Cost to Charge an EV at Home

Most “cost to charge an EV” articles quote a flat $0.16 per kWh, the national average, and call it a day. That number is wrong for almost everyone in California, and it hides the single thing that decides your charging bill: what time you plug in.

I work with PG&E rate data every day. On the EV2-A home charging plan, the same 60 kWh charge costs $13.80 overnight or $32.40 if you plug in at 6 p.m. in summer. Same car, same energy, more than double the price. Here is the real math.

The number that actually matters: your off-peak rate

Charging cost is simple to calculate. It’s the energy your car pulls (in kWh) times your price per kWh. The hard part is that your price per kWh is not one number. On a time-of-use plan it changes through the day.

PG&E’s EV2-A plan, the one built for home charging, has three windows:

Period	Hours	Summer rate	Winter rate
Off-peak	Midnight to 3 p.m.	$0.23/kWh	$0.23/kWh
Partial-peak	3 to 4 p.m., 9 p.m. to midnight	$0.43/kWh	$0.39/kWh
Peak	4 to 9 p.m.	$0.54/kWh	$0.41/kWh

These are the rates effective March 2026. Off-peak is the only window that matters for charging, because that overnight $0.23 is where you want every mile to come from. Set your car or charger to start after midnight and you never touch the expensive periods. (Look up the exact peak hours for any California plan.)

Cost per mile, the honest version

A typical EV uses about 0.28 to 0.30 kWh per mile in mixed real-world driving. I’ll use 0.28.

• Off-peak (EV2-A): 0.28 kWh × $0.23 = about $0.064 per mile
• Peak summer (EV2-A): 0.28 kWh × $0.54 = about $0.151 per mile

Now compare a gas car. At 28 mpg and California gas around $4.80 a gallon, you’re paying about $0.171 per mile.

So charging overnight costs roughly a third of driving on gas. Charging during the 4 to 9 p.m. peak costs almost as much as gas. The win is real, but only if you control the timing.

What that looks like on a monthly bill

Say you drive 1,000 miles a month. That’s about 280 kWh of charging.

How you charge	Monthly cost
Overnight off-peak, EV2-A ($0.23)	about $64
On E-1 flat tiered (about $0.37 average)	about $104
Plugging in at peak, summer ($0.54)	about $151
Equivalent gas (28 mpg, $4.80/gal)	about $171

The gap between the top and bottom row is over $1,000 a year, and it’s entirely under your control. This is why the flat $0.16 estimate is misleading. It happens to land near the off-peak best case, but only if you’re on the right plan and charging at the right time. Do neither and your real cost is double.

Three things that change your number

The plan you’re on. If you have an EV and you’re still on a tiered plan like E-1, you’re paying tiered rates for every overnight kWh instead of $0.23. Moving to EV2-A is usually the biggest single lever. I broke down the choice in the best PG&E rate plan for an EV.

Your charger speed. A Level 1 (120V) cord adds about 3 to 5 miles of range per hour, which is fine for low-mileage drivers and means you can charge entirely in the off-peak window. Level 2 (240V) adds 25 to 40 miles per hour. Speed doesn’t change the cost per kWh, but a faster charger makes it easier to finish before the morning peak.

Charging losses. You lose roughly 10 to 15 percent of the energy to heat and battery conditioning between the wall and the battery. Your home meter sees that loss, so real-world kWh runs a bit above the car’s display. I’ve already folded a representative amount into the per-mile figures above.

Tesla, specifically

“Cost to charge a Tesla at home” is the most common version of this question, so here are the rounded numbers. A Model 3 or Model Y holds roughly 60 to 75 kWh usable. A full 0 to 100 percent charge you’d rarely do is about 60 to 75 kWh, or $14 to $17 overnight on EV2-A. A normal top-up from 20 to 80 percent is closer to 40 kWh, about $9 off-peak. The Tesla app lets you set a scheduled departure or off-peak charging window, which is the single setting that saves the most money.

The catch nobody mentions

EV2-A has cheap nights, but its peak rate ($0.54 in summer) is higher than the standard E-TOU-C peak ($0.52) and far higher than flat E-1. That trade is fine if your car charging is the main reason you’re on the plan and you shift it overnight. It can backfire if your house runs heavy air conditioning from 4 to 9 p.m. and you don’t move that load. The right plan depends on your whole home, not just the car. If you’re not sure, the fastest way to know is to check your actual usage against every plan instead of guessing.

If your bill jumped right after you bought the car, that’s expected, and it’s fixable. See why your bill went up and PG&E peak hours for the timing details that make the biggest difference.