The Cheapest Hour to Charge Your EV Isn't Midnight Everywhere

By Morgan Ellis, Editor at GearUp Insights

The standard advice for home EV charging is three words long: charge at night. It is printed in owner manuals, repeated by dealers, and built into the default schedule of nearly every smart charger sold in the United States. In much of the country it is correct. In California it can cost you money.

Pacific Gas and Electric's EV2-A plan, the rate most Bay Area EV owners are steered toward, prices electricity lowest from midnight to 3 p.m., every day of the week, weekends and holidays included. The expensive window is 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. A driver who plugs in at 6 p.m. out of habit, believing evening is off-peak, is charging during the single most expensive stretch of the day. The reason is solar: California's grid runs a midday surplus, so the cheap hours moved into daylight and the utility repriced the day around it.

This is the part of EV ownership cost that almost no comparison article handles, because it cannot be answered nationally. The rate plan you are on, and the hours it defines as cheap, vary more than any other input in the calculation. More than the car, more than your mileage, more than the price of gasoline.

The Same Car, the Same Miles, a Four-Fold Difference

Consider a driver covering 12,000 miles a year in a vehicle averaging 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. That works out to roughly 3,429 kWh of charging annually, a figure we use throughout GearUp cost models and the default behind our Charging Cost Calculator.

Here is what that identical amount of electricity costs across four real 2026 rate positions:

Rate position	Price per kWh	Annual charging cost
Georgia Power, Overnight Advantage super off-peak (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.)	5.66¢	$194
U.S. residential average	18.83¢	$646
PG&E EV2-A off-peak (midnight to 3 p.m.)	23¢	$789
PG&E EV2-A summer peak (4 to 9 p.m.)	54¢	$1,852

Calculated by GearUp using Georgia Power tariff schedules TOU-OA-14 and TOU-FCR-TP-5, PG&E residential rate plan pricing effective March 1 2026, and EIA-derived national average rates, accessed August 4, 2026.

The spread between the top and bottom rows is $1,658 a year. Nothing about the vehicle changed. The driver in Georgia who charges overnight is paying less per mile than the national average driver pays for a third of the same electricity, while the Californian who charges at dinnertime is spending more on electricity than many gasoline drivers spend on fuel, a reversal we ran through in detail in our 1,000-mile road trip breakdown.

Two things follow from this table, and they point in opposite directions. The first is that the potential savings from getting your rate plan right are larger than almost any other single decision in EV ownership, including which car you buy. The second is that the headline numbers above are not what anyone actually pays, and the gap between the tariff sheet and the bill is where most of the confusion lives.

The Tariff Sheet Is Not the Bill

Georgia Power lists the cheapest rate on its Overnight Advantage plan as 2.1859 cents per kWh for the super off-peak window between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., seven days a week, year round. That number is real, it is published in the filed tariff, and it is not what you pay.

Sitting on top of it is a separate schedule called Time of Use Fuel Cost Recovery, which adds 3.4747 cents to every super off-peak kilowatt-hour for residential customers as of bills rendered in June 2026. That single rider more than doubles the headline figure, bringing the energy rate to 5.66 cents. It is filed as its own document, it changes on its own schedule, and it does not appear anywhere on the rate plan marketing page.

Nor is that the end of it. The tariff itself specifies that the calculated amount is further increased under the Environmental Compliance Cost Recovery schedule, the Demand Side Management Residential schedule, and the Municipal Franchise Fee, the last of which varies by the city you live in. There is also a Basic Service Charge of $0.4603 per day, roughly $168 a year, owed regardless of how much electricity you use.

We are not going to pretend to a precision we do not have. The honest statement is that the Georgia Power super off-peak rate is at least 5.66 cents per kWh and somewhat higher depending on your municipality, and that the $194 annual figure in the table above is a floor rather than a forecast. Any article quoting you a clean single number for a utility rate is either ignoring the riders or has picked one city and not told you which.

The practical instruction is narrow and worth following: when you compare rate plans, pull the filed tariff and the fuel recovery schedule as separate documents, and check your own bill for the rider lines. The utility plan comparison page will not show them.

You Are Not Switching Your Car Rate. You Are Switching Your House Rate.

This is the failure mode that turns a good decision into a bad one. EV2-A is a whole-house rate: every kilowatt-hour the home consumes is billed under it, not just the ones that go into the car. The plan is named for electric vehicles, and it prices your air conditioner.

