Customize Infrastructure Details
▼Charging installation cost is driven by your site, not by the charger. The hardware is the predictable part. Everything between your electrical service and the parking space is where quotes diverge, and the single biggest variable is simply how far apart those two things are.
• Utility-side work is only partly covered. Where your charging load exceeds 200 kW and your existing service can't absorb it, we now include a $100,000 allowance for the utility's distribution transformer upgrade, a threshold a pair of 150 kW chargers crosses on its own. What we still can't price is the line extension: the utility sets that by tariff and by what's already in the street, it can dwarf everything else on the job, and there is no national figure for it. Ask your utility for a preliminary design early. It is usually the longest lead item too.
• Make-ready program coverage changes without much notice. Where we credit a utility make-ready program we use its published coverage, but these open, close and exhaust their budgets, two of the programs in our data closed during 2025–26. Confirm the program is still accepting applications before relying on it.
• Trenching assumes an ordinary run. Rock, existing utilities, or cutting and restoring finished concrete raise it well beyond our per-foot figure. A long run across a parking lot can cost more than the chargers.
• Ongoing network and payment-processing fees beyond the subscription modeled here.
• Demand-charge rules beyond a flat monthly rate. The operating costs include demand charges on the managed peak, at the $/kW-month rate in your inputs. A tariff with a ratchet, a coincident-peak charge or a separate EV rate bills differently, and DC fast charging can set a new billed peak on its own.
• Our DC fast-charging installation figures rest on a modeled national study, escalated to today, the NREL 2030 National Charging Network report, not on a set of filed invoices. They carry a wide published band: the same study's optimistic and pessimistic ends are roughly a third either side of the figure we use. Federal rules do require every publicly funded station to file its actual installed cost, itemized, but that database is closed to everyone outside the funding program, so nobody outside it can check these numbers against real ones, including us.