Public EV charging price index (Q4 2026)

An index fixes a base and measures everything against it. The base here is Q4 2026 — the first edition — whose national median was $0.35 per kWh. That median reads 100. Every other figure on this page is a median divided by it: a state at 80 charges 20% less than the country as a whole, one at 131 charges 31% more. The base never moves, which is what lets next quarter's national index show a real change instead of a new scale.

The number in the middle is a median, not an average, and the difference is not pedantry. The mean tariff in this edition is $0.40 — 5¢ above the median — because the top of the market is long and thin: the dearest tenth of stations list $0.59 per kWh or more, and that tail lifts an average without moving the middle. A median answers the question a driver is actually asking, which is what a typical charger charges, not what the market averages out to.

What the index is not: a quote. A station's tariff is set per site, and networks change them without notice. It also is not the whole bill — session fees, idle fees, parking and membership discounts sit outside it, which is the first thing the method section below admits.

A single median implies a single market. There are two. Sorted by price, the 3,805 tariffs run from $0.01 to $2.00— the top of that range is the ceiling this index counts to, not the market's own limit — and they bunch twice: once around $0.30–$0.40, where workplace and public Level 2 chargers sit alongside the cheaper DC networks, and again around $0.45–$0.60, which is DC fast on the large networks. Move the slider and the shape becomes a position: a tariff is cheap or dear relative to everything else on the same grid.

The middle half of the directory spans 18¢, from $0.29 to $0.47. The cheapest and dearest ranked states are 18¢ apart. Put those two sentences next to each other and the practical lesson is uncomfortable for a state-by-state guide: which charger you pull up to matters at least as much as which state you are in. The state table is still worth reading — it is the only version of the number you can act on before you move — but it explains less of your bill than the choice of plug does.

DC fast is not a dearer network. It is a different product.

Level 2 and DC fast list different tariffs because they sell different things. A Level 2 post delivers 6–19 kW and takes hours; a DC charger delivers 50–350 kW and is done in twenty minutes. The electricity is the same commodity, but the equipment behind it is not, and the tariff reflects the equipment.

That gap is why a headline “average charging price” is always a little wrong. A driver who charges at home, at work and twice a year on a road trip pays close to the Level 2 number. A driver without a driveway pays something closer to the DC number for most of their miles. Same directory, two very different bills.

Only states with at least ten priced stations are ranked. Below that, a median is one charger's tariff with a state's name on it, and a leaderboard entry built on it would be a claim about a forecourt dressed up as a claim about a place. The 22 states that list any price at all are in the table below, ranked or not.

The gap between Iowa at $0.28 and Arkansas at $0.46 is 18¢ per kWh — about $9.45 on a 10–80% stop in a 75 kWh car. Real money, but smaller than the gap between a cheap and a dear charger in the same city, which is why the map's state medians are a starting point rather than a shopping list.

The states tab lists every state where a station quotes a per-kWh price, with the sample behind each median and the share at or below $0.40. The networks tab lists the operators with twenty or more priced stations. Sort by index to compare like with like; filter to the ranked states to drop the ones where one charger sets the number.

A network median describes an estate more than a tariff. Most networks sell charging to the property — the hotel or the mall sets the price and the network runs the payment — so a low network median often means that network's sites are in cheap electricity markets, not that it is generous.

The index is a price per kilowatt-hour. A driver pays for kilowatt-hours somewhere between empty and full, so the useful conversion is a stop: pick a state, a battery and a speed, and the same tariffs become a number on a card. The 10–80% band is the default because it is the stop people actually make — the last 20% of a pack is slow on DC and rarely worth waiting for.

Every station record carries the tariff its network lists. A station is a priced station when that tariff is a positive per-kWh figure no higher than $2.00 — the ceiling the directory uses to reject data-entry artefacts such as $35 per kWh. The index is the middle of those figures, sorted. Ranges, percentiles and the chart are computed from the same list, so the median on the map, in the table, in the chart and in the structured data is one number.

• Excluded: per-minute, per-hour and per-session tariffs, which cannot be turned into a per-kWh figure without inventing a charging power. They are listed on the station pages where the network states them.
• Excluded: session and connection fees, idle fees, parking at the site, membership discounts and sales tax. The tariff is the energy price only.
• Excluded: home charging. Residential electricity is a different market, at roughly half the public rate, and it is covered in the cost-per-mile guide.
• Median, not mean: the tail of expensive forecourts is real but not representative, and a median does not move when one of them changes its price.
• Sample thresholds: ten priced stations to rank a state, twenty for a network row, ten for a speed-specific median. Below those, the figure is shown but not used to compare places.
• One copy of the data: the state medians come from the same computation as the cost page and the state cost pages, so the three cannot disagree.

Prices come from the networks' own listings in the directory feed, not from a reading at the charger, and a network can change a tariff without telling anyone. Read a median as the shape of the market and the station page as the number that applies to the charger in front of you.

The words in the table

Listed tariff

The per-kWh price a network publishes for a station. It is not a reading at the charger: it is what the operator says the electricity costs, and it can change without the directory changing.

Priced station

A station whose record carries a plausible per-kWh tariff — above zero and at most $2.00. Stations that bill per minute, per session or per hour are not priced stations, even when they are not free.

Index value

A median divided by the base quarter's national median, times 100. It makes a $0.28 tariff and a $0.46 tariff comparable without arguing about the cents.

10–80% stop

The charge a driver actually makes on a road trip: 70% of the pack, which is where a DC charger is fastest and a full pack is not worth waiting for.

Fill

On this page, 70% of a 75 kWh pack — 52.5 kWh — priced at the state's median tariff. A unit for the map's second view, not a claim about any particular car.

This is the first edition, so the table has one row. Each quarter it keeps the previous rows and adds one, with the national median, the index value, the priced sample and the cheapest state — enough to see a move without archiving the whole page.

The next edition is Q1 2027. A quarter here means a calendar quarter of the station data, read from the date the build-time copy was written: this one describes tariffs as of October 26, 2026. A data refresh inside the quarter moves the numbers without creating a new edition, and the date on this page is the one to quote.