What public charging costs, and what the law gives you while you're plugged in

A price for public charging is quoted in pence per kWh, and that figure depends heavily on which type of charger you plug into. The three categories you'll meet away from home draw very different amounts of power, and the price generally tracks that.

• Standard (slow) chargers, the kind found on lamp posts and in long-stay car parks, draw the least power and tend to sit at the cheaper end.
• Fast chargers, common at supermarkets, gyms and other destinations, sit in the middle on both power and price.
• Rapid and ultra-rapid chargers, mostly at motorway services, deliver the most power in the shortest time, and that speed usually carries the highest price per kWh.

Why the figure moves from month to month

Operators adjust their pay-as-you-go prices as wholesale electricity costs change, so a rate that held last month may not hold this one. Zapmap tracks this by publishing a monthly index of average pay-as-you-go prices across UK networks, broken down by charger type. That index gives you the sector average for the month it covers, not the tariff at any one charge point, and individual networks set their own prices above or below it.

If you're weighing up how much of your charging to do away from home against charging on your own driveway, the home charge point payback calculator on this site lets you put your own mileage and tariff against the public-charging side of that comparison.

When you plug in away from home, the price per kWh has to be shown before you start charging, and it cannot be raised once you have started (SI 2023/1168, read 29 September 2026). That applies at the charger, and it holds whether you pay by card, app or anything else the network offers.

It is worth knowing this sits alongside separate rights on payment method and on what happens when a charger is broken, which are set out in their own sections of this guide. The point here is narrower: you are entitled to see the rate in pence per kWh before any money moves, on every public charge point the regulations cover.

What this means at the charger

In practice, look for the rate displayed on the unit itself or through the app before you authorise payment. If a network cannot show you that figure first, it is not meeting the requirement. Screenshotting the price before you start is a simple way to have a record if a bill later looks wrong.

A charging network membership trades a standing fee for a lower price per kWh. Pay-as-you-go asks for no fee at all, and charges the network's standard rate every time you plug in. Which one costs you less depends entirely on how often you charge away from your own charger, not on which network you choose.

What a membership actually buys you

Joining a network usually lowers the pence-per-kWh rate you pay at that network's chargers, sometimes with a lower rate at rapid or ultra-rapid units specifically. In exchange you pay a monthly or annual fee whether you charge once or twenty times. The saving on each charge has to clear that fee before the membership is worth having at all.

A membership can also bring a single account and a single app across a network's own chargers, which some drivers prefer to carrying several payment methods. That convenience has a cost built into the fee, and it's worth separating from the price argument when you're deciding.

When pay-as-you-go is the cheaper route

If most of your charging happens at home and you only use a public charger occasionally, for a long journey or when your own charger is unavailable, the standing fee on a membership rarely earns itself back. Paying the standard rate each time, with no commitment, usually costs less overall for that pattern of use.

Contactless payment is required at the great majority of public chargers regardless of membership, so you're not paying a subscription for access. The decision is purely about the rate you'd pay per kWh against the fee charged to get that rate.

Working out which one applies to you

• Estimate how many times a month you expect to charge somewhere other than home.
• Check the pay-as-you-go rate at the charger types you'd actually use, and the member rate for the same charger type.
• Multiply the difference between those two rates by the energy you'd typically take on each visit, and by the number of visits a month.
• Compare that monthly saving against the membership's fee, including any minimum term.

Where the saving clears the fee most months, the membership is worth having. Where it doesn't, pay-as-you-go leaves you with no commitment and no fee sitting idle on a month you didn't need to charge away from home at all.