EV Cost Per Mile Calculator

An electric car’s running cost comes down to one number most owners never see: what a mile costs at the wall, after charging losses, at the electricity rate you actually pay. This calculator works that number out for any EV. Pick a model preset or type your own efficiency in Wh/mi, set your rate, charging loss, and annual miles, and you get the charging cost per mile and per year, an all-in figure once insurance and maintenance are added, and a fuel comparison against a gas car.

One honest note about the name this page used to carry. The tool was titled for one brand, but the math has never been brand math: the rate, the loss, and the miles are yours, the efficiency field accepts any electric car, and the presets are simply the models the original author typed in first. The page has been renamed for what the tool does. Calculator Zilo is not affiliated with Tesla, Inc. or any car maker, and the Tesla models in the preset list appear as rated examples, checked against EPA figures in the table below.

Quick Answer

How to use this calculator

Four inputs produce the headline number, and five optional ones refine it. Work down the card in order and the result stays honest.

Start with efficiency. Pick the preset closest to your car, or choose Custom and type the Wh/mi your car reports. If your car or its app shows miles per kWh instead, divide 1,000 by that figure: 3.5 mi/kWh is about 286 Wh/mi. If you only know the EPA rating in kWh per 100 miles, multiply it by 10: 25 kWh/100 miles is 250 Wh/mi.

Set your real rate. Use the all-in rate from your electricity bill, total electricity charges divided by kWh used, not the headline supply rate. If you mostly charge on a public fast-charging network, enter that network’s per-kWh price instead, and the blending section below shows how to mix the two. If you are still working out what you pay for a kilowatt-hour, the cost per kWh calculator breaks a bill down line by line.

Leave charging loss at 10% unless you know yours. Ten percent is a fair AC home-charging figure, and the loss field is what separates a wall-cost answer from a battery-cost guess. Then add your annual miles, and optionally insurance, maintenance, and a gas car to compare against.

The formula: you pay for wall energy

Cost per mile equals your car’s efficiency divided by 1,000, divided by one minus the charging loss, times your electricity rate. The middle step is the one most calculators skip.

The US Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center gives the same method in kWh-per-100-miles terms: its home charging guide prices a car using 27 kWh per 100 miles at about $0.03 a mile on 10.7-cent electricity. The loss step matters because conversion is not free: the Department of Energy estimates about 16% of wall energy is lost between the wall and the battery across charging, which is why this calculator lets you set the loss instead of hiding a fixed assumption. A tool that prices battery energy understates your bill by roughly the loss percentage, every mile, every year.

Worked example, checked against the tool

The pre-filled values are the worked example, so pressing Calculate reproduces every figure here. An efficient EV at 250 Wh/mi, home electricity at $0.16/kWh, 10% charging loss, and 12,000 miles a year pulls 277.8 Wh from the wall per mile and costs 4.44 cents a mile, $533.33 a year. The gas comparison at $3.50 a gallon and 28 MPG costs 12.50 cents a mile, $1,500 a year, so the fuel saving is $966.67 a year.

The same tool prices any other EV with no preset hunting. Type 260 Wh/mi as a Custom entry for an efficient non-Tesla sedan, set the rate to $0.1831/kWh (the July 2026 US residential average reported from EIA data), keep 10% loss and 12,000 miles, and the result is 288.9 Wh from the wall per mile, 5.29 cents a mile, $634.75 a year. Nothing about that run involves a Tesla: it is the arithmetic any EV owner paying the national average rate faces.

Presets, EPA ratings, and finding your exact figure

The preset list is a set of starting points, not a promise about your car. Each preset is an approximate EPA combined rating, and real consumption moves with wheels, trim, weather, and speed, so the Custom entry and your car’s own energy screen always win. The table shows what every preset costs at the worked-example rate, loss, and mileage, reproduced from the calculator itself.

One pairing rule matters more than any single figure. EPA consumption ratings are measured at the wall, charging losses included, so an EPA figure pairs with a 0% loss setting, or the loss gets counted twice. The Wh/mi on a car’s dashboard is measured from the battery, losses excluded, so a dashboard figure pairs with about 10%. The presets in this tool are battery-side figures, which is why the worked example pairs them with 10%. FuelEconomy.gov, the DOE and EPA listing, publishes the wall-side figures for every EV; the anchor preset checks out exactly against it, since the 2025 Model 3 Long Range RWD is rated 25 kWh per 100 miles, the 250 Wh/mi preset.

