EV Charging Site Selection: What to Evaluate Before You Commit

Where you put chargers on a commercial property matters as much as which chargers you buy. Poor site selection raises installation cost, depresses utilization, and creates compliance problems that are painful to fix later. These decisions are some of the most expensive to reverse in the whole project, because once conduit is buried in concrete or asphalt, moving it means cutting, re-trenching, and patching.

This article covers the five factors that should drive site selection, in roughly the order of their impact on cost, plus how to run the walkthrough that catches the problems paper analysis misses.

Before booking a site visit: Check the existing public charger density around your property and the local EV registration count. A market that is underserved relative to local EV ownership is a stronger candidate for a new installation than one that is already saturated. Open the public charger density lookup →

Factor 1: Proximity to electrical service

This is the dominant cost variable, full stop. Running electrical infrastructure (conduit, conductors, switchgear) costs largely as a function of distance and the surfaces it has to cross. Chargers 20 feet from the panel cost a fraction of chargers 400 feet away across a parking lot.

What to assess:

• Where is the main electrical panel or transformer?
• Is there an intermediate sub-panel closer to the target parking?
• What is the realistic cable route: through existing conduit, along building exteriors, or underground?
• Does the route cross anything expensive, such as asphalt requiring saw-cutting, landscaping, structural penetrations, or a drive aisle that has to stay open?
• Will the added load need a new service or a larger transformer? If so, the utility decides where its equipment goes and controls that schedule, so talk to the utility before you fix the charger location.

Rule of thumb: placing chargers near existing electrical infrastructure is usually the biggest installation saving available, because trenching, boring, and surface restoration are priced largely by the foot. There is no reliable published percentage for that saving, since it depends on run length and what the route crosses, so have the electrician price at least two candidate locations side by side. When two parking areas are otherwise equivalent, proximity to power usually decides it. This single factor is why a "worse" parking location can be the right financial choice.

Factor 2: Parking flow and visibility

Chargers that are hard to find do not get used, and chargers in inconvenient spots get passed over for closer non-EV parking. Utilization is the variable that drives revenue, so visibility is not cosmetic.

Good locations:

• Near building entrances, which shortens the walk for users
• Visible from the main circulation path through the lot
• Compatible with clear signage (overhead markers, tall signs)
• Near where users naturally spend time (lobby, elevator bank, an amenity)

Problematic locations:

• Back corners of large lots
• Poorly lit areas, which also raise safety concerns
• Spots that require navigating past the main parking area
• Loading zones or areas with competing uses

For destination charging (hotels, shopping centers), placing chargers near the entrance also signals that charging is a valued amenity rather than an afterthought, which influences whether guests choose you over a competitor.

Factor 3: ADA compliance

There is no EV-specific federal accessibility standard in force, but that does not exempt charging. The U.S. Access Board states that even without a specific reference to EV charging in the ADA Standards, stations must still be accessible to and usable by people with disabilities. The 2010 ADA Standards apply through their general provisions on accessible routes, operable parts, and reach, which affects both how many accessible charging spaces you plan and where they sit.

What to plan for (confirm current specifics during design):

• The charging station must connect to an accessible route that leads to an accessible entrance
• The Access Board recommends, but does not require, at least two charging spaces with accessible mobility features (a space at least 11 feet wide and 20 feet long with a 5-foot access aisle), placed on the shortest accessible route to the entrance relative to the other chargers at the station
• The Access Board's proposed EV-specific rule (September 2024) was moved to inactive status on September 4, 2025, so it is not law; state codes such as California's can set binding EV accessibility requirements, so design to the accessibility code your jurisdiction enforces as well

If your most electrically convenient location cannot accommodate ADA-compliant spaces on an accessible route, you have a conflict to resolve at design, not after installation. This is exactly the kind of issue that turns a cheap site into an expensive one. See ADA Requirements for EV Charging for specifics.

Factor 4: Future expansion capacity

Most commercial installations start smaller than they will eventually need to be, and EV adoption in your market will likely grow over your hold period. Planning for expansion now is far cheaper than retrofitting later.

What to think about:

• Is the conduit route sized to pull additional circuits later without new trenching?
• Is the panel or sub-panel sized for more load than the initial install needs?
• Is the parking area physically expandable for more stalls?

