Guest surveys on hotel EV charging range from 19 percent who say they need it to 91 percent of EV drivers who say they are more likely to book a property that has it, and the high numbers come from sponsored surveys. The only per-site revenue benchmark found averages about $3,300 a year for paid charging, so the electricity revenue is small and the decision rests on room nights. Start with a few ports, price for overnight dwell, and model the booking effect as an explicit assumption.
The best hotel EV charging revenue figure we could find is about $3,300 a year per site. That is the average paid-charging income across 78 hotel properties on one vendor's network, and the top tenth of those sites earned nearly $11,000. Meanwhile, the guest surveys behind the "you need chargers to compete" pitch run from 19 percent to 91 percent depending on who paid for the survey. Both sets of numbers deserve a hard look before a hotel signs a charger contract.
Our short version: charging is a reasonable hotel amenity, a poor hotel profit center, and a decision that lives or dies on room nights, not kilowatt-hours. For how hotels compare with offices, retail, and multifamily, see which property types are best suited for EV charging. This article goes one level deeper on hospitality.
Several surveys get repeated in hotel charging sales material. They do not agree, and the gap tells you something.
Read these as three different questions. J.D. Power asked all hotel guests, most of whom do not drive an EV, and found a minority need charging and a smaller minority use it. The BLLA survey asked only EV drivers, through a sponsor with a stake in the answer, and asked what they would prefer, not what they booked. Stated preference runs ahead of behavior in nearly every amenity survey; people say they would pay a premium far more often than they do.
In short: among EV drivers, charging is a real tiebreaker, especially on road trips. Among your whole guest base today, the people who will plug in on a given night are a small share. How small depends on your market and your guest mix, which is why you should measure before you size the project.
EV Connect, a charging software vendor, published a benchmark of 12 months of data from 78 hotel properties on its network. It reported average annual income from paid charging of $3,274 per site, with the top 10 percent earning nearly $11,000. An older version of the same benchmark covered 22 months at 68 properties and reported roughly $4,000 on average, with the top 10 percent above $10,000; we could not confirm whether those were annual or cumulative figures, so we do not compare them with the 12-month number. We could reach only secondary reprints of these reports, not the originals, so we cannot tell you whether the dollar figure is gross revenue or net of electricity, or which model year of hardware and pricing it reflects. Treat it as one vendor's network, not the hotel industry.
Even so, the order of magnitude is useful. Put it against a project cost to see what it means:
Compare that with the 8-port highway-corridor hotel in the same ROI article. It reaches a 5.7-year payback only by assuming 18 kWh per port per day and $0.40 per kWh, while measured Level 2 venue averages run 5.8 to 10.6 kWh per port-day (NREL EV WATTS data). At 3 percent active-charging occupancy, the typical case today, that site's payback stretches to 33.6 years. Eight ports is a bet on a busy corridor; two to four ports is a bet on your own guests.
If the electricity revenue is modest, the case for the amenity is bookings. Two mechanisms matter, and both are assumptions you should write down rather than hope for:
A usable test is a break-even count. Take the annual cost of the program (net capital spread over its life, plus network fees and maintenance, minus charging margin) and divide by what one extra room night contributes after variable costs. If your program costs $4,000 a year net and an incremental room night contributes $100 after housekeeping and distribution costs (both figures are placeholders, so use your own), you need 40 extra room nights a year for the amenity to break even. That is a number you can sanity-check against your booking data and your own EV-driver count. It is a much better question than whether a survey says 91 percent.
The evidence for the booking effect is thin. Our tenant retention and customer behavior article collects what operators report, and it is mostly operator surveys and case studies, not matched comparisons. Model the effect conservatively.
Hotels have the most favorable dwell pattern in commercial charging. A guest parks for 8 to 12 hours, which is long enough for a standard Level 2 port to deliver most of what a car needs. Our ROI model's hotel example assumes a 12 kWh average session (about 79 minutes on a 40-amp port), a deliberately modest figure; a guest who arrives with a low battery and plugs in overnight can take far more, so your own sessions may run larger. DC fast charging rarely makes sense for a hotel that sells beds, because the guest is not waiting in the lot.
Hotels price charging three ways, and we could not find a systematic survey of which is most common: free to guests, a per-kWh rate, or a flat overnight fee. Anecdotal consumer guides report everything from free for loyalty members to $0.50 per kWh. Our ROI article's guidance still holds: many hotels use a $10 to $25 flat overnight fee, which prices a full overnight charge above $0.50 per kWh for a typical session.
Whichever you choose, set the rules in writing:
Open the commercial ROI snapshot and enter hospitality-realistic assumptions rather than generic retail ones: a small port count, an overnight-heavy session length, low early-year occupancy (3 percent is a defensible Year 1), and your own price. Then run a second case in which the booking effect is zero. If the project only works with a large guessed room-night lift, that is information too.
The vendor benchmark is the only per-site hotel revenue figure we found, and we could not confirm it against the original report. The J.D. Power usage figure is from 2023 and we found no newer edition. Hotel charging pricing practice has no systematic survey that we could find. If you operate hotel chargers and can share anonymized utilization and revenue, that would improve this piece.
Last factually verified: October 23, 2026. Sources: J.D. Power 2023 North America Third-Party Hotel Management Guest Satisfaction Benchmark (as reported by Hotel Dive and Lodging Magazine); Boutique and Luxury Lodging Association and El-Monde survey release of April 17, 2025 (via search excerpts and secondary coverage; the release page was unreachable); EV Connect hotel benchmarks (secondary reprints); NREL EV WATTS figures and the installed-cost and payback examples from our own ROI model. Unreachable from this environment: hospitalitynet.org and costar.com (DNS failure), so the survey details and CoStar's reporting on hotel charging were confirmed from search excerpts only.
evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.
This article draws on 1 primary source, cited inline where each figure appears. We re-check the numbers when incentive amounts, regulations, or product availability change.
Last updated Oct 23, 2026
Commercial EV charging ROI has two components: direct financial returns (charging revenue, incentives, demand charge reduction) and indirect returns (tenant retention, property value, competitive positioning). Direct returns rarely justify the investment alone in low-utilization scenarios. The strongest case includes both, with incentives doing most of the heavy lifting in the first 3 years.
EV charging can increase commercial property value three ways: NOI enhancement (charging revenue capitalized at market cap rates), reduced vacancy in markets where EV owners self-select, and repositioning aging assets. The strongest evidence is in multifamily housing in high-adoption markets. Valuation is still inconsistent: appraisers and buyers treat it differently depending on market and asset type.
EV charging shapes tenant and customer behavior: multifamily residents who use on-site charging face a real switching cost when moving, though no public study quantifies a renewal-rate gap; retail customers who charge spend more time on-site and make more purchases; hotel guests who charge are more likely to return and give higher satisfaction scores. The effect is largest in high-adoption markets and grows as EV ownership increases.
The Commercial Charging Playbook covers evaluating, planning, and operating EV charging, including the funding programs that can cover most of the cost.
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