Per-kWh vs Per-Minute EV Charging Billing by State (2026): Where It's Actually Legal

A driver in Georgia and a driver in California can plug into the same brand of charger, pull the same 30 kWh, and walk away with receipts that were computed by two entirely different formulas - one priced by the clock, one priced by the electron - because of a utility-code definition written before either of them owned an EV.

By Marcus Whitfield, EV Running-Cost Analyst · Published August 11, 2026 · Data current to Q3 2026

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Every ChargeCostLab price table assumes a driver can compare $/kWh figures across networks and states on equal terms. That assumption breaks down in a shrinking but real number of places, because not every charger is legally allowed to bill by the kilowatt-hour at all. In roughly 20 states as of December 2019, a business that was not a regulated utility could not lawfully sell electricity to the public by the unit - full stop - which is the specific, boring, statutory reason per-minute billing became the industry default rather than a deliberate design choice [19]. This article maps which states required that workaround, which have since passed the enabling law, which state - California - went the opposite direction and now requires kWh billing outright, and which single state ChargeCostLab could not confirm has fully closed the loophole as of August 2026.

This is not another $/kWh price-level comparison; ChargeCostLab's tariff rate table and cost-by-state guide already cover what a kWh costs where. This is about the separate, prior question of whether a network is even permitted to charge for a kWh in the first place, or whether state law still forces it to charge for a minute instead - and why that distinction quietly determines what kind of car benefits from the pricing you see on the screen.

The legal mechanism: charging networks needed a law before they could sell electricity by the kWh

The reason per-minute billing exists is not technical, it is definitional: most state utility codes historically defined anyone who resells electricity to the public as a "public utility," and public utilities are regulated - rate-of-return, tariff filings, service obligations - in ways no EV charging startup was built to satisfy [22]. A network that billed a driver $0.35 per kWh was, in the eyes of an unmodified 1970s-era utility statute, doing the same thing as a power company selling electricity, without a power company's regulatory license to do it. Billing by the minute instead sidesteps the definition entirely: a network charging for time spent connected, or a flat session fee, is not "selling electricity" in the statutory sense, so it avoids triggering utility regulation regardless of how much energy actually flows [22][27].

Fixing that required each state legislature (or in a few cases, a public service commission via rulemaking or docket order) to write a specific carve-out: EV charging service providers are not defined as public utilities, and may sell electricity for EV charging purposes without becoming one. Every state discussed below with a "permitted" status in the comparison table has, in some form, passed exactly that carve-out - the wording in Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas and Louisiana's statutes is close to interchangeable, because most of these bills were drafted from similar model language as state after state worked through the same problem [3][5][7][11]. What differs is the timing, and one holdout appears not to have finished the job at all.

California is the one state that requires per-kWh billing, not merely permits it

California is the only state in this article that bans per-minute billing outright rather than simply permitting an alternative to it. Under California Code of Regulations Title 4, Division 9, Chapter 1, Article 1, Section 4002.11 - enacted November 1, 2019 and operative April 1, 2020 - EV charger rates "must be based on a price per megajoule or kilowatt-hour," and every charger must be able to display the billing rate, energy delivered and maximum power/current type at any point during a transaction [1][2]. This is administered by the Division of Measurement Standards (DMS) within the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), which treats a paid EV charger as a commercial measuring device in the same regulatory family as a gas pump or a grocery-store scale [17][18].

The phase-in was staged by hardware type and installation date rather than applied all at once. New Level 2 chargers installed from January 1, 2021 had to comply on installation; Level 2 units already in the ground before that date get until January 1, 2031 to convert. New DC fast chargers installed from January 1, 2023 had to comply immediately; older DCFC units get until January 1, 2033 [1][2][19]. The DMS was explicit about its reasoning when charging operators objected during rulemaking: electricity is "a type of motor vehicle fuel," and fuel gets measured and sold in physical units, not in minutes [19]. That is a genuinely different legal theory from every other state in this piece - California is not asking "should non-utilities be allowed to sell electricity," it is asking "should a fuel be sold by the gallon-equivalent," and answering yes for everyone.

