The cheapest way to charge an electric car at home is overnight on a dedicated EV tariff. As of July 2026, Intelligent Octopus Go advertises smart charging from 8p/kWh,[2] which fills a typical 60kWh battery for about £4.80. The same charge costs about £15.67 at the July to September price cap rate of 26.11p/kWh,[1] and about £47 at the average public rapid charger.[5]
- Cheapest overnight rate
- 8p/kWhIntelligent Octopus Go, July 2026
- Price cap unit rate
- 26.11p/kWhOfgem, Jul-Sep 2026 average
- Public rapid average
- 79p/kWhZapmap index, May 2026
- Typical full charge
- £4.8060kWh at 8p/kWh
- Annual saving vs cap
- ~£4148,000 miles at 3.5 mi/kWh
How much does charging at home actually cost?
Start with the default. If you plug in on a standard variable tariff and do nothing clever, you pay your normal unit rate. Under the Ofgem price cap for 1 July to 30 September 2026, that averages 26.11p per kWh for direct debit customers, plus a 57.19p daily standing charge you pay anyway.[1]
A 60kWh battery, typical for a mid-size EV, therefore costs about £15.67 for a full charge from empty. At a real-world efficiency of 3.5 miles per kWh, that is roughly 7.5p per mile. Not bad, but the whole point of owning the meter your car drinks from is that you can do far better.
Two structural advantages make home electricity hard to beat. First, domestic energy carries 5% VAT while public charging carries 20%.[6] Second, suppliers want your predictable overnight demand and will sell it cheaply to get it. That is the entire EV tariff market in one sentence.
Which EV tariffs are cheapest in July 2026?
An EV tariff gives you a deep discount in a defined overnight window (or, in the smart variants, whenever the supplier schedules your car). These were the headline rates on the suppliers’ own pages when we checked in July 2026:
| Tariff | Cheap rate | Window | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligent Octopus Go | 8p/kWh | 23:30-05:30, plus extra smart slots | 18 Jul 2026 |
| E.ON Next Drive | 9p/kWh | 00:00-06:00 | 19 Jul 2026 |
| OVO Charge Anytime (add-on) | 14p/kWh | Any time, smart-scheduled | 19 Jul 2026 |
Intelligent Octopus Go’s 8p/kWh applies to the whole house during the six-hour window, and the smart scheduling can extend cheap charging beyond it when the grid is quiet.[2] E.ON Next Drive is a simpler proposition: 9p/kWh between midnight and 6am, every night.[3]
OVO’s Charge Anytime looks dearer at 14p/kWh, and it doubled from 7p in November 2025, but it prices the car’s charging separately at any hour of the day.[4] If you cannot reliably charge at night (shift work, one charger shared between two cars), paying 14p at 2pm can beat missing the window entirely.
Pence per kWh by charging option, July 2026
Rates move with the wholesale market and suppliers reprice these tariffs without much ceremony, so treat the table as a snapshot and check the supplier’s page on the day you switch.
What is the catch with EV tariffs?
There are three, and none is a dealbreaker.
You need a smart meter that works. The supplier has to read your usage half-hourly to bill the cheap window correctly. If your smart meter is in “dumb” mode, fix that first.
You need compatible kit. Intelligent Octopus Go schedules the charging itself, so it needs either a supported car or a supported charger to talk to.[2] The compatibility lists are long and growing, but check yours before you switch, not after.
Daytime rates can be higher. The overnight discount is funded partly by peak-time pricing. If your household uses most of its electricity during the day and cannot shift any of it, compare the tariff’s full unit rates against the cap, not just the 8p headline. For most EV owners the car dominates the bill and the sums still work comfortably.
How do you switch to an EV tariff?
The process is ordinary tariff switching with two extra checks at the front:
- Confirm your smart meter works. Half-hourly readings are how the supplier knows which kWh were overnight. If your in-home display died years ago, ask your current supplier to check the meter is communicating before you start.
- Check the compatibility list. For scheduled tariffs like Intelligent Octopus Go, look up your exact car and charger on the supplier’s page before applying.[2] A pairing that is not on the list means the smart scheduling cannot run.
- Switch, connect, and set your ready-by time. You link the car or charger in the supplier’s app, tell it when you need the car and to what percentage, and it buys your kWh in the cheapest slots.
- Sanity-check the first bill. Confirm the overnight kWh actually billed at the cheap rate. Five minutes of checking protects a year of savings.
None of this requires new wiring. If the wallbox is already on the wall, the switch is paperwork and an app login.
What could move these numbers?
Three moving parts sit under this article, all date-stamped for a reason. The price cap resets every quarter: the 26.11p average holds for July to September 2026, and Ofgem publishes the next cap before it starts on 1 October.[1] EV tariffs reprice without a schedule: OVO doubled Charge Anytime from 7p to 14p in November 2025,[4] and export rates moved twice in four years. And the VAT appeal described above could eventually cut public charging by an eighth if HMRC loses.[6] The ranking (EV tariff, then cap, then public) has been stable even as the gaps moved, but check the cited pages before you commit to anything.
How does home charging compare with public charging?
Brutally. Zapmap’s price index put the weighted average across rapid and ultra-rapid chargers at 79p per kWh in May 2026.[5] That is almost exactly ten times the Intelligent Octopus Go overnight rate. The motorway services rate is the minibar of electricity.
Slower on-street options sit in between: ubitricity’s lamppost chargers charge 44p off-peak and up to 66p at evening peak,[7] useful if you have no driveway (we cover that in the guide to charging without a driveway).
There is also a live VAT question. In March 2026 a tax tribunal ruled that public charging below 1,000kWh a month should carry the domestic 5% rate rather than 20%. HMRC disagrees and is appealing, so the 20% rate still applies at the charger today.[6] If the ruling survives, public prices should fall; until then, the VAT gap is one more reason the home wins.
How much can you save in a year?
Take a household driving 8,000 miles a year at 3.5 miles per kWh, which needs about 2,286kWh. Ignoring charging losses and assuming every charge happens at the stated rate:
| Where you charge | Rate | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| EV tariff overnight window | 8p/kWh | £183 |
| Standard tariff (price cap avg) | 26.11p/kWh | £597 |
| Public rapid only (network avg) | 79p/kWh | £1,806 |
Switching from the cap rate to an 8p overnight window saves about £414 a year at this mileage, and more if you drive more. Run your own numbers, with your mileage and your tariff, in our EV charging cost calculator; it states every assumption next to the result.
Does solar change the sums?
Less than you might hope, in an interesting way. If you have panels and an export tariff, every kWh you push into the car is a kWh you did not export. Octopus Outgoing pays a flat 12p per kWh for exports as of July 2026,[8] while overnight import on an EV tariff costs 8p. At those two rates you are better off exporting the solar at 12p and buying the car’s electricity at 8p, pocketing the 4p spread.
That result surprises people, it depends entirely on current rates, and there are real exceptions (no export tariff, a solar-diverting charger you already own, batteries). The full working is in Can you charge an electric car with solar panels?
The bottom line
Get on a proper EV tariff before you optimise anything else. The gap between 26p and 8p dwarfs every other saving available to an EV owner, it requires no hardware beyond the charger you already have, and it compounds every night you plug in. The order of operations, if you are starting from scratch: confirm the smart meter, pick the tariff whose compatibility list includes your car or charger, set the schedule once, and stop thinking about it. Then check whether a chargepoint grant applies to you, and let the car fill itself while you sleep.