Fleet EV charging cost per port

A depot bill has two shapes inside it. One set of costs happens once regardless of how many ports you energise: the service and switchgear, the trench across the yard, the conduit and pull boxes, the concrete pads, the restoration of whatever you cut. The other set happens per port: the charger, its mount or pedestal, the final terminations, commissioning and network setup.Only the second set scales with port count. The first is divided by it. So the per-port price of a four-port depot and a forty-port depot at the same address, built to the same spec, are different numbers describing the same job, and the difference is arithmetic rather than a better deal.This is also why make-ready dominates commercial charging bills. Published breakdowns put the electrical and civil make-ready at roughly half to seventy percent of a commercial charging project, with the hardware itself commonly $700 to $3,500 per port. A proposal built up from hardware price is describing the small end of the project.

Ten vans on overnight dwell, ten Level 2 ports, existing service with enough spare capacity that no new transformer is needed, and a trench across a paved yard to a row of pads. Every figure below is an illustrative input for the arithmetic. A site walk replaces all of them, and the one that moves most between real depots is the trench.Total lands at about $73,000, or $7,300 per port, which sits mid-range against the sourced national band. Make-ready is roughly sixty percent of it, which is inside the fifty to seventy percent that commercial breakdowns report. The chargers are under a quarter of the bill.Note what is not in the number, because these are the items that turn a good estimate into a bad surprise.

Utility-side service work. If the yard needs a larger service or a new transformer, the utility prices that itself, on its own schedule, and it is not part of your contractor's per-port figure. It is also the item with the longest lead time on the whole project, so ask about it before you ask about anything else.Ongoing costs. Network subscriptions are billed per port per year for as long as the chargers are networked. Demand charges are a rate question rather than a construction one and can exceed the energy bill at an unmanaged depot. Neither appears in capex and both belong in the business case.Site items that arrive with the electrical. Striping, signage, wheel stops, lighting relocation, accessibility work where the applicable rules require it. Some proposals include them, most do not, and the difference between two bids is frequently here rather than in the electrical scope. Ask each bidder to list exclusions rather than comparing headline totals.

Distance from the service to the vehicles. This is the trench, and the trench is usually the largest single site-wide line. A row of pads against the building and a row at the far fence are different projects at the same address.Whether the existing service has spare capacity. If it does, load management across the dwell window frequently avoids an upgrade entirely, and the project stays inside the range above. If it does not, a service upgrade moves the total by an amount the utility sets and adds months to the schedule.Surface and restoration. Cutting and restoring asphalt or concrete, working around drainage, and reinstating a yard that has to keep operating during construction all sit in the civil line. A gravel yard and a finished parking structure are not the same trench even if the run is the same length.Notice that none of the three is the charger. Hardware selection matters for reliability, software and warranty. It is not where the money is, and letting a vendor conversation start with hardware is how depots end up optimising the smallest line on the page.

The per-port curve above only works in your favour if the site work is done once. Trench the yard, populate four ports, then come back in two years to trench it again for the next eight, and you have paid the site-wide cost twice while claiming the small-depot per-port price both times.The documented saving from putting conduit and panel capacity in for the full build at the start is forty to sixty percent per port against retrofitting the same site later. That is the single largest cost decision available on a depot project and it is made at the design stage, before anyone has quoted a charger.The counter-argument is real: if the electrification plan slips, oversized infrastructure is stranded capital. The resolution is to oversize the passive parts, which do not go obsolete, and defer the powered parts, which do.

There is no federal tax credit to net against a depot built today. Section 30C, the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit, terminated for property placed in service after June 30, 2026, under Public Law 119-21. The business version went with the residential one.Vendor proposals and cost calculators are still showing it, because most of that material was written when the credit ran to 2032. If a per-port price is presented to you net of a thirty percent federal credit, the gross number is your number, and the difference is not coming back.What remains is the utility layer and a thinner state layer, both local and neither guaranteed to exist in your territory. Verify any program on the sponsor's own page with a date before it enters a proforma.