Off-peak windows and rates vary by utility, not by a national rule of thumb: Georgia Power's Overnight Advantage prices Super Off-Peak at about 2 cents per kWh from 11pm to 7am, while California standardizes a 4pm-9pm peak across PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E. Some utilities charge every kWh in the home at the TOU rate; others, like Con Edison, require a second meter just for the charger. And a charger set to chase the cheapest hour alone can leave you with a cold, unheated car in the morning; pairing off-peak charging with a scheduled-departure feature avoids that trade.
"Charge overnight" is the advice everyone gives, and it is not wrong, but it is not specific enough to save you real money. Overnight covers ten hours on some utilities and four on others. One plan might price your cheapest window at 2 cents a kilowatt-hour; another might barely undercut the daytime rate. The only way to know what you are actually paying is to look up your own utility's schedule, not the national average. Here is how to do that, what changes when the plan is EV-specific rather than whole-house, and the one tradeoff that pure cost-chasing schedules get wrong on cold mornings.
Not every utility offers one, and among those that do, the plan is either opt-in or requires enrollment. Start with your utility's rate plans or billing page, search for "time-of-use" or "EV rate," and check three things: whether it is available to your account type, whether it requires a smart meter you may not already have, and whether switching is free or reversible. Most utilities let you enroll online in a few minutes and switch back later if the math doesn't work out. Once you find the plan, read the rate sheet line by line to confirm the windows and the per-kWh price.
evcharginghelp.com's own utility and state pages already carry this lookup for 129 utilities and every state, with the plan name, peak and off-peak windows, and current rates pulled from the tariff itself. Three real examples show how differently these plans are built.
Georgia Power's Overnight Advantage (TOU-OA): peak runs 2pm to 7pm on summer weekdays only (June through September, excluding holidays); every other hour, including all of fall, winter, and spring, is off-peak. Within that, Super Off-Peak from 11pm to 7am prices at roughly 2.2 cents per kWh, against a summer peak of about 30 cents (energy charge only; fuel and other charges are extra). That is a rate plan built around a narrow, seasonal peak, not a fixed daily window.
Consumers Energy's Nighttime Savers (RPM_1050) in Michigan: Super Off-Peak runs 11pm to 6am on weekdays and all day on weekends, at 14.1 cents per kWh in winter and a higher price in summer (the utility's page lists two different sets of summer figures, roughly 13 to 19 cents, so confirm yours on your bill); on-peak (2pm to 7pm weekdays) is about 17 cents in winter and roughly 21 to 25 cents in summer. The gap between peak and off-peak is real but far narrower than Georgia Power's, because Michigan's overall rates sit closer together across the day.
California's standardized peak window: PG&E's EV2-A, Southern California Edison's TOU-D-PRIME, and San Diego Gas & Electric's EV-TOU-5 all set peak hours at 4pm to 9pm every day of the year, a rule the state's major investor-owned utilities converged on. PG&E's off-peak window is 12am to 3pm. SCE's off-peak is broader than a simple overnight band: it covers all hours outside that 4pm-9pm peak, with an extra-cheap winter super off-peak sub-window from 8am to 4pm layered on top. Off-peak rates on these plans run roughly 23 to 30 cents per kWh depending on utility and season, well above Georgia Power's or Consumers Energy's off-peak rates in absolute terms; the California savings come from avoiding the 4pm-9pm peak (which runs meaningfully higher still), not from an unusually cheap off-peak hour.
The takeaway: there is no substitute for reading your own plan. A schedule copied from a friend in another state, or a generic "charge after 9pm" rule, can miss your actual off-peak window by hours, or miss that your cheapest tier only exists in a narrow overnight band.
This is the detail that generic TOU advice skips, and it changes what "switching" actually means for your bill.
Most of the newer EV-oriented rates, including all three examples above, are whole-house plans: every kilowatt-hour your home uses, not just your charger, bills at the time-of-use schedule. PG&E's EV2-A combines your vehicle's and your home's electricity use on one rate. That means your dishwasher, your air conditioner, and your charger are all subject to the same peak and off-peak pricing, for better or worse. It rewards households that can shift laundry and other discretionary use to the cheap window, and it penalizes ones that can't avoid using power during peak hours for reasons that have nothing to do with the car.
Some older EV rate designs work differently. Con Edison in New York offers a whole-house time-of-use option (SC1 Rate III, with an unusually wide 8am-to-midnight peak window and off-peak reserved for midnight to 8am), and separately lets customers install a second, dedicated meter that measures only the EV charging circuit on its own time-of-use schedule, for an additional $20 monthly customer charge. That second meter is a way to isolate charging costs from the rest of the home's electricity use without moving the whole house onto a TOU schedule. Con Edison's SmartCharge New York program, a separate managed-charging bill credit covered in our utility rebates roundup, pays standard-rate customers for shifting charging into off-peak hours, but Con Edison says customers who move the whole home to the time-of-use rate or add an EV-only meter are not eligible for SmartCharge incentives, so the three options are alternatives, not a stack. Which one is worth it, whole-house TOU, the second meter, or SmartCharge alone, depends on how much of the rest of the home's usage can shift off-peak, which is exactly the kind of detail that only shows up once you read your specific utility's rate sheet rather than a general explainer.
