Published 4 July 2026 · EV Costs Comparison
Here's the thing most new EV owners don't realise: the car doesn't decide what your charging costs — the clock does. The identical car driving identical kilometres can cost anywhere from about $104 to $686 a year to charge, purely depending on when and how you plug in. That's the largest controllable cost in EV ownership, and fixing it usually takes one phone call and a timer.
For a typical 13,000 km year in an EV using 16 kWh/100km (about 2,080 kWh of driving energy), your annual charging bill by method looks like this: a flat tariff around 33c/kWh costs about $686; a mixed-use tariff around 25c costs about $520; an off-peak overnight rate around 15c costs about $312; and rooftop solar — where your real cost is only the ~5c feed-in tariff you give up by not exporting — costs about $104. Public DC fast charging, at 45–65c/kWh, sits above all of them at roughly $1,000–1,400 for the same driving, which is why it's best kept for road trips.
Moving from a flat rate to off-peak charging halves your cost for close to zero effort. Most Australian retailers offer time-of-use plans with cheap windows overnight (often midnight to 6am), and some now offer dedicated EV plans with rates under 10c — even free windows in the middle of the day when the grid is flooded with solar. Every EV can schedule its own charging from the car's screen or app, so the routine is simply: plug in when you get home, let the car wait for the cheap window. Check your retailer's time-of-use plans, then put your exact rates into our charging cost calculator to see your per-charge price.
If you have rooftop solar, daytime charging is close to unbeatable — the electricity would otherwise earn you only the feed-in tariff, so that's its true cost to you. The catch is timing: solar charging suits people whose car is home during the day. If your car sits at a workplace from 9 to 5, off-peak overnight will usually beat a solar setup you can't use. Our solar + EV calculator works out the split for your actual solar fraction, and how quickly a home charger setup pays for itself.
Barely. A portable charger on a normal socket (~2 kW) and a 7 kW wall box draw the same energy for the same charge — the wall box just finishes three times sooner. The wall box earns its keep on convenience and on making the most of short cheap-rate windows, not on the electricity bill itself. What does cost you a little everywhere is charging loss: about 10% of what you pay for never reaches the battery, which is why our calculators quietly add it in.
Ranked for 2026: solar first if your car is home in daylight, off-peak overnight for everyone else, mixed/flat tariffs only if you haven't got around to switching plans yet, and public fast charging as the travel exception. The difference between the best and worst habit is around $580 a year — enough to repay a wall box in a couple of years on its own. Put your own numbers into the charging calculator and see where you land.
Figures use this site's 2026 Australian defaults (see how accurate are these calculators?). Estimates only, not financial advice — tariffs vary by state and retailer.
