1,000 Rapid Hubs: How UK EV Charging Got Real

There was a time when the first question about any electric car journey was whether charging would work out at all. That question has quietly been answered. The UK now has 123,677 public chargers, and the number of proper charging hubs, the places with a bank of fast chargers together in one spot, has passed a thousand. The question is shifting from "can I charge?" to "where do I want to charge?", which is a different and much better problem to have.

The scale of the change is worth sitting with for a moment. In December 2023 the whole country had just 10,000 rapid and ultra-rapid chargers, a milestone that made the news at the time. By the end of March 2026 that had reached more than 27,000, and the number of locations with eight or more of them has gone from 239 to well over a thousand. Anyone who formed their view of electric motoring during the early years of patchy coverage is working from a map that no longer exists.

First, what the numbers actually count

One bit of jargon to clear up, because the government changed how it counts. Since 2026, the official measure is the individual EV charger, technically called EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment), rather than the physical charging unit. One cabinet on a forecourt can hold more than one independently controlled connector, so one device can serve two cars at once. At the end of August, the Department for Transport's monthly indicator, built on Zapmap data, put the network at 123,677 chargers spread across 96,708 devices at 47,810 locations. We will just say "chargers" from here on.

The growth is steady rather than spectacular. August alone added a net 953 chargers, 2026 so far has added 7,634, and the total has grown about 2% since the official 1 July figure of 121,171. Put against the government's target of 300,000 public chargers by 2030, the network sits at around 41% of the way there, a comparison the AA drew in its latest EV Readiness Index.

The hub era

A hub, by Zapmap's definition, is a location with at least eight rapid or ultra-rapid chargers. The count of these passed 1,000 in the first quarter of 2026, and there are another 65 Tesla-only hubs on top of that. By the end of June the open-to-all total had reached 1,034, with 108 added in the first half of the year alone. For scale, the same count stood at 723 at the end of 2024.

New sites are arriving at motorway services, retail parks and city centres: GRIDSERVE's 24-charger Electric Super Hub at Moto Lymm on the M6, extra capacity at Cobham and Peterborough, IONITY's urban Birmingham site with 12 chargers capable of up to 400kW. These are not niche additions. The hub is where the charging experience most resembles filling up, and Zapmap's own driver surveys consistently find hubs are what EV drivers want more of.

Ultra-rapid is the fastest-growing part of the network

Within the hub boom, the power race is being won by 150kW-and-above chargers. At the end of June there were 13,996 ultra-rapid chargers in the UK, up 37% year on year, while standard rapid chargers (50 to 149kW) grew just 2.1% because older units are being upgraded rather than replaced. Rapid and ultra-rapid units are only about a quarter of chargers by count, yet ultra-rapid alone delivered an estimated 52% of all the energy used on the public network in the final quarter of 2025, according to a Zapmap and Green Finance Institute analysis, up from 44% a year earlier. That is the statistic that matters for whether the network can absorb a growing fleet.

For a driver with a car that can take 150kW or more, a 20-minute stop at a hub now genuinely covers a long journey. For anyone planning holiday routes, our guide to motorway service chargers covers what to expect at each operator, and rapid charging etiquette still applies: move the car once charging is done, because a hub only works when the bays turn over.

The economics of hubs are worth understanding too, because they explain where the new sites land. A hub needs a high-capacity grid connection, which is cheapest where the network is already strong: motorway junctions, retail parks, service stations. That is why hub building is racing ahead on trunk routes while some residential areas still wait for their first kerbside column, a split we look at separately in our piece on councils and on-street charging. It also reflects how people use chargers: a high-powered hub turns over far more cars per day than a 7kW column ever can, and the Zapmap and Green Finance Institute utilisation data shows the energy share concentrated in ultra-rapid chargers still climbing as the fleet grows.

From scarcity to choice

The deeper change is psychological. Zapmap's data shows the network growing about 10% year on year, with 5,119 chargers added in the first half of 2026 alone. Coverage is broad enough that the interesting differences are now price and reliability rather than existence, which is why we track the state of the charging network and the cost per kWh separately from the raw count.

There is still a long way to 300,000, and growth in the second half of 2026 has been running below the pace that target implies. But the direction is settled, and the practical experience of driving an electric car in Britain has changed character: charging is something you fit around your journey, not the thing that decides whether the journey happens.

First, what the numbers actually count

The hub era

Ultra-rapid is the fastest-growing part of the network

From scarcity to choice

Sources