TurningCircle
11 November 2026updated 16:06

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Charging

Charger additions fell 18% while electric car registrations rose 30%

The UK had 126,140 public chargers on 1 November, but the 10,088 added this year is 18% below 2025 while electric car registrations rose 30.4%.

By The TurningCircle Team 6 min read

Britain's public charging network reached 126,140 chargers on 1 November, 9.6% more than a year earlier, according to the Department for Transport's monthly indicator updated today. The total is a record. The pace behind it is not. The network added 10,088 chargers in the first ten months of 2026, against 12,321 over the same period of 2025, a fall of 18% while electric car registrations rose 30.4%.

The monthly faster indicator is the least glamorous publication in the department's charging series. It carries no commentary and no explanation. What it does carry is a consistent count, taken at midnight on the first of each month, and that count now says something the quarterly releases have not: the installation rate has slipped.

What the release counts

The figures cover public charging infrastructure in the United Kingdom, sourced from Zapmap and published on 11 November. At 1 November there were 126,140 chargers on 98,899 physical devices across 48,815 locations (data table).

The distinction between chargers and devices matters more than it used to. A charger is a single connection that can run one car at a time, while a device is the cabinet on the ground. One cabinet can hold two chargers, which is why the network averages 1.28 chargers per device. Both measures rose over the month, with chargers up 1,402 and devices up 923.

October's 1,402 addition compares with 1,061 in September, and it is the third-strongest month of the year after March and August. Read on its own, the month looks healthy. Read across ten months, it is not.

The ten-month comparison

On 1 January the network stood at 116,052 chargers. By 1 November it stood at 126,140, a net addition of 10,088. Over the equivalent ten months of 2025 the count went from 102,771 to 115,092, a net addition of 12,321. The stock has grown 8.7% over those ten months, against 12.0% over the same stretch of last year.

One correction sits inside this year's figure and flatters the slowdown, so it is worth adding back. In June a charge point operator removed about 1,270 chargers from its open data feed after they were found to be private-access units wrongly reported as public. That removal is a data-quality fix, not demolition, and the department flags it in the notes. Add those chargers back and 2026's ten-month total becomes 11,358, which is still 7.8% below 2025.

The rolling picture points the same way. In the twelve months to 1 November the network grew by 11,048 chargers. Across the calendar year 2025 it grew by 13,281. Annual additions are down 16.8%.

Rapid chargers are the exception

The high-power end of the network is still expanding at a fair clip. Chargers rated at 50kW and above, the rapid and ultra-rapid units that carry motorway journeys, reached 30,060 on 1 November, up 4,044 on the 26,016 recorded a year earlier, a rise of 15.5%. October alone added 338.

Rapid units now make up 23.8% of the network, against 22.6% a year ago, and Zapmap counts 1,091 charging hubs open to all electric cars. That is the segment where the money and the utilisation are, and it is growing roughly 1.6 times as fast as the network as a whole.

The slow end is a different story, and it is the end that matters to anyone without a driveway. The government's own Budget documents describe lower-powered chargers near homes as around a third of the current network, which puts that segment at roughly 40,000 units. The support aimed at it does not start until spring 2027, when £100 million over two years will cut prices at lower-powered chargers near homes rather than pay for new ones.

Where the chargers are

London holds 32,072 chargers, or 25.4% of the UK total, on a population of roughly nine million. The South East has 16,929 and Scotland 12,956. Northern Ireland has 1,239.

Per head of population the gap is stark. The UK average is 182.1 chargers per 100,000 people. London records 352.8 and Scotland 233.6, against 127.6 in the East Midlands, 116.6 in the North West and 115.2 in Yorkshire and the Humber. Northern Ireland sits lowest at 64.3. London has 2.8 times the charger density of the East Midlands.

The rapid picture inverts part of that. London has 29.4 rapid chargers per 100,000 people, the lowest of any UK region, while Scotland has 62.0 and the South West 50.8. A dense city network of low-power kerbside points serves residents who park on the street. A thin network of high-power sites serves people passing through. The two are counted together and do different jobs, a point we made in our review of the summer figures.

The fleet is growing faster than the network

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders reported on 5 November that 503,805 battery electric cars were registered in the first ten months of 2026, up 30.4% on the 386,244 of a year earlier. Electric cars took 26.6% of the year to date and 32.0% of October, against a ZEV mandate target of 33% for the year.

Set the two series side by side and the arithmetic is blunt. Every net new public charger installed this year arrives alongside about 50 new electric cars. Last year the same calculation gave about 31. Most of those cars will charge at home most of the time, so the ratio is a rough gauge of public supply rather than a measure of need. For the 40% of drivers without access to a driveway, identified in a Vauxhall freedom of information exercise covering 414 councils, it is closer to the whole story. That exercise found 39% of councils provide on-street charging, up from 31% in 2023.

The department's July breakdown put 33% of chargers on-street, 52% at destinations such as supermarkets and hotels, and 11% en route. The kerbside share is the one that decides whether a household without a driveway can run an electric car on cheap overnight power, and it is the share growing slowest.

What it means for a buyer

A national total of 126,140 is a reasonable answer to a question nobody asks. The useful question is whether there is a working charger within walking distance of home, and the monthly indicator cannot answer it. It counts installations, not uptime, and it counts a 7kW lamppost post the same as a 400kW hub.

The next signal is the December count, which has carried an end-of-year push in past years as operators close out installation programmes. It will show whether the autumn recovery in net additions holds through the winter.

Price matters more to a driver's weekly cost than the size of the network does, and we track it in our running check on public charging rates. Whether the spring 2027 money moves the low-power segment is a longer question, and one the monthly count will answer slowly.

For anyone shopping for a used electric car now, the practical test is unchanged. Look up the chargers within a mile of the address where the car will be parked overnight, and treat the national figure as context rather than reassurance. The rural end of that gap is set out in our piece on charging deserts, and the council-by-council picture in the on-street charging audit.

Sources