a year of average driving, that is around £150 at home against nearly £1,700 if you rely on public rapid chargers. That is more than the £1,600 it costs to fuel an average petrol car over the same miles.
- the price per unit to charge in public
- 12×
- a year more than charging at home
- £1,539
- homes have nowhere to park on their own property
- 4 in 10
Who pays it?
About four in ten homes in England have nowhere to park on their own property, so can't easily charge at home. Under current rules, every new car sold must be zero emission by 2035, so more and more of those drivers will have no choice but to use public chargers.
Why is public charging so expensive?
The biggest single cost is the grid. Every public charging site pays a fixed yearly fee just to be plugged into it. For a typical site with four chargers, that is around £65,000 a year, and it is the same whether one car turns up or a thousand.
Most public chargers sit unused for most of the day. So that fee is shared between very few drivers, and it adds up to about a third of what they pay.
| Where your money goes, for every 79p | Pence |
|---|---|
| Fee for the grid | 26p |
| VAT (charging at home pays none until April) | 13p |
| Government charges | 7p |
| The power itself, and running the charger | 33p |
Where is it worst?
It depends where you live. In North Wales and Merseyside, a charging site pays £96,000 a year before a single car plugs in. That is nearly three-quarters more than the same site in the East of England.
| Region | Fixed grid fee a year |
|---|---|
| North Wales and Merseyside | £96,000 |
| North Scotland | £87,000 |
| South Scotland | £82,000 |
| South Wales | £71,000 |
| West Midlands | £71,000 |
| South West | £67,000 |
| Southern England | £65,000 |
| East Midlands | £65,000 |
| London | £63,000 |
| Yorkshire | £62,000 |
| North East | £60,000 |
| North West | £60,000 |
| South East | £60,000 |
| East of England | £56,000 |
The same four-charger site in every region, this year's fees.
What would make it fairer?
Charge new public chargers for the grid by how much they are actually used, not by how big they are, until they get busy. Busy chargers would still pay their full share. Drivers would stop paying for empty ones.
That would cut a public top-up from £30 to about £22, if charging companies pass the saving on. Shared across everyone, it would cost about £135 million a year. That is under £2 for a typical household.
It won't close the gap. Charging at home will always be cheaper. But it removes the part drivers should never have been paying.
Isn't this already being fixed?
Not yet. Two industry proposals would cut the fee for public chargers (known as DCP 420 and DCP 454). One has been undecided since 2023. The other won't start before 2028.
Neither touches the national part of the fee, which is the bigger one.
The cost of using the grid changes through the day. See it live where you live.
Open Grid ClockQuestions about these figures? hello@energycode.ai
How we worked this out
- Top-up: a typical family electric car with 60 kWh of usable battery (the best-selling Tesla Model Y has 60 to 79 kWh usable), charged from 20% to 80%, so 36 kWh into the battery. At home we add 10% for charging losses (40 kWh through the meter, about 5.5 hours on a 7.4 kW charger, inside the cheap overnight window). In public we add 5% (our assumption).
- Prices: home 6.57p a unit on Intelligent Octopus Go, 23:30 to 05:30 (Octopus, 13 October 2026, 0% VAT until 31 March 2027). Public 79p a unit, Zapmap's average pay-as-you-go rapid and ultra-rapid price (Zapmap, September 2026). 79 ÷ 6.57 = 12 times the price per unit. Against the standard price cap rate (26.32p) it is 3 times.
- A year: 7,100 miles, the average car in England (DfT National Travel Survey 2024, table NTS0901a, mileage as estimated by drivers). Electric at 3.5 miles per kWh, with the same charging losses. Petrol at 175.28p a litre (GOV.UK, 12 October 2026) and 35.5 mpg, the average petrol car implied by government emissions factors. At 40 mpg petrol would be £1,414. Public charging costs more than petrol only for drivers who rely on rapid chargers. Slower public chargers average 54p. When VAT returns to charging at home on 1 April 2027, the home figure rises to about £155.
- Grid fee: EnergyCode's charging engines, 2026-27 published rates, a four-charger site (600 kVA, high voltage) delivering 4.7% of its maximum output: 12.8% of the time in use at an average 55.4 kW on 150 kW chargers (Zapmap and Green Finance Institute). Its fixed grid charges (DUoS fixed and capacity charges plus the TNUoS transmission residual) are £64,742 a year at the national median, from £55,505 (East of England) to £95,997 (North Wales and Merseyside). These do not change with use. Spread over the power it sells, that is 26p a unit excluding VAT, about a third of the 79p national average price. This is the fixed part only: the small per-unit grid charges (distribution unit rates and balancing, BSUoS) add about 1.7p and are counted with the power itself.
- Fairer charging: fixed grid fees charged per unit until a site is 15% busy, cutting the fixed fee from 26p to about 8p a unit (79p to about 58p with VAT, if passed on). About £135m a year across an estimated 7,300 sites (range £70m to £210m), under £2 per household. Our estimate.
- Industry proposals: DCUSA change proposals DCP 420 (raised 29 March 2023) and DCP 454 (raised 6 May 2025, proposed start 1 April 2028).
- 2035: "all new cars and vans will need to be fully zero emission by 2035" (GOV.UK, 14 August 2026; a review is under way). Four in ten: English Housing Survey 2024, table DA2204. 59.2% of homes in England have a garage, carport or parking space on their own plot, so 40.8% do not. 26.3% have no designated parking at all.