What October's Energy Price Cap Means for Charging at Home

The electricity price most households pay changes on 1 October, and for anyone running an electric car it is worth ten minutes of attention. Ofgem's cap for the three months to 31 December sets the ceiling on standard variable tariffs, which is what a supplier is allowed to charge if you have never switched or your last fixed deal has expired. The new electricity unit rate is 26.32p per kilowatt hour, up from 26.11p, and the electricity standing charge falls to 54.83p a day from 57.19p. Those are the two numbers that decide what a home charge costs this winter.

The headline is a gas story, not an electricity one

Ofgem announced the change on 26 August, describing a 4% rise on the cap, which takes a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit from £1,663 a year to £1,723, an increase of £60, or about £5 a month. Look at the detail and the picture changes. Gas rises 8.7%, while electricity goes up by 0.8% in unit terms with a lower standing charge to match. In Ofgem's own words, households that do not use gas will see an increase of less than 1%.

Two policies are doing the work there. Wholesale gas prices have climbed 11% over three months, which Ofgem puts down to the conflict in the Middle East. Against that, the government has removed VAT from household electricity for the six months from 1 October to 31 March 2027, a cut Ofgem says would otherwise have added around £45 to the cap. The result is a winter where the electric half of a bill barely moves and the gas half carries the rise.

What a charge actually costs now

The cap is a ceiling on rates, so it is also the fairest yardstick for anyone not on a special tariff. Take a family hatch with a 50.8kWh usable battery, which is the size fitted to cars such as the Vauxhall Corsa Electric. A full charge from empty at the October cap rate comes to about £13.37. Drive 1,000 miles in a car returning 4.5 miles per kWh and you would buy around 219kWh of electricity, roughly £57.63 at the cap rate.

Compare that with the pump. The RAC's Fuel Watch average for unleaded petrol passed £1.70 a litre this month, the highest since 2022. A 45mpg petrol car covering the same 1,000 miles burns about 101 litres, which is £172 at that average. The gap between filling up at home and filling up at a forecourt has rarely been wider, and the different routes to public charging are covered in our guide to prices per kilowatt hour.

The overnight tariff is still the best deal in motoring

The cap rate is the wrong number to charge an electric car against if you can avoid it. Time-of-use tariffs sold specifically for EV owners sit a long way below it. Octopus Energy's Intelligent Octopus Go charges 8p per kWh from 1 October, down from 8.4p, and gives six hours of cheap power across the whole house between 11:30pm and 5:30am, plus up to six hours of smart charging whenever the grid is cheapest. The same 50.8kWh charge costs about £4.06 on that rate, and 1,000 miles costs about £17.52.

Octopus calculates that 8p is up to 69% below the average price cap unit rate. The company also says customers on that fixed tariff typically saved £771 over the year to April 2026 compared with its standard variable tariff, and it quotes Ofgem's own figures showing 653,000 households on smart time-of-use EV tariffs.

Two things make those rates possible. Smart meters let suppliers measure half-hourly use and price it accordingly, and an electric car is the most useful flexible load a home can own, because its battery sits idle for most of the night. A 7kW wallbox running through the full six-hour window adds around 42kWh, which is roughly 190 miles of driving at 4.5 miles per kWh. If you are still deciding on hardware, our wallbox cost guide breaks down what installation involves.

What to sort before 1 October

Check what you are on. Around 35% of households, roughly 11 million, are on fixed tariffs and will not see this change at all, though the VAT cut still applies to their electricity automatically.

Do the sums on a fix. Ofgem's director general for markets, Neil Kenward, noted that fixed tariffs are available at £100 or more below the October cap, and that prepayment customers pay the lowest cap rates and could save around £45 more than direct debit customers. If certainty through the winter matters more to you than the chance of a cheaper cap in January, a fix below the cap is a straightforward call.

Look at a time-of-use tariff if you have a smart meter. You need a compatible car or chargepoint and a willingness to leave charging to the app rather than the wall, but the difference between 8p and 26.32p is the whole game. Households building a home battery can shift more of their ordinary evening use into the same cheap window.

Know your limits if you cannot charge at home. The cap does nothing for the millions of drivers without off-street parking, who buy their electricity from public networks instead. Our tracker of public charging prices follows that market, and the planning rules for charging across a pavement are changing as we reported in charging without a driveway.

The bigger picture

The direction of the numbers deserves a mention. This cap sits 52% below the peak of the energy crisis in 2022, when the government stepped in to hold bills at £2,500. The VAT holiday runs out on 31 March 2027, and the next cap, for January to March, arrives in late November. Wholesale gas remains the volatile part of the equation and the part nobody in the UK controls.

What is within reach of most drivers is the tariff they charge on. An electric car on a standard variable rate this winter will cost about £58 for 1,000 miles. The same car on an overnight EV tariff will cost about £18, and it will do that while the rest of the house's ordinary load runs on the same cheap six hours. On the current arithmetic, that is the best-value motoring in Britain, and the gap has widened rather than narrowed.