Compliance runs through a state-specific device certification track. California operates its own California Type Evaluation Program (CTEP) in parallel with the national NTEP system discussed below, and a charger generally needs to clear either CTEP or NTEP evaluation - plus receive a CDFA Certificate of Approval - before it can legally bill by the kWh in the state [17][18]. Colorado is the only other state ChargeCostLab found moving toward a comparable mandate rather than a mere permission: under Colorado Revised Statutes Section 8-20-107, the state's weights-and-measures director must adopt minimum specifications, tolerances and methods of retail sale for publicly accessible EV chargers by July 1, 2026 [10]. As of this writing that Colorado rule had not yet taken effect, which is why the comparison table above marks it "pending" rather than "mandatory."

NIST Handbook 44 and 130: the federal layer every kWh-billing charger still has to pass

State law answers whether a network is legally allowed to sell electricity by the kWh. A second, separate federal-technical layer answers whether a specific charger is accurate enough to be trusted to do it - and a network needs to clear both before a kWh price on a screen means anything. That second layer runs through NIST's National Institute of Standards and Technology, via two documents: Handbook 44, which sets the technical accuracy and display requirements for "Electric Vehicle Fueling Systems" as a device category, and Handbook 130, which establishes the kilowatt-hour itself as the official unit of measure for selling electricity as a vehicle fuel [13][14]. Handbook 130's kWh method-of-sale requirement was first adopted for EVSEs in 2012 and published in the 2013 edition; it was amended in 2023 to drop the megajoule as an alternate accepted unit, leaving the kWh as the standard [14].

Handbook 44 Section 3.40 gets granular: a commercial charger billing by kWh must be of "the computing type" and must display the electrical energy delivered, the unit price and the total price of the transaction, must record and reset transactions correctly, and must hold accuracy tolerances of roughly ±1% at initial acceptance and ±2% in ongoing maintenance testing [13]. Meeting the written spec is not enough by itself - a specific charger model has to be independently type-evaluated against it. That evaluation runs through the National Type Evaluation Program (NTEP), administered by the National Conference on Weights and Measures, and NTEP or CTEP certification is generally required only for chargers that actually bill by kWh [18].

This is the part of the story that a state legislature's "you may now sell electricity by the kWh" law does not, by itself, resolve. A network operating in a state that has passed the enabling law still cannot legally bill a specific charger by kWh until that charger's hardware has NTEP (or, in California, CTEP) type-evaluation approval and, typically, an inspection and certificate from the relevant state weights-and-measures office [20][18]. NIST's own Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment program frames the comparison directly: EVSEs "can be considered similar to retail motor fuel dispensers (aka gas pumps)" in how weights-and-measures rules apply to them, and the agency has been building out documentary standards, calibration services and a regulator-training track since the U.S. National Work Group on Electric Vehicle Fueling and Submetering was formed in 2012 [15][16]. In practice, this two-layer structure - state permission plus device certification - is why a state passing its enabling law does not flip kWh billing on overnight across every existing charger; it opens the door, but hardware still has to walk through it one certified model at a time.

Four states were still holdouts as of October 2023 - and their fixes were not identical

By October 2023, Blink Charging's own reckoning of the legislative landscape put the number of remaining holdout states at exactly four: Michigan, Nebraska, Tennessee and Wisconsin had not yet passed the legislation needed to redefine "utility" and allow non-utility kWh pricing, while every other state had [22]. That is down from roughly 20 states as of December 2019 - most of the country's legislative work on this narrow issue happened in a three-to-four-year window as EV adoption accelerated [19][22].

Michigan and Wisconsin both resolved theirs with close to boilerplate exemption language. Michigan Compiled Laws Section 460.10g now states that an entity providing EV charging services "is not defined as a public utility and is not subject to restrictions on the resale of electricity," though the state separately requires a vehicle-fuel dealer license (MCL 460.10a-10q) to sell or dispense electricity as a vehicle fuel at a commercial location [3]. Wisconsin's equivalent sits in Wisconsin Statute 196.01(5), with the same operative sentence, and the state paired the exemption with a new cost: an excise tax of $0.03 per kWh on public EV charging, in force since January 1, 2025, that station operators must add to the price they charge drivers [5].

