What Charging Costs in Italy, and the Card Hold That Makes It Look Ten Times Worse

Two stories from the Italian charging market landed on the same day, and read together they explain most of what confuses drivers about what a charge costs.

The survey

Consumer association Adiconsum and tariff tracker TariffEV publish a monthly price survey, and the July 2026 edition covers 20 operators on AC, 20 on DC and 16 on high-power charging.

The gap between the public network and a domestic socket is the number that shapes Italian EV ownership. Charging at home costs roughly a third of the AC public average, so the economics of running an EV in Italy depend heavily on whether a driver has off-street parking — a divide that matters more in Italian cities than in most of Northern Europe.

The survey also publishes break-even thresholds against diesel, which is the more useful way to read the figures. In city driving, public charging stays cheaper than diesel up to €0.800/kWh. On the motorway, where an EV's efficiency advantage shrinks and a diesel's improves, the threshold falls to €0.520/kWh. At July's €0.74/kWh DC average, a motorway fast charge in Italy costs more than the equivalent diesel — while the same energy in the city remains comfortably cheaper.

The €10/kWh that wasn't

The second story is a reader complaint. Someone charged at an Enel X point in Sappada, took on 3.05 kWh over a little more than an hour on a slow AC charger, and saw €30 taken from their PostePay card. That works out to nearly €10/kWh.

It was not a price. It was a pre-authorisation hold — an amount the operator's payment processor reserves on the card to confirm funds are available before the session, released a few days later once the real charge settles. The actual cost of that session was under €3. Other drivers reported €49 holds from Enel X and from Electra.

The mechanism is standard and appears at petrol pumps and hotels too. The problem is that it is close to invisible at the moment of use: a driver sees a large debit on a banking app, no itemised receipt, and no obvious indication that the figure is temporary. On a prepaid card with a small balance, a €49 hold can also block the next purchase.

What it means for European drivers

For drivers in Italy, two practical points follow. Check the settled transaction rather than the initial debit before concluding a charge was overpriced — and if you use a prepaid card, keep enough headroom for a hold several times the size of the actual session.

For operators, the transparency gap is a self-inflicted wound at a moment when Italian charging is already being restructured: Enel X's charging business is being folded into Enel Energia. Price complaints that turn out to be payment-flow complaints still register as price complaints, and the AFIR rules obliging clear ad-hoc pricing across the EU were written for exactly this kind of ambiguity.