The short version: home charging cost = kWh charged × your unit rate. A 10 kWh top-up is 86c–€1.39 inside a smart EV window, €1.68–€2.12 on NightSaver night rates, €2.46–€4.27 on 24-hour plans — and €4.54–€5.68 if it runs on a 17:00–19:00 smart peak. Rates verified 28 August 2026.
This page is the maths. The shopping list — which supplier's window is cheapest this week — lives on best EV tariff in Ireland. matched.ie is not a CRU-accredited comparison site; the accredited comparators are listed on cru.ie.
How do I turn kWh into euro on a home charge?
Everything on this page is one multiplication:
kWh into the battery × cent per kWh = the cost of the charge
Both numbers are already yours. The kWh comes from the car's app or the charger itself — it is the energy actually delivered, and it is the only honest way to count, because "percent of battery" means a different number of kWh on every car. The rate is on your electricity bill or your supplier's rate card, in cent per kWh including 9% VAT. Nothing else moves: the standing charge and PSO levy are fixed amounts you pay whether or not a car exists, so the car only ever touches the units line.
The example we price throughout is deliberately ordinary: a 10 kWh overnight top-up — roughly what a commuter puts back most evenings, about 90 minutes of charging on a typical ~7 kW home charger — repeated most weeknights for about 250 kWh a month. It is the same stated example our EV tariff ranking uses, so the two pages agree with each other. If your top-up is 20 kWh, double every figure; the formula scales exactly.
The reason the answers vary so wildly for the same 10 kWh is that Irish electricity is sold on four different shapes of tariff — one price all day, two prices, three-plus prices, or a price that changes every half hour. Where you can put the charging inside each shape decides everything. The full ladder of shapes has its own explainer; here we just price the car on each rung.
What does a 10 kWh charge cost on each meter shape?
Here is the example charge — and the example month — priced on verified rates from each shape. The "example rates" column shows the cheapest and dearest rate we verified for that shape on supplier sites on 28 August 2026; every euro figure is just that rate pushed through the formula, nothing modelled.
| Meter shape | Verified example rates (28 Aug 2026) | 10 kWh charge | 250 kWh month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smart EV window Charger timer set inside the window | 8.59c (Yuno, 02:00–06:00) to 13.86c (SSE Airtricity, 23:00–05:00) | 86c–€1.39 | €21.48–€34.65 |
| NightSaver night (23:00–08:00) Any start time after 23:00 counts | 16.83c (Electric Ireland, year-1 card) to 21.24c (Community Power) | €1.68–€2.12 | €42.08–€53.10 |
| 24-hour flat rate Time of day is irrelevant | 24.63c (SSE V6 fixed, year 1) to 42.65c (Energia standard rate) | €2.46–€4.26 | €61.58–€106.63 |
| Smart ToU peak (17:00–19:00) Nobody chooses this — a dumb charger does | 45.38c (Yuno smart peak) to 56.76c (Energia standard EV card peak) | €4.54–€5.68 | €113.45–€141.90 |
| Dynamic (wholesale-linked) Price changes every half hour | No fixed rate to print — see below | Varies by night | Varies by month |
Read the span, not just the rows: the identical 10 kWh charge runs from 86c to €4.27 depending on nothing but the tariff shape and the clock — a factor of five before anyone has driven differently or bought a different car. Yuno's 8.59c window (02:00–06:00) is the cheapest rate we could verify this week; Energia's 42.65c standard 24-hour rate — the card its percentage discounts lapse onto — is the dearest non-peak rate. The individual windows, and who they suit, are ranked supplier by supplier on best EV tariff.
Two shape notes worth carrying into the table. Electric Ireland's 10.88c boost window is only two hours (02:00–04:00), which still fits a 10 kWh top-up on a ~7 kW charger but not much more — outside the boost its plan charges 18.54c all night. And NightSaver's nine-hour 23:00–08:00 window needs no precision at all: any charge that runs at night gets the night register, which is why plenty of EV owners on an existing MCC02 day/night meter do respectably without touching a smart plan. Whether to jump from NightSaver to smart is a one-way decision with its own page.
What does a month of home charging cost?
The per-charge numbers look small — nobody's month is small. At ~250 kWh of charging, here is the same formula run once per shape, one verified example rate each:
Stretch the month to a year and the gap turns into real money: 3,000 kWh of annual charging costs about €258 at the 8.59c window and about €1,280 at the 42.65c standard rate — over a thousand euro a year between two households doing identical driving. That is also why an EV changes which tariff family you belong in at all: 3,000 kWh of charging on top of the CRU's 4,200 kWh typical household puts you well past the point where the unit rate dominates the standing charge, and the shape of the plan matters more than any single discount percentage.
One warning before you chase the smallest bar: the window rate only prices the car. The other ~350 kWh a typical home uses each month bills at the plan's day, night and peak rates, and a cheap window is routinely paired with an expensive everything-else — that trade-off is the whole story of the EV tariff ranking and of year 1 vs year 2, where the discounted card quietly becomes the standard one at month 13.
