Why Some Electric Car Chargers Cost 33p More Per Unit Than Others, Zapmap Finds

• Zapmap’s July 2026 price index shows the UK’s top ten rapid and ultra-rapid charging networks charge between 59p and 92p a kilowatt hour, a 33p gap for identical electricity.
• The weighted average price across all rapid and ultra-rapid public chargers reached 80p a kilowatt hour in July 2026, keeping public charging expensive for drivers who cannot charge at home.
• Drivers can compare prices by network before they plug in, because the cheapest and most expensive chargers in the country are sometimes parked on the very same motorway services forecourt.

The Same Electricity, Two Very Different Bills

Pull into a motorway services in an electric car and the price per kilowatt hour on the screen depends almost entirely on which charging network owns that particular unit, not on the electricity flowing through the cable. Zapmap’s rapid charging data for July 2026 puts the UK’s ten biggest rapid and ultra-rapid networks between 59p and 92p a kilowatt hour, a spread of 33p for a service that is, electrically speaking, identical from one operator to the next.

MFG EV Power sits at the cheap end of that range, listing 59p a kilowatt hour for its 50 to 149kW chargers. Fastned prices its rapid network at 74p. At the expensive end, operators including InstaVolt and bp pulse have run network-wide pricing around 89p a kilowatt hour on their pay-as-you-go tariffs. None of these are introductory offers or off-peak discounts; they are the standard list price a driver without a membership or subscription pays on arrival.

Why There’s No Single Price for “Filling Up” With Electricity

Zapmap’s weighted average across every rapid and ultra-rapid charger on the public network came in at 80p a kilowatt hour in July 2026, little changed from where it stood a year earlier. Slower 3kW to 49kW chargers, the kind found on residential streets and in supermarket car parks, averaged a separate 54p a kilowatt hour over the same period. The gap between networks comes down to a mix of site lease costs, how much a charge point operator pays the grid for electricity at that location, how recently the hardware was installed, and how much competition exists nearby. A charger on a service station forecourt with no competitor for twenty miles can set a far higher price than one on a busy high street with three alternatives within sight.

Public charging also carries 20 percent VAT, compared with 5 percent on electricity supplied to a home. That tax gap alone adds roughly 15 percentage points of cost to every public charge compared with charging on a domestic tariff, on top of whatever margin the network itself is charging. For a driver without a driveway or home charger, that combination of higher VAT and highly variable network pricing can mean paying several times over for the same number of miles as someone charging overnight at home.

Doing the Mile-by-Mile Maths

At the 80p a kilowatt hour average for rapid charging, and a typical real-world efficiency of around 3.5 miles per kilowatt hour for a mid-size electric car, a public rapid charge works out at roughly 23p a mile. A petrol car returning 45mpg at current pump prices works out at a broadly similar figure per mile, which is why RAC and Zapmap data both show the fuel-cost advantage of running an electric car narrows sharply, or disappears altogether, once a driver relies on public rapid charging rather than a home wallbox. Charging on the cheapest network in this price index, rather than the most expensive, can cut that cost per mile by close to a third, without changing the car, the route or the electricity itself.

The Loyalty Trap of Rapid Chargers

Several networks offer a lower price to drivers who sign up for a paid or free membership tier, sometimes cutting the per kilowatt hour rate by ten pence or more against the pay-as-you-go price shown on the charger’s screen. The catch is that these discounts only help a driver who has already picked, and stuck with, one network’s app and RFID card. A driver who charges wherever happens to be convenient, rather than planning around a single operator’s locations, ends up paying the higher pay-as-you-go rate by default on unfamiliar networks, even if they hold a membership with a rival operator just up the road.

What You Can Do Before You Plug In

Apps such as Zapmap show live pricing by network and by individual charge point before you arrive, so it is possible to compare the cost of the charger you are heading for against alternatives nearby, particularly at a motorway services where several networks often operate side by side. Cross-network payment services, now live on many rapid networks, let a driver tap a single card or app rather than needing a separate account for every operator, which removes some of the incentive to default to whichever charger is directly in front of the car. For regular long-distance drivers, checking which network consistently prices lowest along a familiar route, and routing charging stops around it, can make a measurable difference over a year of driving. Home charging, where available, remains by far the cheapest option, and the gap between home and public rapid pricing is now wide enough that it is worth factoring into any decision about where to live or park if an electric car is part of the plan.

Where the Biggest Gaps Actually Show Up

The 33p gap between the cheapest and priciest networks is not evenly spread across the country. Rural motorway services with a single operator and no nearby competitor tend to sit at the expensive end of the range, since there is no commercial pressure to match a cheaper neighbour. Urban retail parks and supermarket forecourts, where two or three networks often compete for the same passing trade, tend to cluster closer to the cheaper end. A driver who always charges at the same services on a regular commute or school run may never notice the gap, simply because they never see the alternative. It only becomes visible on a long trip, when a driver passes through several networks in a single journey and watches the price per kilowatt hour swing by more than thirty pence between one stop and the next.

Fleet and company car drivers face an added layer of complexity, since many reclaim charging costs through HMRC’s advisory electricity rate, a flat pence-per-mile figure that does not account for which network was used. A driver who consistently charges on the pricier end of the range effectively absorbs the difference themselves, even where the business reimburses mileage at the standard rate, because that rate assumes an average cost that the most expensive networks comfortably exceed. For private drivers claiming no such allowance, the gap simply shows up as a bigger bill at the end of a long trip, with no obvious explanation beyond the receipt itself.

Sources:

• Zapmap Rapid Charging Prices
• Zapmap Charging Price Index