The make-ready approach: experienced operators install conduit and sub-panels sized for future build-out during the initial work, even when only some positions get chargers at first. Adding chargers later then needs only hardware and a connection, not fresh conduit. The incremental cost of upsizing conduit during the original trench is small; adding infrastructure after the fact is not. The closest published comparison is new construction versus retrofit: a 2019 Energy Solutions analysis for two California community energy providers, cited in a December 2024 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory technical brief for the U.S. Department of Energy, put retrofit charging circuits at roughly 2.8 to 3.2 times (across an office and an apartment building) the per-space cost of installing them during construction ($3,232 versus $1,166 per space for a 60-space office), mostly from demolition, trenching and boring, and new permitting. Those are 2019 California dollars, so treat the ratio, not the price, as the lesson. Factor 4 is therefore mostly a Factor 1 decision made early.

Factor 5: Dwell-time alignment

Level 2 adds about 25 miles of range per hour of charging (the U.S. Department of Energy's rule of thumb), and less when the car's onboard charger or the station's output is lower, so the location should match where users actually spend hours. At public Level 2 stations, NREL found cars sat plugged in but not charging for 30 percent (retail) to 76 percent (parking lots and garages) of their plug-in time in 2019 to 2022 data, a pattern NREL links to destination charging, where the activity, not the charge, sets the length of the stay. Level 2 belongs where people already park for hours, not minutes.

If your users do not stay long enough for Level 2 to add useful range, you either move to DC fast charging (much higher cost) or accept that this location is not optimized for charging and look elsewhere on the property.

A site-selection scorecard

For each candidate location, score these and compare:

• Distance from power and route difficulty (the cost driver)
• Visibility and walking distance from the entrance
• Whether ADA-compliant spaces fit on an accessible route
• Room and conduit headroom for future expansion
• Dwell-time match for the users who park there

The best site is rarely the one that wins every category. It is usually the one that scores well on power proximity and ADA feasibility while staying visible enough to get used.

The site walkthrough

Before finalizing any decision, physically walk the proposed location with three perspectives present:

• A licensed electrician or electrical engineer who can assess cable routes and real infrastructure cost
• Your architect or space planner for ADA and accessible-route review
• Your property manager or operations staff who understand actual parking flow

Together they surface problems a drawing hides. A site that looks ideal in CAD may have a buried concrete footing blocking the cable route, a grade change that complicates the accessible route, or a drive aisle that cannot be closed for trenching. Catching that on foot, and with a locate of existing underground utilities before anyone digs, is the cheapest insurance in the whole project.

California note

California projects carry an extra layer, all within Title 24: CALGreen (Part 11) sets EV-capable and charging-station counts for new construction and some additions and alterations, and Chapter 11B of the California Building Code (2025 edition, in effect since January 1, 2026) sets binding counts (Section 11B-228.3) and dimensions (Section 11B-812) for accessible charging spaces that go beyond the federal baseline. Treat the ADA factor as a code-compliance gate during design, and confirm current state requirements with your architect rather than relying on federal standards alone.

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Last factually verified: 2026-10-03 against the U.S. Access Board's Design Recommendations for Accessible Electric Vehicle Charging Stations and its FY 2027 budget justification (EV rulemaking inactive since September 4, 2025), the U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center's charging-speed figures, NREL's public charging station utilization study (Borlaug et al.), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's December 2024 EV charging technical brief for DOE, 2025 California Building Code Sections 11B-228.3 and 11B-812, and 3C-REN's summary of the 2025 CALGreen nonresidential EV requirements.

Corrections (October 3, 2026): This article previously said NREL research puts the average Level 2 session around 50 minutes; no such NREL finding could be located, and NREL's public charging data shows long Level 2 plug-in times, with cars idle for 30 to 76 percent of plug-in time depending on venue. It previously said federal ADA standards require EV charging spaces to meet accessible-parking requirements, that a share of EV spaces must meet accessible dimensions, and that accessible EV spaces must sit on the shortest accessible route to entrances; there is no EV-specific federal standard in force, the 2010 ADA Standards apply through their general provisions, and the space dimensions, the two-space count, and the shortest-route placement are nonbinding Access Board recommendations. It previously described EV-specific federal guidance as in development; the Access Board moved its proposed rule to inactive status on September 4, 2025.