Run the comparison for a household moving from the PG&E tiered E-1 plan at 33 cents to EV2-A. The charging itself gets cheaper immediately. 3,429 kWh at 23 cents instead of 33 cents saves $343 a year. But summer evenings between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. now cost 54 cents instead of 33, and June through September is 122 days long.

Household use during summer 4 to 9 p.m.	Added peak cost	Net annual saving
2 kWh/day (lights, cooking, no cooling)	$51	$292
4 kWh/day (moderate AC use)	$102	$241
8 kWh/day (central AC running through the evening)	$205	$138

Calculated by GearUp using PG&E residential rate plan pricing effective March 1, 2026, accessed August 4, 2026. Assumes 3,429 kWh of annual charging placed entirely in the off-peak window and a 122-day summer season.

Two caveats cut in opposite directions, and both matter. The table counts only the summer peak window, so it understates the penalty. EV2-A also prices winter peak hours above the tiered rate, and it adds partial-peak periods from 3 to 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. to midnight that the tiered plan does not have. Against that, the 23-cent off-peak price applies to everything the house uses before 3 p.m., not just the car, so a household that runs its dishwasher, laundry and pool pump during the day recovers more than this table credits.

What the table does establish is the shape of the answer. The savings survive in every scenario we modeled, but a heavy evening cooling load consumes roughly 60 percent of them. A household in Fresno running central air until bedtime is in a materially different position from one in San Francisco that owns no air conditioner, and the rate plan that is obviously correct for the second is arguable for the first.

In Some States, You Did Not Get to Choose

Everything above assumes the rate plan is a decision in front of you. In Colorado it already happened. As of November 1, 2025, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission moved all Xcel Energy residential customers onto time-of-use pricing by default. On-peak runs 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on non-holiday weekdays, year round, and peak pricing runs roughly 2.7 times the off-peak rate.

The guidance the Commission publishes for consumers includes a line worth reading twice: charging an electric car mainly during the on-peak period may cause bills to increase. That is the regulator telling EV owners, in advance, that the default arrangement can go against them.

Colorado is the clearest case but not the only direction of travel. The structural logic, utilities facing evening demand peaks they must build capacity for and pricing those hours accordingly, applies broadly, and mandatory or default time-of-use enrollment has been moving through rate cases in multiple states. The question for most drivers is shifting from whether to switch to a time-of-use plan toward which one they are already on, and when its cheap hours fall.

If you have not checked your bill since buying the car, check it. The plan name is printed on it.

The Twelve-Month Trap

Rate plans are not month-to-month, and this is where a miscalculation stops being recoverable.

Overnight Advantage carries a one-year contract term, automatically renewing on the anniversary date unless cancelled with 30 days notice beforehand. Miss the window and you are in for another twelve months. PG&E allows two rate changes in the first twelve months, after which you are locked to the new rate for a full year.

This matters because the household variable that decides the answer, how much electricity you draw during peak hours, is seasonal. A driver who switches in February, sees a lower bill through the spring, and then meets July with central air running from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. has committed to a plan whose worst months had not yet arrived when the decision was made.

The defensive move is cheap. Before switching, pull twelve months of hourly usage data from your utility online portal, most of which now publish it, and check what share of your consumption falls inside the proposed peak window during the worst month rather than the average one.

What to Actually Do

The sequence below takes about thirty minutes and is worth more per hour than most of the optimization advice aimed at EV owners.

Find out what plan you are on. It is printed on your bill. If your utility moved you onto time-of-use pricing by default, you may be on one already without having chosen it.
Get the actual hours, not the folk wisdom. Look up the periods the tariff defines. Overnight is cheapest in Georgia, midday is cheapest on the PG&E EV plan, and the expensive window in Colorado is the four hours after work. Do not assume.
Pull the fuel adjustment schedule separately. It is a different document from the rate plan and can more than double the advertised off-peak price, as it does in Georgia.
Check your peak-hour household load in your worst month. Not just the car. The rate applies to everything, and a summer evening cooling load can consume most of the benefit.
Read the contract term before enrolling. Twelve months is common, and automatic renewal is common.
Set the car, not the charger. Nearly every EV sold today schedules charging by departure time or start time from the vehicle itself. Once you know your cheap window, this is a two-minute change that persists.

The rate plan is the cheapest lever in EV ownership to pull and the one most often left alone. There is no equipment to buy and no installer to schedule, unlike the charger itself, where the hardware and electrical work carry real cost and the decision deserves its own analysis, which we covered in our breakdown of home charger installation costs. Once the charger is on the wall, what you pay to use it is set by a document you can read in ten minutes.