EV Charging Cost by State

Every cost-to-charge article eventually says “it depends on your electricity rate.” That is true and completely unhelpful, because almost nobody knows their rate off the top of their head. So here is the whole country, from one authoritative table, with the arithmetic already done.

The numbers below come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly, the official monthly series for average electricity prices by state and sector. The rate column is EIA’s; every dollar figure is ours, computed in code from that rate so the assumptions and the output cannot drift apart.

The formula, in one line

Charging cost is not complicated: kWh × price per kWh. To turn that into a per-mile figure you divide the price per kWh by the car’s efficiency in miles per kWh. We use 3.5 miles per kWhas a reference for a mid-size EV throughout this site — your own figure is on the vehicle’s efficiency label, which DOE and EPA publish as kWh per 100 miles.

So a state at 20 cents per kWh costs about 5.7 cents a mile. A state at 30 costs about 8.6. That is the entire model, and everything below is that sum run 51 times.

What the spread actually means

The national residential average in May 2026 was 18.44 cents per kWh. The cheapest state, Idaho at 12.35, is about a third below it; the most expensive, Hawaii at 52.00, is nearly three times it. That is a four-fold spread between the two ends, on the same car, on the same charger, for the same miles.

A few patterns are worth noticing rather than just reading off the table. New England and the Middle Atlantic cluster high — five of the six New England states are above 24 cents. The Mountain and West North Central regions cluster low, with Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, North Dakota and Missouri all under 14. The South Atlantic splits sharply: North Carolina and Florida sit near 15, while Maryland and the District of Columbia are above 21. And the Pacific region is not one thing at all — Washington at 14.95 and California at 33.25 are in the same census division.

Even at the expensive end, the comparison that matters is not against other states. It is against a fuel pump, and we work that comparison through in EV charging vs gas. Hawaii is the only state where the arithmetic gets genuinely close.

Three reasons your bill will not match the table

A state average blends every utility in the state.EIA’s figure is exactly what it says: an average across all residential customers. In states with many utilities, an individual co-op or municipal provider can sit several cents either side of it.

Time-of-use rates are often much cheaper overnight.EIA notes that some utilities offer time-of-day pricing to reduce peak demand, and that the real cost of supplying electricity is highest in the afternoon and early evening even where customers pay a flat seasonal average. If your utility offers an EV or whole-home TOU plan, an overnight charging window can be billed well below the state average — which is the point of our time-of-use guide.

Tiered rates punish the extra consumption.Where a utility bills in tiers, an EV’s added kilowatt-hours land on top of your existing usage and may be priced at the highest tier you reach. That makes the marginal rate — not the average — the number that governs your charging cost. We take that apart in what an EV adds to your bill.

Where this changes what you should buy

The charger you bolt to the wall does not change your rate. It changes when you draw power, and in an expensive state that is worth money.

Run the sum: 12,000 miles a year at 3.5 miles per kWh is about 3,430 kWh. In Massachusetts at 28.82 cents that is roughly $988 a year. If a time-of-use plan halves the overnight rate, the saving is in the hundreds — enough to pay for the charger in a year or two. In Idaho the same driving costs about $423, and halving part of that saves considerably less.

That is the honest way to decide whether to pay for scheduling. Two caveats before you do: many EVs schedule charging perfectly well from the car’s own app, which makes a charger’s scheduler redundant — we argue both sides in smart vs dumb chargers. And an ENERGY STAR listing is frequently an eligibility condition for utility rebates, which can be worth more than a year of the savings you are optimizing.

Quick picks

Ranked on published specs, charging speed, electrical fit and value. Select a row to jump to the full write-up. We have not bench-tested these chargers — here is exactly what we do instead.

#	Product	Best for	Price
1	Emporia Level 2 EV Charger The value pick that doesn't feel cheap: a full 48 amps, ENERGY STAR listing, WiFi with genuine energy monitoring, and a 25 ft cable — for well under what the big names charge. It's the one we point most people to first.	Best value scheduler for a high-rate state	$449.00 · View on Amazon Price as of September 2, 2026. #ad How we’re funded
2	ChargePoint Home Flex The safest default for most homes: you set the amperage in the app anywhere from 16A to 50A, so one charger fits whatever circuit your panel can spare today and scales up if you upgrade later. The app is the most mature here, and the warranty is long.	Most mature scheduling app	$456.74 · View on Amazon Price as of September 2, 2026. #ad How we’re funded
3	Grizzl-E Classic A deliberately dumb charger, and that's the point. No app, no cloud account, no firmware to fail — just a die-cast aluminum box built for a Canadian winter and rated to keep working outdoors. If you want set-and-forget, this is it.	Cheap-power states, where scheduling earns least	Check price on Amazon → #ad How we’re funded

A note on what is not in the table

These figures are energy delivered to the battery. They exclude three things, all of which are real:

• Charging losses, roughly 10% between the meter and the pack. Multiply by about 1.1 for the utility-billed number.
• Fixed charges— the monthly connection fee on your bill does not change because you bought an EV, so it does not belong in a per-mile figure.
• Winter, which is not a rounding error. DOE and EPA data put the range hit at around 41% in mixed driving at 20°F with the cabin heater running, and every one of those miles is electricity you paid for. We do that arithmetic separately in winter charging cost.

Once you have your own rate off your own bill, the rest of the site’s cost work applies directly: cost by battery size for your specific pack, and is a Level 2 charger worth it for whether the hardware pays for itself at that rate.