Tesla Raised US Supercharger Prices 15% in a Year. The Other Networks' Average Has Not Moved in Five Quarters.

Paren published its third-quarter report on the US fast-charging market on 13 October 2026. The United States passed 80,000 public fast-charging ports in the quarter, Tesla again built more of them than anyone else, and Tesla is also the reason the national average price rose. Everyone else's prices, taken together, did not move.

The report counts 664 new DC fast-charging stations and 4,106 new ports between July and September, taking the national network to 14,614 stations and 80,964 ports. Paren's Q3 2026 report draws on its own infrastructure dataset, the federal AFDC station list and proprietary session models, and says it monitors 98% of US fast-charging ports in real time.

The price line

The national average was $0.540 per kWh, up 0.4% on the second quarter and 2.7% on a year earlier. Paren's wording is direct: "Tesla accounts for the increase." Tesla's price for non-Tesla drivers without a membership rose 15% over the year to $0.569, and its member rate, the price a Tesla itself pays, rose 9% to $0.396. The average across non-Tesla networks has stayed near $0.533 for five quarters.

The US move runs against Europe. On 11 September Tesla cut German Supercharger prices overnight, to as little as 20 cents off-peak, on the same day it raised them at more than 200 Canadian sites. Paren's figure covers a year rather than a day, but it confirms where Tesla's prices are rising: North America. J.D. Power's 2026 study had already dropped the Supercharger network from first to fourth on payment and cost factors.

Tesla builds the most, and its share still falls

Tesla added 1,287 ports in the quarter, 31.3% of all new ports, or 1,411 and 34.4% counting the 124 at Supercharger for Business sites, where a host buys the hardware and sets the price. A year earlier it added 1,744, 37.4% of that quarter's total. Its share of all US fast-charging ports has slipped from 54.3% to 49.3% in twelve months, after Paren recorded it falling below 50% for the first time in the second quarter. Tesla added about 5,700 ports over the year. The rest of the market added more than twice as many.

Tesla's sites are getting bigger. New Superchargers averaged 13.1 ports, up from 12.1 in the second quarter. Eleven had 24 or more stalls, nearly three times as many as a quarter earlier, led by a 48-stall site in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Tesla added 303 ports rated above 400 kW from 26 sites with its 500 kW V4 cabinets and now has 42 such sites with 487 ports.

Demand, use and reliability

Sessions reached 50.4 million in the quarter, up 26% from 39.9 million, with a record 17.6 million in July. Because the network also grew 26%, utilisation, the share of time a port spends charging a car, stayed at 15.9%, inside the 15.7% to 16.5% band it has held for five quarters. The 30 largest metro areas ran at 21.1% and the rest of the country at 11.0%; Los Angeles led the metros at 31.8%.

For scale, Tesla's own third-quarter update, reported by TeslAnt on 2 October, counted 69 million Supercharger sessions worldwide.

What it means

The slowdown is in sites, not ports. Every quarter of 2026 has opened fewer stations than the same quarter of 2025, 2,158 against 2,696 so far this year, while ports are down only 9% because each site is larger. Paren expects the usual fourth-quarter push; last year's brought 6,191 ports.

For a Tesla driver in the US, the practical change is the member rate: $0.396 is 9% more than a year ago, and the gap other brands pay without a membership has widened to about 17 cents. For a European owner, the lesson is that Tesla prices market by market. The same quarter brought a 20-cent floor in Germany and a 15% annual rise in the US.