Before enrolling, check which structure your utility offers. If it is whole-house, model your total consumption pattern, not just the charger, before assuming the switch saves money. If a second-meter option exists, compare its fixed monthly cost against what it isolates.
Here is the part that pure cost-chasing advice gets wrong. If you set your charger or car to only charge during the cheapest hour and to stop the moment that window ends, say 6am when your off-peak rate expires, your battery and cabin can sit at ambient temperature for however long passes between the charge finishing and you actually leaving. In winter, that means walking out to a cold cabin and a cold battery, which is a separate problem from the "does cold weather slow charging" question (it barely does at Level 2 home charging rates; see our cold-weather charging breakdown for the physics and the range-loss numbers). This is about timing, not charging speed: a charge that finishes too early leaves the car un-preconditioned.
The fix most EVs already support is a scheduled-departure feature, not just scheduled charging. Tesla's Scheduled Departure combines Off-Peak Charging (which delays the session so it still finishes within your off-peak window) with Preconditioning (which warms the cabin and battery on grid power in the minutes before your set departure time). Tesla's documented guidance on the feature goes further: if the car finishes charging well before departure, the battery cools back down and then has to be rewarmed using stored energy, so the recommendation is to let the charge run until closer to departure rather than finishing as early as possible. Ford's equivalent, Scheduled Departure in the FordPass app, does the same thing: it lets the vehicle use grid power to warm the battery and cabin while still plugged in, so the driver starts with a warm car without spending range on it.
The distinction that matters: plain "charge during off-peak hours" scheduling optimizes for the lowest electricity price and nothing else. Scheduled-departure features optimize for being ready, warm, and charged by a specific time, using off-peak pricing where possible but not sacrificing pre-drive comfort to save the last few cents. If your EV or charger offers both options, use the departure-time version rather than a flat off-peak-only schedule, especially once the weather turns cold. If your vehicle doesn't have a departure-time feature, the practical workaround is to leave the car plugged in past the point charging completes, so any built-in preconditioning still pulls from the wall instead of the battery.
None of this requires new hardware. It requires ten minutes on your utility's website and a look at your charger or car's scheduling settings, and it is the difference between generic "charge overnight" advice and actually capturing the savings your specific utility is offering.
Last factually verified: October 19, 2026, against Georgia Power's Overnight Advantage rate page (windows and 2.1859 cents super off-peak and 29.7868 cents on-peak; its June 2026 tariff schedule lists about 2.23 cents and 30.35 cents), the Consumers Energy Nighttime Savers page (windows confirmed; the page lists conflicting summer prices, so summer figures are given as ranges), PG&E's EV rate plans page (EV2-A windows: 4pm-9pm peak, midnight-3pm lowest cost; summer off-peak 23 cents, summer peak 54 cents), Southern California Edison's residential time-of-use page (TOU-D-PRIME: 4pm-9pm peak, winter super off-peak 8am-4pm; summer off-peak 26 cents, winter off-peak 30 cents), SDG&E's EV pricing page (EV-TOU-5 peak 4pm-9pm every day), and Con Edison's electric vehicles and your bill page (time-of-use peak 8am to midnight, $20 extra monthly charge for a second meter, SmartCharge ineligibility for time-of-use and second-meter customers). Tesla's Scheduled Departure behavior was checked against tesla.com owner's manual search results, which also note that Scheduled Departure and scheduled charging can conflict on some models, so check your own model's manual; Ford's Scheduled Departure description was not re-checked this pass. PG&E's page states that EV2-A combines vehicle and home usage; the winter off-peak price for EV2-A was not found. The count of 129 utilities comes from this site's own content files. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.
This article draws on 8 primary sources, cited inline where each figure appears. We re-check the numbers when incentive amounts, regulations, or product availability change.
Last updated Oct 19, 2026
Using EIA residential rates averaged over August 2025 through July 2026, driving 1,000 miles on home electricity costs about $36 in North Dakota and about $125 in Hawaii, with the national average near $52. California is second most expensive at about $95. The cheapest ten states sit between 12.5 and 13.9 cents per kWh; the priciest ten run from about 24 cents to nearly 44.
The 30C tax credit gave homeowners 30% of EV charger purchase and installation costs, capped at $1,000 per item. It was nonrefundable, so you needed federal tax liability to use it, and it was only available if your home sat in an IRS-designated eligible census tract, a disqualifier that caught many suburban addresses. The credit ended June 30, 2026 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ENERGY STAR certification was not required for the residential credit. It was claimed on IRS Form 8911.
State and utility incentives for home EV charging vary widely and, with the federal 30C tax credit now ended, are the incentives that remain. The four best places to look are the AFDC Laws and Incentives database, the DSIRE database, your utility's EV page, and your state energy office. Demand-response and managed-charging programs pay ongoing bill credits for letting the utility shift your charging. Always verify a program is currently funded and confirm whether it requires pre-approval before you buy.
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