How much does it cost to charge a Tesla?

The short answer

Charging a Tesla costs whatever electricity costs where you plug in, multiplied by how much energy your car actually draws. There's no single number that's true for everyone, because the two inputs — your electricity rate and how much charge you need — are different for every driver. What you can do is work out your own number with simple arithmetic, and that's what this guide walks through.

What actually determines the cost

Three things decide what a charge costs you:

• How much energy you add. This is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh) — the same unit on your home electricity bill. A full Tesla battery holds somewhere between roughly 50 kWh and 100 kWh of usable energy depending on the model, trim, and battery chemistry; your own car shows the exact figure on its touchscreen. Most day-to-day charging tops up a partial battery rather than going from empty to full, so the relevant number is usually much smaller than the full pack size.
• Your price per kWh. Home electricity is billed per kWh, and the rate varies a lot by location, utility, and whether you're on a flat rate or a time-of-use plan that charges more during peak hours and less overnight. Check a recent electric bill for your actual rate rather than assuming a national average — it can vary widely even between neighboring utilities.
• Charging losses. No charging process is 100% efficient. Some energy is lost as heat between the wall outlet and the battery, so the electricity your meter registers is always a little higher than the energy your car reports as "added" — this effect is generally larger with slower AC home charging than with DC fast charging, and larger in cold weather.

Home charging vs. the Supercharger network

Charging at home, overnight, on your own electricity plan is almost always the cheapest way to charge a Tesla — you're paying your normal residential rate rather than a premium. Tesla's Supercharger network, by contrast, charges its own per-kWh (and sometimes per-minute) pricing that's set station-by-station and can flex with demand and location. It's priced for the convenience of fast charging on the road, not to compete with your home rate, so expect it to cost noticeably more per kWh than plugging in at home. If you mostly drive local miles and can charge overnight, the bulk of your charging cost should come from the cheaper home side of that equation.

A simple way to estimate a charge

The math itself is just multiplication: energy added (kWh) × your price per kWh = cost. As a purely illustrative example — not a real-world rate — adding 30 kWh at a hypothetical 15¢/kWh works out to about $4.50 (30 × $0.15). Swap in the kWh your car actually added (visible in its charging history) and your own utility's rate, and you'll have a number that reflects your actual charge rather than someone else's average.

Why your real number will differ from any average

Any "typical cost to charge a Tesla" figure you read online is an average across different cars, different electricity markets, and different driving habits — it isn't your number. Your battery size, your local electricity price, how much of your charging happens at home versus at Superchargers, and even the weather all move the real figure up or down. The only way to know what charging actually costs you is to look at your own sessions.

See your own numbers automatically

This is exactly what Amped's charging cost tracker does: it prices every home charging session automatically against the flat-rate or time-of-use tariff you set up once, and separates home energy from Supercharger energy on the same monthly view — so you see a real cost, not a guess, and never a fabricated number for a session it can't actually account for.

Amped is opening in stages — charging cost tracking is one of the first things you'll get. Join the waitlist and we'll email you the moment your spot is ready, so you can start seeing your own real charging costs instead of estimating them.