About ChargeCostLab

What we do

ChargeCostLab exists to answer one question honestly: what does an electric car actually cost to charge, and to live with? Every guide is a costed answer to a specific question — what a kilowatt-hour costs in your state, what a home charger install really runs to, what a second EV adds to the monthly bill, whether a lease beats buying — with the arithmetic shown and the assumptions stated rather than buried.

There are 82 guides on the site drawing on 2,408 cited primary sources across 7 topic clusters. Each one ends with its numbered source list and a “Methodology & sourcing” block setting out its scope, its inputs and what it could not confirm.

What we calculate

• Charging cost — home versus public, per kWh, per 100 km or mile, per month and per year, including off-peak EV tariffs, idle and congestion fees and the extras that never appear on the advertised rate.
• Running and ownership cost — depreciation and residual values, insurance, servicing, registration and road tax, and the connected-service subscriptions carmakers now charge for.
• Incentives and levies — federal and state credits, utility rebates, EV registration surcharges, and their UK and EU equivalents, each with its expiry date where one exists.
• Tools — the charging cost calculator (with US and EU versions), running cost by model and charging time by model.

Where the numbers come from

Primary sources first, always. Electricity prices come from the US EIA Electric Power Monthly, the Ofgem price cap and Eurostat household prices; efficiency and charging figures from EPA fueleconomy.gov and ev-database.org; incentives from the IRS, the DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center and gov.uk; mileage from the FHWA; pump prices from AAA and the UK weekly road fuel statistics. Public charging prices come from the operators' own published tariffs, and real-world consumption and battery-degradation figures from independent fleet datasets such as Recurrent and Geotab. Residual values come from the market trackers — Cox Automotive, Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, iSeeCars and J.D. Power.

The full picture is on our methodology page: the standing assumptions, the formulas behind the calculators, and what we can and cannot verify.

What we do not do

We do not run a test fleet. Nobody here drives instrumented loops, meters charging sessions or keeps a garage of loan cars, and we do not pretend otherwise. ChargeCostLab is desk analysis: reconciling regulator data, operator tariffs, manufacturer specifications and third-party telematics into figures a driver can check against their own bill. Where a number is a model rather than a measurement, the article says so, and where a source could not be confirmed, it says that too.

Who writes it

7 named analysts are accountable for the analysis on this site — every article carries a byline, and every byline has a profile page listing everything that author has written:

Editorial independence

ChargeCostLab takes no payment from carmakers, charging networks, charger manufacturers, dealers, insurers or energy suppliers in exchange for coverage, inclusion or ranking. We publish no sponsored articles and no paid placements, and the site carries no display advertising. We are not currently enrolled in any affiliate or referral programme — the detail, including what the partner boxes in a handful of guides actually are, is on our affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

Prices move and programmes expire, so every figure is dated and every article states the period it is current to. If you find a number that no longer holds, a source that has changed, or arithmetic that does not add up, tell us: we will correct the article and say that we did. Write to [email protected].