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What It Costs to Charge an EV in the Netherlands in 2026

September 10, 2026· Wise EV

If you're buying your first electric car in the Netherlands, you've probably been told that charging at home is where the savings are. That advice was written for countries where home electricity is cheap, and Dutch home electricity is not cheap. The Netherlands has one of the narrowest gaps in Europe between what you pay in your own garage and what you pay at a motorway rapid charger. That's bad news if you have a driveway and surprisingly good news if you don't, which is most people here.

There's also a deadline in this. 2026 is the last full year of the salderingsregeling, and what replaces it on 1 January 2027 changes the arithmetic for anyone with solar panels.

Table of Contents

The Dutch numbers at a glance

Every cost per 100 km below uses 18.75 kWh per 100 km, the real-world average across 12,143 electric cars and 1,544,460 charge entries logged on Spritmonitor, retrieved 21 August 2026.

Where you plug inPrice per kWhPer 100 kmVersus home
Home, standard contract€0.258€4.83baseline
Home, dynamic tariff overnight€0.24€4.500.93x
Public AC, national average€0.48€9.001.86x
Public AC, cheapest gemeente€0.33€6.191.28x
Public AC, dearest gemeente€0.70€13.122.72x
Fastned, Gold subscription€0.54€10.122.10x
Fastned, ad hoc€0.77€14.442.99x

Three times, home to rapid. In the UK that ratio is ten times and in Ukraine it's close to fourteen. The Dutch spread is compressed at both ends: the home rate is high, and the public rate is not as punishing as it looks.

What charging at home really costs

CBS publishes the two halves of a Dutch electricity bill separately, and it does not add them up for you. For August 2026 the variable supply rate including BTW was €0.1469/kWh, and the energiebelasting including BTW was €0.11085/kWh. Add them and you get €0.258/kWh. That addition is ours, not CBS's.

That figure sits at the bottom of a contested range, and you should know why before you budget with it. Comparison sites quoting newly offered contracts land higher: Energievergelijk.nl gives €0.285/kWh on 9 September 2026, Keuze.nl gives €0.30 on 8 September 2026, and Milieucentraal gives €0.27 of which €0.11 is tax. CBS tracks the average across existing contracts, including old cheap fixed deals that nobody can sign today. If you're switching supplier now, budget €0.28 to €0.30, not €0.258.

Two things that don't scale with your charging:

  • Netbeheerkosten are about €477 a year, fixed, regardless of how many kWh you pull. The more you charge at home, the smaller that becomes per kWh. An EV household is a high-consumption household, and this is one of the few places where that helps.
  • The belastingvermindering is €629 including BTW per electricity connection per year, a flat credit against your energy tax.

A dynamic contract with Tibber, Frank Energie, ANWB Energie or Zonneplan lets you chase the cheap hours. On 10 September 2026 the all-in dynamic price bottomed out at €0.24/kWh overnight against a €0.37 daily average. On 24 June 2026 the cheapest quarter-hour of the day hit €0.13 and the most expensive went over €1.20. That's one day, not an annual average, and nobody publishes a 2026 average night-hours price. Treat dynamic tariffs as a real lever with real variance, not a guaranteed €0.24.

2026 is the last year of saldering

This is the part worth acting on.

The Wet beëindiging salderingsregeling passed the Eerste Kamer on 17 December 2024 and was published in the Staatsblad on 29 January 2025. Net metering ends on 1 January 2027, and there's no taper. It runs at 100% through 31 December 2026 and then stops.

What replaces it is a terugleververgoeding from your supplier, guaranteed at at least 50% of the kale leveringstarief, the bare supply rate before tax, through 2030. Electricity you use on site as you generate it stays free of tax and supplier charges.

Work through what that does to a solar household charging an EV. Today, a kWh you export in June and a kWh you import in December cancel out one for one. From 2027, the kWh you export earns you half of a rate that excludes the €0.11085 energy tax, while the kWh you import costs you the full €0.258 or more. The incentive flips from "export by day, charge at night" to "charge the car in daylight, straight off the panels." If your commute lets you plug in at home during the day, or you can charge at work, 2027 is when that becomes worth reorganising your week around.