Nebraska's fix was the last of the four to land. LB1317 was signed by Governor Jim Pillen on April 24, 2024, and state and industry sources describe it as closing what had been the country's last outright statutory bar on non-utility kWh billing for EV charging [29][30]. A $0.03/kWh excise tax on commercial EV charging follows on January 1, 2028 [6].

Tennessee is the outlier where ChargeCostLab could not confirm a clean resolution comparable to the other three. The only explicit exemption AFDC's Tennessee entry documents is narrower than a statewide statute: EV chargers that provide electricity exclusively for EVs are not considered public utilities "within the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) service area," with the state directing operators outside that footprint to TVA's own guidance rather than citing a separate general statute [4]. TVA's service territory covers the large majority of Tennessee, which likely explains why Tennessee does not show up as a live controversy in 2026 reporting the way it did in 2023 - most Tennessee chargers probably sit inside the TVA carve-out - but "most of the state, via one utility's footprint" is a materially weaker legal foundation than the standalone statutes Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Louisiana now have, and it is the reason this article does not mark Tennessee "resolved" in the comparison table.

Louisiana closed its loophole with a market-structure rule, not just a definitional fix

Louisiana is worth treating separately from the Michigan/Wisconsin/Nebraska trio because its state regulator went further than a bare definitional exemption. Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 45:1622, combined with Louisiana Public Service Commission Docket R-36131, establish that an entity providing EV charging services "is not defined as a public utility and is not subject to restrictions on the resale of electricity" [7]. That definitional piece traces to 2022's Senate Bill 460, after which the LPSC directed the state's regulated utilities to propose wholesale EV-charging rates so private charging operators would have a predictable input cost [32].

In August 2024 the LPSC went a step further and unanimously adopted a rule that actively prevents the state's major power companies from using customer (ratepayer) money to "own, lease, operate, or control EV charging stations" - utilities can still run chargers, but only through a separate, unregulated subsidiary that does not touch ratepayer funds [31]. The stated goal was competitive: Louisiana ranked near the bottom nationally for EV charging infrastructure density, at roughly one charger per 9,144 residents against a national average near one per 2,280, and the commission's reasoning was that a utility subsidizing its own chargers with captive ratepayer dollars would undercut the private operators the definitional fix was supposed to attract [31]. Louisiana's version of "permitted" therefore combines the same utility-exemption language every other resolved state uses with an extra layer of market-structure protection most states have not adopted.

Texas, Florida, Washington and New York solved the same problem four different ways

The four largest EV markets outside California each arrived at "non-utility EV charging can bill by the kWh" through a different legal instrument, which is itself informative about how unsettled this area of law still is nationally.

Texas legislated it directly into its utilities code: Texas Utilities Code Sections 37.001-37.002 state that EV charging service providers operating equipment solely for alternative-fuel vehicles are not considered retail electric utilities statewide [11]. Texas then layered on a separate consumer-protection requirement rather than a billing-method mandate - Texas Occupations Code Sections 2311.0206 and 2311.0303-2311.0306, together with Texas Administrative Code Title 16, Part 4, Chapter 96, required EV charging providers to disclose on the charger's display the method used to calculate the fee, the current rate and any applicable surcharges, by December 1, 2024 [11]. Texas does not require per-kWh billing the way California does; it requires that whichever method a station uses be disclosed up front.

Florida took the exemption route through Florida Statutes Section 366.94, which states plainly that EV charging made available to the public by a non-utility "is not considered a retail sale of electricity" - removing the statutory trigger for utility regulation - while separately directing the state to adopt rules covering definitions, methods of sale, labeling and price-posting requirements for EV chargers [12]. Washington used its utilities-commission statute instead of a standalone EV bill: Revised Code of Washington 80.28.320 exempts an entity that offers EV supply equipment to the public for hire from having its rates, services, facilities or practices regulated by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, unless that entity is otherwise already regulated as an electrical company [9].

