Your City Funded Chargers. Are They Actually Being Used?
Paren Municipal Series, Part 2 of 4 | June 2026
Every city that has deployed public EV charging incentives — rebates, grants, site subsidies — has made an implicit bet: that the chargers it funded would get used. Most cities have no way of knowing whether that bet paid off.
Utilization rate is the metric that answers that question. And in most public EV programs, it's not being tracked.
What Utilization Rate Measures
Utilization rate tells you what percentage of a charger's available time is being used for active charging sessions. It's the clearest measure of whether a charger is serving real demand — or sitting idle.
Context matters here. Paren's Q1 2026 data puts the national average at ~15.6% — and that's considered a healthy, balanced market. Top-performing urban markets like Washington D.C. reach 37.2%, while California sits around 22.2%. At the low end, underdeveloped regions run at 2–3%.
The complication: utilization is not a standardized metric in the EV industry. Different networks define and report it differently, which makes cross-network comparison unreliable without independent aggregation. Paren has written about this definitional problem directly — it's a gap the industry needs to close, but cities shouldn't wait for consensus to start asking for the data.
What the Data Reveals
From Paren's Q1 2026 SOTI report and network-wide tracking, a few consistent patterns stand out:
The national average masks wide local variation. Utilization ranges from 2–3% in low-density regions to 37.2% in leading urban markets — a spread that has held consistent year over year. DC, California, New Jersey, and Florida consistently top the rankings. A city benchmarking only against the national average is missing the more important local picture.
High utilization signals where infrastructure is stressed — not just popular. Markets like DC (37.2%) and New Jersey are classified in Paren's data as “stressed” — utilization above 25% where reliability is starting to strain. These are the markets where densification is most urgent, not just a nice-to-have.
Persistently low utilization at funded sites is a policy signal, not just an operational one. If chargers installed under your rebate program are consistently running at the bottom of the range — in line with the 2–3% seen in the weakest U.S. markets — the site criteria need revision, not the rebate amount.
Location is the dominant variable. Paren's data consistently shows that a well-placed charger on an underserved corridor outperforms a premium charger in the wrong parking lot, regardless of network brand or hardware.
Designing Rebate Programs Around Outcomes
Most rebate programs are output-oriented: they count ports installed. The ones that will perform better over time are outcome-oriented: they track whether those ports are serving demand.
A few design shifts that make a real difference:
Require utilization reporting as a condition of funding. If a CPO receives public incentives, ongoing data sharing — utilization rates, session counts, uptime — should be a contractual obligation, not optional transparency.
Set minimum utilization benchmarks for renewal or expansion eligibility. Sites that underperform after 12–18 months should trigger a review before additional investment is made nearby.
Use utilization data to identify where to invest next. High-utilization sites signal unmet demand. They're your best evidence for where new capacity — or expanded capacity at existing sites — will have the most impact.
Where Paren Fits In
Paren tracks utilization independently across every major public charging network in the U.S. — not self-reported data from operators, but measured performance based on real session activity. Your team can access that data via our Site Lookup tool or directly through our API, benchmark against regional and national figures from our quarterly SOTI reports, and build the evidence base your program office needs to make defensible decisions.
If you're running a charging rebate program without utilization data, you're flying blind.
Next in the series: A Broken Charger Is the Same as No Charger — why reliability and uptime data should be part of every municipal EV infrastructure conversation.