EV Charging Statistics

The UK’s public charging infrastructure is rapidly expanding to meet the growing demand and adoption of electric vehicle drivers. In the coming years, this won’t just be for electric vehicle owners but also for those that will rent EVs, learner drivers, fleet services, and many more. As you can imagine, getting an accurate representation of the size of public charging in the UK can be tricky with this expansion.

That is unless you have public charging data!

Octopus Electroverse is offering a closer look at the UK’s electric vehicle ecosystem through key public charging statistics.

The below data will answer both top-level and more complex questions. Interactive graphs have been designed so you can explore the UK public charging network through a selection of filters (e.g. charge point operator, socket type, speed etc.). If you have a question about any of the data or would like to make a request, please get in touch with us at: hello@theelectroverse.com.

The source of this data is our own Octopus Electroverse database, please cite us if you are publishing data from our website.

(This data is updated monthly, last update: 03/01/2023.)

The UK has more than 50,000 EVSEs (electric vehicle supply equipment) and more than 20,000 charging locations across the UK. A charging location is a a single site of a single network with one or multiple chargers. Think of it as a single pin on the Electroverse map. A charger is (by our definition) capable of charging one vehicle at a time. One charger can have multiple cables or sockets - but only one of these can be used at any one moment.

The UK is the 4th country in Europe with the most EVSEs, in front of countries such as Spain and Italy but behind the Netherlands, Germany and France.

There are half a million electric vehicles in the UK. The number of electric vehicles in the UK has increased by 250% in the past 2 years, which explains the rapid deployment of new public charging infrastructure.

Source number of electric vehicles in the uk: smmt.co.uk/

The graph shows the number of connectors in the UK distributed by speed and stacked by connector type. There are mostly slow connectors in the UK, second is fast, third is rapid and lastly ultra rapid connectors are the least represented.

As you can see, at slower speeds, Type 2 sockets are prevalent, but at higher speeds Type 2 CCS is dominant as it increasingly becomes the standard.