Germany's charging registry has passed a round number. The Bundesnetzagentur counted 212,064 publicly accessible charging points nationwide as of 1 August 2026, an increase of 28,663 points — 15.6% — on a year earlier. Installed capacity available simultaneously reached 9.22 GW, up from 7.35 GW.
The more useful figure for anyone driving a Tesla is further down the release: of 12,914 registered operators, Tesla is the third largest.
Who actually runs Germany's chargers
| Operator | Charging points |
|---|---|
| EnBW mobility+ | 12,464 |
| E.ON Drive | 4,942 |
| Tesla | 3,951 |
| EWE Go | 3,595 |
| BP/Aral | 3,149 |
Tesla sits third on a list of nearly 13,000 operators, which is a reminder of how unusual its position is: a carmaker operating one of the largest charging networks in Europe's biggest car market. Those points are Superchargers, and a growing share of them are open to other brands, so the number counts as public infrastructure rather than a walled garden.
It is also a reminder of how fragmented the rest is. The top five operators together account for roughly 28,000 of 212,064 points. Everything else is spread across councils, hotels, supermarkets, car parks and Stadtwerke, which is why roaming terms and payment friction remain the practical problem rather than raw coverage.
The split still leans slow
| Type | Points | Share |
|---|---|---|
| AC, up to 22 kW | 156,399 | 74% |
| DC, above 22 kW | 55,665 | 26% |
Three quarters of Germany's public charging is AC at 22 kW or below — useful overnight or at a destination, irrelevant on a motorway run. The growth, though, is at the top end: the highest DC class, above 299 kW, grew 36.4% to 19,566 points, the strongest dynamic in the data. Hamburg expanded fastest among the states at 38.6%.
That top class is worth a caveat for Tesla owners specifically. A charger rated above 299 kW has headroom no current Tesla can draw — the cars peak at 250 kW — which is the same mismatch TeslAnt described in Shell's state-funded 400 kW rollout across Poland. Faster chargers still help, because a car that cannot use the peak can still hold a higher rate for longer when a site is not power-shared, but the headline kilowatts are not a Tesla figure.
Where the points are
North Rhine-Westphalia leads with 41,646 charging points, ahead of Bavaria on 40,421 and Baden-Württemberg on 35,791 — the three most populous states, in population order.
Read the total as a floor
The Bundesnetzagentur is explicit that its own figures undercount. The Ladesäulenverordnung does not require complete registration, so the real number of publicly accessible charging points is higher than 212,064. Private residential and non-public industrial charging are not tracked at all.
How it compares across Europe
For comparison, France crossed 200,045 public charging points on 31 July 2026, on a similar total but a slowing build rate. Germany's 15.6% annual growth suggests the opposite trend, and the concentration of that growth in high-power DC is where the next year of long-distance driving in Europe gets easier.