One caveat worth naming: Rijksoverheid states the 50%-through-2030 minimum as settled, while the Eerste Kamer dossier describes the level as originating in an amendment and not yet fixed. Rijksoverheid's page is the newer of the two.

The lamp post is the Dutch default

Most countries write about public charging as the expensive fallback. In the Netherlands it's how a large share of drivers charge all the time, and the country is built for it. There were roughly 210,000 public charge points in 2025, up from about 63,000 in 2020, with Amsterdam alone at around 16,000 and Rotterdam above 11,000.

The best price data available is ANWB's, drawn from about 6 million AC charging sessions on its charge card across 2025 and published on 5 February 2026. National average: €0.48/kWh. The municipal spread is wide, from about €0.33 in Nederweert to about €0.70 in Oegstgeest.

Where your charge point sits in the concession cycle matters more than most people realise. In the Laadwerk concession covering Noord-Holland, Flevoland and Utrecht province, tariffs as of 13 July 2026 split by installation date:

OperatorInstalled from 1 Jul 2024Installed before 1 Jul 2024
Shell ubitricity€0.35€0.47
Vattenfall InCharge€0.36€0.52
TotalEnergies€0.37€0.48
Velian€0.38not listed

The pole outside your house and the pole two streets over can differ by 15 cents for no reason you can see. Worth checking before you assume they're the same.

Here's the number that matters if you're weighing a house with a driveway against one without. At 15,000 km a year, charging entirely at home costs about €725. Charging entirely on public AC at the national average costs about €1,350. The difference is roughly €625 a year. That's real, but it's a fraction of what the same choice costs a British driver, and it should not by itself decide where you live.

Watch the charge card, though. Providers layer fees on top of the CPO rate. Eneco charges a €0.39 starttarief per session unless you pay €3.00 a month, Shell Recharge adds €0.35 per session capped at €7 a month, and the ANWB card adds €0.89 per session at Tesla Superchargers. On short top-ups a per-session fee can outweigh the per-kWh price entirely.

Fast charging on the snelweg

For long trips, the operator you pick moves the price more than anything else.

OperatorAd hocWith subscription
Fastned€0.77€0.54 (Gold, €5.99/month)
Ionity NLaround €0.63 averagelower on Passport
Shell Recharge€0.66 to €0.79around €0.55
Tesla, non-Tesla driver€0.35 to €0.70Tesla rate on membership
Tesla, Tesla driver€0.27 to €0.50n/a

Fastned's own site notes the €5.99 Gold fee applies "tot 30 september 2026", so expect a change there shortly after you read this. Tesla prices are dynamic by time and location, which is why they're a range and not a number.

The subscription maths is simpler here than elsewhere. Fastned Gold saves €0.23/kWh. At 18.75 kWh per 100 km that's €4.31 saved per 100 km of rapid charging, so the €5.99 monthly fee pays for itself in under 140 km of motorway charging a month. One return trip to Germany covers it.

Where the Netherlands sits in Europe

Same comparison, seven markets. UK, Germany, France, Spain and Ukraine figures come from our home versus motorway charging breakdown, verified 21 August 2026. Dutch and Italian figures were checked on 10 September 2026.

MarketHome rateTypical rapidGap
Germany€0.370€0.762.1x
Italy€0.316€0.852.7x
Netherlands€0.258€0.773.0x
France€0.159€0.623.9x
Spain€0.08€0.698.6x
UK£0.08£0.8010.0x
Ukraine2.16 UAH30 UAH13.9x

The countries with the cheapest home electricity have the widest gaps, because their public prices are set by the same European charging networks regardless. Spain and the UK reward a driveway enormously. The Netherlands, Germany and Italy barely do.

For a Dutch buyer that reframes the whole decision. Your running cost is less about where you plug in and more about how many kWh the car needs in the first place. A car doing 15 kWh/100 km against one doing 22 costs you less on every single charge, home or public. Our comparison tool puts real-world consumption figures side by side, and WLTP versus real range covers why the official number isn't the one to plan around.