New York is the most structurally distinct of the four, because its permission did not come from the legislature at all - it came from a Public Service Commission determination. In Case 13-E-0199, the New York PSC found that EV chargers are not "electric plants" and that companies operating them are not "electric corporations" under state law, meaning the commission itself lacks jurisdiction to regulate publicly available EV chargers as utilities [8]. That is a regulatory ruling rather than a statute, which functionally achieves the same result - non-utility kWh billing is legally clear - through an entirely different branch of state government than Texas, Florida or Washington used.

Why per-minute billing penalizes exactly the cars that most need public charging

Per-minute pricing is not merely a workaround for a legal definition - it changes who pays more for the same electricity, and the mechanism is simple enough to compute directly. A per-minute rate charges for occupying the stall, not for the energy that flows into the battery, so a car that draws less power in each minute still pays the full per-minute rate for less electricity delivered. A vehicle capable of accepting only 50 kW - common among older or smaller-battery EVs, and among any EV once its charging curve has already tapered past roughly 60-70% state of charge - gets roughly 0.83 kWh for every minute connected. A vehicle capable of sustaining 100 kW or more gets roughly 1.67 kWh in that same minute. Both pay the identical per-minute rate; the slower car is paying, in effect, close to double per kilowatt-hour for the privilege of occupying the same square footage of pavement for the same amount of time.

Worked example. At an illustrative flat per-minute rate of $0.35 - chosen to demonstrate the mechanism, not to report any single network's current published rate - a car averaging 50 kW gets 50 ÷ 60 = 0.833 kWh per minute, for an effective cost of $0.35 ÷ 0.833 ≈ $0.42 per kWh. A car averaging 100 kW gets 100 ÷ 60 = 1.667 kWh per minute, for an effective cost of $0.35 ÷ 1.667 ≈ $0.21 per kWh - almost exactly half. A car sustaining 150 kW brings the effective rate down to roughly $0.14 per kWh. Our calculation, applying an illustrative flat per-minute rate to standard charging-speed figures - the ~2x ratio between a 50 kW and a 100 kW car holds at any flat per-minute rate, since it is a function of relative charging speed, not the specific price.

This is not a hypothetical edge case. Charging speed is not a fixed property of a model - it tapers sharply as a battery fills, which is the same physics ChargeCostLab's idle and congestion fee guide documents for the fee side of the receipt: a session that starts at 150 kW can be down near 50 kW or lower by the time the pack passes 70-80%, meaning the same car, on the same charger, effectively pays a rising per-kWh rate as its own session progresses under per-minute billing. Under per-kWh billing, by contrast, that same taper is invisible on the bill - the driver pays the posted $/kWh rate regardless of how fast or slow their particular car or their particular state of charge happened to accept power that day. Per-minute billing does not just create winners and losers across different car models; within a single session it structurally rewards fast, aggressive top-of-the-curve charging behavior and penalizes exactly the drivers - older EVs, colder batteries, higher states of charge - who are least able to control their charging speed.

Some networks have partially, not fully, corrected for this. Electrify America's per-minute markets use a two-tier structure rather than one flat number - a lower-power tier and a higher-power tier, each carrying its own per-minute rate [24]. That tiering narrows the penalty for the fastest-charging cars, but does not eliminate it within a tier: a car near the bottom of a power tier and one near the top still pay the identical per-minute rate despite a meaningful energy-per-minute gap between them.

What the major networks actually bill today, state by state

The legal status in the comparison table above sets the ceiling on what a network is allowed to do; it does not mean every network has fully rolled out kWh pricing the moment a state's law changed, which is why "legally permitted" and "actually billed by kWh today" are not always the same map.

Electrify America's most detailed public disclosure of its own transition came via a newsroom release announcing kilowatt-hour pricing across 23 states plus Washington DC, alongside a simplified, reduced two-tier per-minute structure for the states where kWh billing remained unavailable [25][26]. The network's mobile FAQ confirms the same split still exists in principle: "drivers will now pay for how much energy is delivered from the charger to their EV instead of how long the charger delivered energy" in kWh markets, while "where we do provide EV charging on a per-minute basis, we have simplified our pricing" with two power-level tiers rather than three [24].

