In 2024, the U.S. added 1,000 new public EV chargers a week—but that’s not nearly enough

In order to get more people to switch from gas cars to EVs, the U.S. needs to have a robust charging network. The Biden administration pledged to build 500,000 EV charging stations across the country by 2030—but Trump’s agenda will obviously be different when he takes office in January. So how much progress did Biden actually make?

Currently, there are more than 204,000 publicly available EV charging ports, according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. (And one station can have multiple ports, allowing more than one EV to be plugged in at a time.) In 2024 alone, more than 37,700 EV charger ports were turned on. That includes nearly 12,500 DC fast chargers (which can charge an EV to 80% in less than an hour) and more than 25,000 Level 2 chargers (which do the same in about four to 10 hours).

That means that the country is adding, on average, 1,000 new publicly available EV chargers a week that come directly from federal funding, federal tax incentives, state and local funding, and private investments. “That’s a really steady pace making a meaningful difference,” says Albert Gore, director of the EV-advocacy nonprofit Zero Emissions Transportation Association (ZETA), who worked at Tesla for seven years in public policy, and is son of the former vice president and climate activist.

So, since Biden took office in 2021, the number of publicly available EV chargers in the U.S. has more than doubled—and more are underway thanks, in part, to federal investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. That law created the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which gives funding to states for EV charging stations.

Still, the country needs significantly more chargers to keep up with the growing EV adoption. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that by 2030, there will be 33 million EVs on the road. In order to support them, the U.S. needs 28 million EV charging ports. A majority of those can be private, since most EV drivers charge at home. But we’d still need more than 1.2 million public ports total, or about 1 million more than we have now. At the current rate of 1,000 ports a week, that would take 19 years. We need to reach that number in five years.

Admittedly, the NEVI program is slow: $7.5 billion in federal funds for EV chargers ($5 billion of which was allocated to states) has so far delivered only eight EV charging stations. But Gore says that doesn’t capture “the full scope of the program” and how this funding will support “steady growth” throughout the rest of the decade.

Through those federal funding streams, there are 255 EV charging ports now operating across 13 states, and 24,800 federally funded charging-port projects underway across all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. While this progress seems slow, “the vast majority of federally funded chargers are planned to come online in the second half of this decade,” the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation spokesperson said.

Private sector EV chargers continue to grow too. Mercedes-Benz announced in July that it was putting its high-power EV chargers at 100 Starbucks locations along Interstate-5. ItsElectric, which makes curbside EV chargers for cities, raised $6.5 million to expand in New York City and beyond. California announced in August that it surpassed 150,000 EV chargers thanks to a combination of public and private projects.

Many EV drivers may also have their own chargers at home, where 80% of EV charging currently happens. California alone estimates that in addition to that public network, there are more than 500,000 private home chargers installed statewide. (California had long been the top state for EV sales but, in 2024, Colorado passed California’s total EV market share for the first time.) Ford also announced this year it was giving free home chargers and installation to some EV buyers.

That means the public EV charger network has to handle about 20% of charging—but it still needs to be both reliable and convenient to ensure drivers’ needs are met as they travel, whether on a long stretch of highway or through a crowded city. Those two factors are still struggles for the network: A 2024 study found that about one in five EV charging attempts at public stations fail. And while every state does have public EV charging stations, there are still “charging deserts” across large swaths of the country, especially in rural areas.

Still, Gore expects the public EV charging network to continue to grow, not just because of the federal policies in place, but because of the state and local investments. “There’s so much energy there around just making it easier for people to do things, like if a building owner wants to provide curbside charging,” he says. “There’s a whole suite of new products coming to the market.”

All that investment is something Trump can’t claw back. Although how his administration will continue to push the public EV charging network forward—if at all—remains to be seen.