Most EV owners who charge at home already know their utility has some kind of program for it. J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Home Charging Study, released March 24, 2026, found that 69% of owners are aware their utility offers a variable electricity rate or a smart-charging incentive. Only 12% have actually enrolled in one. That 57-point gap between knowing and doing is the most interesting number in a study that otherwise reads as bad news: home charging costs are up, satisfaction is down, and most owners still are not using the one feature proven to fix both.
The sixth edition of the study surveyed 5,399 owners of 2020 through 2026 model-year battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles between November 2025 and February 2026, in partnership with PlugShare. It is not a brand-new release this month, but the gap it measured has not closed, and the dollar figures behind it are worth knowing whether you read about the study in March or are hearing about it for the first time now.
What the study actually found
Average monthly spending on home charging rose to $63, up $5 from a year earlier, and satisfaction with the cost of charging fell 11 points to 687 on J.D. Power's 1,000-point scale. Satisfaction with Level 1 portable charging dropped 12 points to 569. Level 2 portable charging fell 4 points to 710. Level 2 permanently mounted chargers held steady at 733, the highest score of the three and still the setup most owners end up happiest with.
The study's clearest finding, though, is about behavior, not hardware. Owners who always schedule their home charging post an overall satisfaction score of 734. Owners who sometimes schedule score 706. Owners who never schedule score 700. Only 38% of owners say they always schedule their charging; 46% never do. Scheduling is free, it is usually a toggle in the car's or charger's own app, and it is already associated with a 34-point satisfaction gap over not doing it at all, separate from whatever a utility program might add on top.
J.D. Power also found a clear education gap behind all of this: only about 20% of owners say they received any guidance on home charging, including rate options, from the dealer who sold them the car. Most people are left to find a utility program on their own, and most don't.
Why the 57-point gap probably exists
Part of the answer is that the "aware" number overstates how actionable the knowledge is. Being aware a utility offers "a variable rate or incentive" is a much lower bar than knowing which specific program applies to you, what it requires, and what it pays. Utility program pages are often buried several clicks deep, use their own jargon for the same idea (managed charging, time-of-use, demand response, smart charging all overlap), and sometimes require pairing your own charger model or EV with a third-party app before anything activates.
The other part is that payouts vary so much by utility that a generic "ask your utility" answer is not useful on its own. We pulled four current programs, chosen to cover different utility types and payment structures, so you can see what enrolling has actually been worth to someone else before you go looking for your own.
What four real programs actually pay
| Program | Utility / type | What it pays | The catch |
|---|
| Charge Smart SoCal (with WeaveGrid) | Southern California Edison, managed-charging pilot | $50 enrollment bonus, $50 a year for staying enrolled, plus roughly $50 a month in bill savings from shifting to the TOU-D-PRIME off-peak rate; WeaveGrid's own program materials put combined rewards and savings at up to about $650 a year | Limited to SCE's Gateway Cities zip codes; the monthly figure assumes a specific mileage and efficiency, not a guarantee |
| SmartCharge New York | Con Edison, per-kWh plus seasonal bonus | $0.10 per kWh charged between midnight and 8 a.m. year-round, a $35-a-month bonus per vehicle or charger for avoiding charging on summer weekday afternoons (2 to 6 p.m., June through September), and a $25 bonus after three months of enrollment; Con Edison's own materials put the average participant payout at roughly $400 a year | The per-kWh credit alone is modest; most of the money comes from the summer bonus, and it requires actively avoiding the afternoon window |
| Smart Charge Bundle | PG&E and GM Energy, automaker-utility bundle | A no-cost home charger, a $15-a-month bill credit, and up to $50 a month more from shifting charging to cheaper, lower-demand periods | Only for customers who buy or lease a new Chevrolet, GMC, or Cadillac EV from a participating Northern or Central California dealer; the offer runs through February 2027 or until it fills up |
| ConnectedSolutions EV Demand Response | Rhode Island Energy, demand response | A $50 prepaid card in year one, plus $20 for each additional year of enrollment | Payment is small and mostly guaranteed rather than usage-based; in exchange the utility can make brief adjustments to your charging, typically no more than three hours and never on holidays, and you can opt out of any single event |
The spread here is the point. A Southern California Edison customer in the right zip code who shifts most of their charging overnight could see several hundred dollars a year in combined rewards and savings. A Rhode Island Energy customer gets $50 in year one for minimal effort, rising to $70 cumulative by year two, and keeps the right to ignore any event that doesn't work for them. Neither is wrong, they are different utilities solving different grid problems, and the only way to know which kind applies to you is to check your own utility's program page directly rather than assume a number from somewhere else applies.