EVgo's public framing has been consistent since its own transition announcement: the network moves to kWh pricing "in each and every US state that allows it," and bills per minute everywhere else [27]. EVgo's October 2023 rollout already covered 30 states plus Washington DC on kWh pricing at that point, a list that itself illustrates the "legal versus rolled out" gap discussed above - it included Michigan, a state Blink's contemporaneous count still listed as lacking the enabling statute, suggesting either an early administrative accommodation or a discrepancy between the two contemporaneous accounts that ChargeCostLab could not fully resolve from public sources [22][27]. By June 2026, an independent pricing tracker recorded EVgo's national average kWh rate at $0.641/kWh across its kWh markets, ranging from $0.56/kWh in Nevada to $0.69/kWh in New York and New Jersey - variation driven by local pricing and time-of-use rules layered on top of the underlying legal method of sale, not by the billing method itself [28].

ChargePoint and Blink both operate host-set pricing models, which makes a single national statement about their billing method less meaningful than it is for Electrify America or EVgo. ChargePoint's own support pages confirm the general US pattern - "In the US, rates are calculated based on kWh" as the default, with station hosts able to instead choose an hourly rate, a flat fee, or overstay/idle charges layered on top regardless of the energy-billing method [21]. ChargePoint's weights-and-measures page adds the compliance layer underneath that statement: Handbook 44 "requires EVSE products to secure a National Type Evaluation Program (NTEP) certification," and in California specifically, the company holds its own DMS/CTEP certification alongside NTEP [20]. Blink's own published figures show kWh-based rates where legally available - Level 2 charging roughly $0.20-$0.50/kWh and DC fast charging roughly $0.35-$0.60/kWh - though unlike Electrify America and EVgo, Blink does not publish a specific state-by-state breakdown of where it still bills by time instead [23].

The throughline across all four networks is the same: none of them chose per-minute billing as a product decision. Each one bills by kWh as its default, switches to time or session-based pricing specifically in the markets where state law or device certification does not yet permit anything else, and each network's own public materials frame the per-minute tier as the fallback, not the plan [24][27].

Key findings

• California remains the only state ChargeCostLab found that mandates per-kWh EV charging billing outright, under a rule that took effect November 1, 2019 and phases in through 2031 (Level 2) and 2033 (DC fast) for equipment installed before those dates [1].
• Roughly 20 states restricted non-utility electricity resale by the kWh as of December 2019; by October 2023 that had narrowed to four holdouts - Michigan, Nebraska, Tennessee and Wisconsin - per Blink Charging's own count [19][22].
• Of those four, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska have since passed statutory exemptions [3][5][6]; Tennessee's only documented exemption is limited to the Tennessee Valley Authority's service territory, leaving its statewide status unresolved in ChargeCostLab's research [4].
• Legal permission to bill by kWh and technical permission to do so are two separate hurdles: a charger also needs NTEP (or California's CTEP) device-type-evaluation certification, based on NIST Handbook 44's accuracy and display requirements, before it can legally bill a specific unit's readings to a customer [13][18].
• ChargeCostLab's own calculation shows a car averaging 50 kW pays roughly double the effective $/kWh of a car averaging 100+ kW under a fixed per-minute rate, meaning per-minute billing structurally penalizes exactly the older, smaller-battery or already-tapered-charging-curve vehicles least able to control their own charging speed.

Frequently asked questions

The answers below summarize the state-by-state legal findings above; full citations and the comparison table sit in the sections they came from.

Methodology note

State legal status was checked individually against the Alternative Fuels Data Center's per-state law pages for California, Colorado, Texas, Florida, Washington, New York and the four 2023-era holdout states, rather than inferred from a single national summary [1]-[12]. Federal metrology requirements come from NIST's own Handbook 44 text and program pages [13]-[16]; California's mandate is additionally cross-checked against CDFA Division of Measurement Standards materials [17][18]. Network billing practices are drawn first from each network's own FAQ, pricing or newsroom page, with industry pricing trackers used only to corroborate figures a primary source could not fully confirm, and flagged as such inline [20]-[28]. The per-minute speed-penalty figures are ChargeCostLab's own arithmetic on an illustrative flat per-minute rate and standard charging-speed benchmarks, not a measured or reported statistic.