What it costs to charge an EV in Pakistan

The question has one honest answer and three prices, because where you plug in matters more than what you drive. Here is the arithmetic, with the public prices taken from the 156 chargers listed on this site rather than from a brochure.

The three prices

At home, off-peak: Rs 23.57 per kWh. This is the subsidised residential rate under S.R.O. 279(I)/2026, and it is the cheapest electricity an EV in Pakistan will ever see. It requires an off-peak-capable meter and the discipline to charge overnight, which is exactly when you are asleep and the car is not being used, so the discipline costs nothing.

At home, standard slab: Rs 40-65 per kWh. Without the off-peak rate, a household charging an EV pushes itself up the protected-slab structure, which is where the marginal cost gets ugly. Getting onto the EV tariff is worth more than any driving technique.

At a public DC fast charger: PKR 100 to 150 per kWh, most commonly around PKR 120. That range is the 10th to 90th percentile of every priced DC charger on our map, so it is the price a real driver meets, not the cheapest one that exists.

The operators' own input cost is capped at Rs 39.70 per kWh, so the margin between that and the retail price is what pays for the hardware, the site, the grid connection and the downtime.

A 60 kWh battery, three ways

Most electric cars sold here sit between 50 and 80 kWh. Take 60 kWh, and the usable 20-to-80-percent window that a real charging stop covers — 36 kWh:

Filling the same battery from empty at home costs about Rs 1,414 off-peak and roughly double that on a standard slab. There is no equivalent figure for a fast charger, because nobody sits at one from 80 to 100 percent: the car tapers the power, and you would be paying fast-charging prices for slow-charging speed.

Against petrol, per kilometre

This is the comparison that decides purchases. A reasonably efficient EV uses about 16-18 kWh per 100 km in Pakistani conditions — city traffic, air conditioning, motorway speeds that are higher than any test cycle assumes. Call it 17.

A petrol car doing 12 km/l at Rs 390.79 a litre costs roughly Rs 3,257 per 100 km — and OGRA revises that fortnightly, so treat it as this fortnight's number rather than a constant.

Charged at home on the off-peak rate, the EV runs about 88 percent cheaper per kilometre. Charged only at public DC fast chargers it still saves money, but the saving falls to about 37 percent. That gap between the two figures is the single most important thing to understand before buying. An EV is cheap to run if you can charge it where you park it. If you cannot, the economics are still positive but they are not transformative.

What changes the number

• Charging losses. You pay for the kWh that leave the wall, not the ones that reach the battery. AC charging loses 8-12 percent, DC rather less. Every figure above is battery-side, so add roughly a tenth for the meter.
• Heat. Pakistani summers make the battery cooling work, and a car left in the sun spends energy getting the pack down to a temperature it will accept a fast charge at. Summer consumption is meaningfully worse than winter.
• Speed. Range collapses above 110 km/h far faster than a petrol car's fuel economy does. The motorway is where an EV is least efficient, which is also where you are most likely to need a paid fast charge.
• The taper. Above roughly 80 percent the car cuts DC power to protect the cells. If the charger bills per minute rather than per kWh, that last 20 percent is the most expensive electricity you will ever buy.

Working it out for your own car

Every EV model page on this site carries the battery size, the DC charging speed and the connector, and every charger page works out the cost of a 20-to-80 charge at that specific charger for the cars people actually drive here. If you want the number for a whole trip rather than one stop, the app does the same arithmetic across a route with your car's real battery and the season's real range.