What does the same charge cost at 6pm — the dumb-charger trap?
The trap: a charger left on "start when plugged in" starts charging when you get home — about 18:00, in the middle of the 17:00–19:00 peak on most smart plans. The same 10 kWh that costs 86c at 02:00 costs €4.54–€5.68 at 18:00 on the peak rates we verified. Same car, same plug, same electricity — five to six times the price, every single evening it happens.
| Verified peak rate (28 Aug 2026) | Peak window | 10 kWh charged at 18:00 |
|---|---|---|
| Yuno — smart plan peak — 45.38c/kWh | 17:00–19:00 | €4.54 |
| Prepay Power — smart ToU peak — 46.81c/kWh | 17:00–19:00 | €4.68 |
| Bord Gáis — smart standard peak, undiscounted — 54.11c/kWh | Mon–Fri evenings | €5.41 |
| Energia — standard EV smart card peak — 56.76c/kWh | 17:00–19:00 | €5.68 |
The fix costs nothing: set the schedule in the charger or the car to the plan's exact published window, and treat "charge on arrival" as a setting for public chargers only. Do it once and the trap never fires. It matters most on exactly the plans with the best windows — the deeper the 2am discount, the taller the peak that funds it — and it is the reason an evening-heavy household sometimes does better on a flat smart rate or a no-peak two-band plan than on the cheapest window in the market. The peak bands themselves, plan by plan, are laid out in the time-of-use guide.
What meter do I need for each tariff shape?
The rate card you are allowed to buy depends on the meter on your wall, not on the charger or the car. The map:
| Tariff shape | Meter needed | The catch for EV owners |
|---|---|---|
| 24-hour flat | Any meter — MCC01, or a smart meter in its default configuration | No window to hit, and no reward either: the car prices like the kettle, at 24.63c–42.65c on this week's verified cards |
| NightSaver | MCC02 day/night meter — and a smart meter can be left in MCC02, keeping the day/night registers | Nine cheap hours (23:00–08:00) but a dearer day rate and usually a higher standing charge — the house pays for the car's discount |
| Smart ToU / EV window | Smart meter, typically half-hourly (MCC12/MCC16) | The move off MCC01/MCC02 is effectively one-way — the whole house inherits the smart card, evening peak included |
| Dynamic | Smart meter with a CTF communications score of 4 | Not every smart meter qualifies — check the CTF score before shopping, not after |
If you are not sure what is on your wall, the smart meters guide covers how to read your MCC off a bill and what the CTF score means; the meter itself belongs to ESB Networks regardless of supplier. The practical order of operations for a new EV owner is meter first, tariff second, charger schedule third — signing up for an EV window your meter cannot support is the most common way this goes wrong.
How do dynamic tariffs price EV charging?
Dynamic plans have no rate we can print in the tables above, because that is the product: the unit price tracks the wholesale market and changes every half hour, published a day ahead. Since June 2026 the CRU has required larger suppliers to offer a standard dynamic contract, so they are a real option — Electric Ireland, Energia, Bord Gáis, Yuno and Prepay Power all have products — but the formula becomes kWh in each half hour × that half hour's price, and the answer is different every night.
For an EV specifically, dynamic is the highest-effort, highest-variance version of everything on this page. Overnight wholesale prices are usually the day's cheapest, and on windy nights they can undercut even the 8.59c fixed window — but there is no floor and no ceiling, and a still, cold evening prices the same charge at multiples of that. It suits owners with a charger or app that can automatically chase the cheap half-hours; it does not suit anyone who wants to know the cost of a charge before it happens. The full mechanics — day-ahead prices, the CTF 4 requirement, who offers what — are in the dynamic tariffs guide.
Is home charging cheaper than public charging?
On the bill, it is not close. ESB ecars — the largest public network — prices pay-as-you-go charging at 60c/kWh on standard AC points and 72c/kWh on fast chargers under its price plans effective 1 July 2026 (checked 28 August 2026; membership at €4.79/month trims those to 55c and 67c). Push the example through the formula and the 10 kWh top-up costs €6.00–€7.20 in public against 86c–€1.39 on a home EV window — seven to eight times the price — and a 250 kWh month bought entirely on public fast chargers would run around €180. Public charging earns its price on journeys, where speed is the product; as a routine, every charge you move from the forecourt to your own driveway after 2am is bought at roughly an eighth of the rate. Other networks price differently — check the operator's app before you rely on any of them.
Where to next?
- Best EV tariff in Ireland — the ranking this page does the maths for: every verified window and rate, supplier by supplier.
- NightSaver vs smart time-of-use — whether to leave an MCC02 meter for a smart EV window, and why the move is one-way.
- Time-of-use tariffs explained — the full ladder of tariff shapes, from 24-hour flat to dynamic.
- Dynamic tariffs — half-hourly wholesale pricing, the CTF 4 requirement, and who should touch it.
- Cheapest electricity in Ireland — if the sums say a flat rate suits your house better than a window.
