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Last year brought a torrent of bad news for the U.S. electric vehicle industry. The Trump administration pushed Republicans in Congress to cancel Biden-era EV tax credits and revoke states’ rights to set clean-car mandates. The White House moved to weaken vehicle fuel-economy standards. And it froze billions of dollars in federal EV-charging grants — although legal challenges have since unlocked $5 billion of that money.
Despite the upheaval, U.S. public charging networks had a growth spurt last year, according to a report released today by data analytics firm Paren. And the new chargers are working more reliably and being used more heavily than ever — a sign the country is matching charging supply to demand.
The nation’s public fast-charging network expanded by 30% over the course of 2025, adding 18,041 ports, according to Paren. That’s up from the 13,970 fast-charging ports deployed in 2024, and way up from the 5,313 installed in 2021.
“We’ve got a record number of chargers being deployed by a bunch of new players in the industry, as well as the stalwarts,” said Bill Ferro, Paren’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Last year’s growth included more charging stations, but also more ports per station, Ferro noted. That’s a sign that charging providers are striving to ensure that EV drivers don’t have to wait too long for a charge when they pull up.
Reliability scores, which Paren measures as the share of charging sessions that are successfully completed, ticked up in 2025 too, averaging 93%. That’s good news for EV drivers who’ve been disappointed by malfunctioning chargers in past years. Ferro credited these incremental improvements both to new infrastructure, “which by default is going to work better,” and improved maintenance and remote diagnostics of malfunctioning chargers.
And utilization rates — a measure of how often a charging port is in use — held steady in most states and even increased slightly in some over the course of 2025. Paren tracked 141 million public charging sessions from January to December, a roughly 30% increase from the previous year.
Paren’s data indicates that charging infrastructure is expanding at a rate that matches up well with demand from a growing number of EV drivers, Ferro said. Maintaining that balance is vital for charging providers, who don’t want to overinvest in charging stations that fail to get enough business to pay themselves off, but also don’t want to leave drivers waiting too long for charging ports to open up.
To date, charging remains in much higher demand in some states than in others. California led the pack on utilization of its fast chargers in 2025, as it has for years, followed by Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, and Nevada. But the fastest growth in utilization occurred in Sunbelt states, including Arizona, Georgia, and Texas.
Importantly, the growth in charging infrastructure was driven almost entirely by private investment rather than by government funding, Ferro said. Tesla, which operates the country’s biggest charging network, continued to lead the pack, with more than 6,700 charging ports deployed in 2025, more than a third of the total. But longtime charging operators, other automakers, and regional players also each added hundreds of charging stations over the course of the year.
This increasing private investment helped counteract the decline in federal funds. In February, the Trump administration tried to cancel the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. After setbacks in court, the U.S. Transportation Department reopened the NEVI program in August, allowing states to resume contracting and installing chargers. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the department’s initial suspension of the funding was unlawful.
That program was designed to bolster public charging along highways and other major transit corridors across the country, including places where EV adoption has lagged, undermining the business case for building chargers. But with just over 700 ports installed as of the end of 2025, NEVI projects make up only a small fraction of the country’s total public charging — although they’re important for rural areas where chargers are still hard to find.
Although NEVI dollars are flowing again, the Trump administration hasn’t released the entirety of the federal EV-charging funding it canceled last year. States and environmental advocates have filed lawsuits seeking to force the federal government to unfreeze the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program for state and local agencies, much of it targeted at expanding charging in rural and lower-income areas.
Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans in Congress last summer not only ended EV tax credits as of September 2025, but will end tax credits for EV chargers as of July 2026. The law also rescinded hundreds of millions of dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicles Program, which was meant to help state and local governments, schools, territories, and tribes purchase zero-emissions trucks and buses and charging equipment.
Even NEVI isn’t out of the woods yet. The draft fiscal year 2026 transportation bill introduced in Congress earlier this month would strip $503 million in unobligated funds from the program, according to the Sierra Club, as well as $300 million earmarked for repair and maintenance of chargers — a potential hit to the network’s reliability.
Looming large over charging providers is the risk that EV adoption may slide precipitously downward. Demand for the vehicles boomed right before federal tax credits expired in September, but sales are now slowing. And major automakers Ford and General Motors have written down billions of dollars of losses on their EV investments.
Still, Paren is forecasting that charger deployments will continue to rise in 2026, albeit at a rate of about 8%, much slower than the breakneck pace set last year. Ferro sees the risks of overbuilding charging infrastructure falling mainly on smaller companies or those overly reliant on federal funding, whose networks could be snapped up by bigger firms.
“I think the industry is going to consolidate and expand at the same time,” he said. “We know the larger players are building out for the future. They’re not looking to 2027 for their goals. They’re looking to 2035.”
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