Ratings from FuelEconomy.gov vehicle listings, accessed October 21, 2026. Wheel size and model year move these figures, so check your exact listing before typing a value in, and remember to set the loss to 0% with an EPA figure.

Home charging, fast charging, and the blended rate you actually pay

Almost nobody charges at one rate. Home charging is the cheap base, and public fast charging on trips runs two to three times the home price per kWh, so the honest figure is a blend weighted by where your miles come from.

Take the wall energy the calculator gives you and weight the two rates yourself. At 85% home charging at $0.16/kWh and 15% fast charging at $0.33/kWh, the blended rate is 0.85 x $0.16 + 0.15 x $0.33 = $0.1855/kWh. Cost per mile = 0.2778 x $0.1855 = 5.15 cents; the annual bill over 12,000 miles is $618.33; and a 300-mile trip costs $15.46. Enter the blended rate into the calculator and every downstream figure, including the all-in cost, updates with it.

The blend is also where road-trip math flips. Price every mile at $0.43/kWh, about the national public DC fast-charging average reported by charging-cost trackers, in the Model Y Long Range AWD preset, and the tool returns 12.90 cents a mile and $1,548 over 12,000 miles: at that rate the 28 MPG gas car is cheaper on fuel by $48 a year, and the calculator prints exactly that instead of forcing a saving. Home charging is where the EV advantage lives, and time-of-use plans widen it, since an off-peak rate lowers the biggest share of your charging. If you prefer this same comparison on a round-number scale, the cost per 100 miles calculator frames gas versus electric per 100 miles.

The all-in figure: insurance and maintenance change the story

Charging cost is the number people quote, but it is rarely the biggest running cost. Add insurance and maintenance and the calculator spreads them over your annual miles: at $2,400 insurance and $600 maintenance on top of the worked example, the all-in cost is 29.44 cents a mile and $3,533.33 a year, of which charging is only $533.33.

Those optional figures deserve realistic values. AAA’s Your Driving Costs study for 2025 put average full-coverage insurance at $1,694 a year across vehicle categories and $1,995 for its electric vehicle category, with maintenance, repair, and tires averaging 11.04 cents a mile across all cars. EVs skip oil changes and brake wear runs lower thanks to regenerative braking, so many EV owners will land under that maintenance average; your own service history is the better input. If you are pricing coverage itself, the car insurance cost per month calculator estimates a premium from your profile rather than a national average. One boundary to keep in mind: this all-in figure is a running-cost figure. It leaves out depreciation and financing, which AAA counts separately and which are usually the largest ownership costs of a newer car.

What competing EV calculators miss

Most charging calculators price the battery, not the wall. They multiply efficiency by rate with no loss step, which flatters every result by about a tenth, or they bury a fixed efficiency assumption (90% here, 93% there) that you cannot change when your charger, climate, or car behaves differently. This calculator exposes the loss as an input because it is a real, measurable part of your bill.

The second common gap is presets with no exit. State-and-model tools price the cars in their database well, but a driver whose trim, wheel size, or model year is missing, or whose real consumption runs 15% over the rating in winter, has nowhere to go. The Custom entry here takes the figure from your own energy screen, which is the most accurate input any of these tools can accept. The third gap is scope: per-charge and per-mile tools stop at electricity, so the reader never sees that insurance alone can cost three times the annual charging bill. The optional all-in fields close that gap without pretending to be a full ownership model.

If your question is about buying, not running

This page answers a running-cost question: what does each mile cost in the EV you have, or in one you can describe with a Wh/mi figure. It deliberately does not price the purchase. If you are deciding whether an electric car pays for itself against the gas car you would otherwise buy, with a purchase price, incentives, and a breakeven year, that is the job of the EV versus gas savings calculator, the companion page to this one. Use this page for the cost of driving the car; use that one for the cost of choosing it.

Frequently asked questions

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