If your utility offers an equipment or installation rebate on top of any of this, those stack separately; see our breakdown of common utility rebate structures and named examples for what a hardware rebate typically looks like next to an ongoing program like the ones above.
What you give up, and what you don't
None of these four programs touch how your charger actually works day to day. You still plug in the same way. The difference is in the background: a managed-charging program like Charge Smart - SoCal or the PG&E and GM Energy bundle uses software to time your charging within a ready-by window you set, occasionally nudging it later into cheaper hours. A demand-response program like Rhode Island's can briefly slow or pause charging during a declared event, a handful of times a year, usually with an opt-out. None of them can discharge your battery, sell your power back to the grid, or leave your car undercharged by morning without warning; that is a different technology (bidirectional charging, the subject of our explainer on vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid), not what these programs do.
What you do give up is a small amount of timing control, and in most programs, sharing your charging data with the utility or its software partner. Read the enrollment terms before you sign up, specifically what counts as an event, how many you can expect per season, and whether you can override one if you genuinely need a full charge by morning.
If you already have an EV with smart scheduling built in, as covered in our rundown of which smart charging features actually matter, a utility program adds a second layer on top of scheduling you may already be doing for free. It's additive, not a replacement.
What to actually do with this
Start by finding out what your own electricity costs look like without any program, using our home charging cost calculator; J.D. Power's $63-a-month national average is a starting point for comparison, not your number. Then search your utility's name plus "EV charging program" or "managed charging" directly on their own site, since aggregator pages go stale and utility program budgets and terms change. Our guide to finding your state and utility incentives walks through that search process in more detail if your utility isn't one of the four above.
The underlying math from J.D. Power is simple enough to act on without waiting for a better moment: scheduling your charging costs nothing and is tied to a 34-point satisfaction gap on its own, and a real utility program on top of that is, for most people, free money they are currently leaving unclaimed because they never finished the ten minutes of research it takes to enroll.
Last factually verified: October 2, 2026, against J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Home Charging Study (released March 24, 2026) as reported by WardsAuto, The EV Report, CBT News, InsideEVs, Automotive World, and evchargingstations.com, all converging on the same 69%/12% awareness-enrollment figures, the $63 monthly cost and 687 cost-satisfaction score, and the 569/710/733 charger-type satisfaction scores; direct access to jdpower.com was unavailable this session, so these figures were triangulated across multiple independent outlets citing the same release rather than confirmed on J.D. Power's own page. Program figures were cross-checked against this site's own Tier-1-sourced utility files and, where unreachable directly, against company-issued releases: Southern California Edison's Charge Smart SoCal terms match content/utilities/southern-california-edison.md, with the combined-rewards estimate from WeaveGrid's own program page; Con Edison's SmartCharge New York rates, including the three-month enrollment bonus and Con Edison's own roughly-$400-a-year average, match content/utilities/consolidated-edison.md; Rhode Island Energy's ConnectedSolutions EV Demand Response terms, including that the $20 payment applies to each year after the first, match content/utilities/the-narragansett-electric.md; the PG&E and GM Energy Smart Charge Bundle, the newest of the four and not yet in this site's utility corpus, was confirmed via GM's own newsroom post and PG&E Corporation's investor-relations press release. All program amounts, eligibility, and enrollment windows change; verify current terms directly with the program before relying on a figure. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.