The tax change that hit harder than any tariff

If your Dutch EV running costs jumped this year, it probably wasn't electricity.

The MRB tariefkorting for zero-emission cars was 75% in 2025. In 2026 it's 30%. You went from paying a quarter of the full road tax to paying seventy percent of it, in one step.

YearKortingYou pay
202575%25%
2026 to 202830%70%
202925%75%
2030 onwardnone100%

Everyone writes about the 2030 cliff. The cliff already happened, in January 2026, and the 2029 step is small by comparison. The 30% was itself an improvement: the Belastingplan 2026 raised it from a previously legislated 25%.

Two more things a used-EV buyer should know. BPM applies to electric cars from 1 January 2025, at €687 for a 0 g/km car, but it's paid at first registration, so a Dutch-market used EV first registered before 2025 carries none of it for you. It bites on imports. And the SEPP purchase subsidy is permanently closed, with the last applications taken on 27 December 2024. A replacement is coming: a scrappage-linked subsidy for buying a used EV, aimed at lower and middle incomes, announced for the fourth quarter of 2026 with roughly €52 million across 2026 to 2028. The per-buyer amount has not been published. If you're shopping this autumn, it's worth asking before you sign.

What Dutch owners actually pay

Numbers from suppliers are one thing. Here's what owners write down.

Luc Akkermans, posting on 10 April 2026 about five years with a used BMW i3 at 11,000 km a year: "Tanken met zonnepanelen icm Tibber dynamisch is lachen gieren brullen: bij zon gratis, en anders gemiddeld €0,10." He also reports MRB of €42 on a 1,250 kg car and about €1,000 a year in depreciation. That's a best case, and it takes solar panels plus a dynamic contract to get there.

Owners without both land in a different place. On a Dutch forum thread from October 2025, Pinaco wrote: "Thuis kost een volle batterij €0,26 x 33 kWh en daar rijden we 200-220 km mee." CellarDoor gave "rond de 20 cent per kwh" at 16 kWh/100 km. Another poster put public charging at €0.37/kWh plus €0.69 per session on an ANWB card, which is close to the concession rates above.

The pattern in every one of these: the people with the lowest cost per kilometre are not the ones who found a clever tariff, they're the ones charging off their own roof. Which is exactly what the saldering change is about to make more valuable, not less.

FAQ

Is charging at home still worth it in the Netherlands?

Yes, but by less than you'd expect. Home at €0.258 against public AC at €0.48 is a gap of about €625 a year at 15,000 km. In the UK the equivalent choice is worth several times that. A Dutch driveway is a convenience first and a saving second.

What happens to my solar panels on 1 January 2027?

Saldering stops completely, with no phase-down. You'll be paid a terugleververgoeding of at least 50% of the bare supply rate for what you export, guaranteed through 2030, while everything you import still costs the full rate including €0.11085/kWh of energy tax. Charging the car during daylight, directly off your own generation, becomes the cheapest kWh you can get.

Is a Fastned subscription worth €5.99 a month?

If you rapid-charge more than about 140 km worth in a month, yes. Gold takes you from €0.77 to €0.54/kWh, which is €4.31 saved per 100 km. Note the fee is only quoted "tot 30 september 2026".

Why is my MRB so much higher than last year?

The korting for electric cars dropped from 75% in 2025 to 30% in 2026. It stays at 30% through 2028, falls to 25% in 2029, and disappears in 2030. Nothing about your car changed.

Can I still get a subsidy for a used electric car?

Not right now. SEPP closed permanently, with final applications on 27 December 2024. A scrappage-linked scheme for used EVs is announced for the fourth quarter of 2026, but the amount per buyer hasn't been published.

Are all the charge points in my street the same price?

No, and the reason is usually the installation date rather than the operator. In the Laadwerk concession, points installed from July 2024 run €0.35 to €0.38 while older ones on the same network run €0.47 to €0.52. Check the app before you plug in.

References

All figures verified 10 September 2026 unless stated.

#charging costs#Netherlands#running costs#saldering#2026