Mapping fast EV ports across rural America reveals ‘emerging charging divide’
Despite the Trump administration's efforts to slow federal funding for building electric vehicle chargers across the country, the number of ports is growing, although rural areas are seeing less investment, per data from the EV charging data analytics firm Paren shared with The Daily Yonder.
As of the first quarter of 2025, 45% of rural counties had at least one fast EV charging port installed, compared to 76.5% of metropolitan counties. Right now, the United States has around 60,000 fast charging ports installed, with more than 3,600 new ones coming online across the U.S. since the beginning of the year, Paren found. A charging port is like a gas pump—it’s where a car gets plugged in to charge up. Direct current fast charging ports, which are also called DC or level 3 chargers, take about 30 minutes to fill a car to a full charge.
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A charging station can have anywhere from several to several dozen charging ports. The term “charger” refers to the hardware. While chargers and ports might seem interchangeable, they’re not. It gets tricky because one charger can have the hookups for more than one vehicle. The number of ports, then, is a useful metric for mapping how EV charging infrastructure is built out in any given area.
In rural areas, charging ports have been slower to come online than in metropolitan areas. That’s partly because of low utilization, or the amount of time the ports are plugged in and providing vehicles with electricity. In cities like San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Miami, where a greater share of the cars on the road are EVs, charging ports can have utilization rates as high as 30% or 40% during peak hours, which are typically in the evening. For much of the rest of the country, though, and particularly in less densely populated rural areas, utilization rates tend to be in the teens or lower.
North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana have the lowest state-wide utilization rates in the country, according to Loren McDonald, Paren’s chief analyst. Rural counties in those states also have the fewest charging ports.
“There just aren’t a lot of them on the road there locally to have that sort of baseline level of usage of those stations,” said McDonald.
The rural charging catch-22
Few EV drivers and a limited number of charging stations pose a dilemma for rural areas looking to expand EV charging infrastructure. Beyond ideological and price considerations, drivers may be hesitant to switch to EVs when there are few places to charge them, while at the same time, investors are hesitant to build charging stations because there aren’t many EV drivers on the road. In order for privately funded charging stations to break even on their investment, utilization rates have to hit certain percentages, usually greater than the teens or low twenties.
“The deck is stacked against those rural areas,” McDonald said. “There aren’t the trends and the economic viability to motivate private industry to put them there.”
To mitigate what McDonald calls this “emerging charging divide,” state and federal-level government programs offer competitive funding for developers to build out EV charging infrastructure in rural areas.
However, the Trump administration has made funding at the federal level difficult for states to access. In February, the Trump administration suspended funding from the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program. Several states and nonprofit organizations, including Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, and Plug in America, have since sued the government for withholding the funds, which were authorized by Congress in 2021.
On May 22, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Transportation, which administers the program under the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), does not have the authority to suspend NEVI and that the agency must continue to carry out the requirements of the program. The court case brought by states and nonprofits is still pending.
Funding for NEVI is designed to be allocated to states over a five-year period. The FHWA has allocated a total of $3.3 billion of NEVI funding to states through fiscal year 2025. States had awarded or obligated $527 million when the Trump administration suspended the program, and an estimated 57 NEVI-funded charging stations had opened across 15 states.
Of those NEVI-funded charging stations, 19 are in Ohio, where Bill Ferro, Paren’s chief technology officer, said many are in rural areas. This has to do with Ohio’s major interstate highways that run North-South and East-West through rural counties. In November and December 2024, when traffic increased during the holiday season, utilization rates spiked for Ohio’s rural EV chargers. Ferro said the stations are an example of how NEVI projects can be successful in rural areas.
“We would say they were the best use of NEVI funding in that they were outside the major cities, and they were intended to allow that great American Road Trip to go,” said Ferro.
Another hotspot on the map is in La Paz County, Arizona, where there are 140 ports, more than any other rural county in the country. Like in Ohio, an interstate is responsible for the buildout, Ferro and McDonald said. Interstate 10 connects Los Angeles to Phoenix, and one Tesla Supercharger station right off the highway has 84 ports.
As of early June, states are still waiting to see how the future of NEVI is resolved, and some have paused the application process for the next cycle of funding. While the program’s freeze has been a blow to rural areas looking to build out their charging infrastructure, McDonald stressed that NEVI is not the only source of money available to communities.
“Almost every charging station in America has some type of incentive, grant, or tax credit,” McDonald said. “NEVI gets all the headlines, but there are lots of other sources of incentive and grant money to offset costs.”
Utility companies and states have "make-ready" incentives to prepare sites to power EV charging stations. Some programs will cover the cost of getting sites connected with the utility and any construction that's needed before the ports go in. Other programs offer rebates for the hardware, helping to facilitate the buildout of EV charging stations in places where private investors would otherwise not be interested in installing charging ports.
McDonald sees the government’s role in funding EV chargers as a way to ensure Americans have access to services regardless of where they live. He compared the current buildout of EV infrastructure to the Rural Electrification Act, which provided federal loans for the installation of rural electrical systems in the 1930s. In that era, the government stepped in to ensure communities had access to electric services in places where private investors didn’t see a way to make a profit.
“There are some things that literally require government help, or otherwise it’s never going to happen,” McDonald said.
Across the U.S., EV sales grew in 2024, increasing the share of EVs among all car sales, according to the International Energy Agency's annual report released in May. The report projects that the number of EVs on the road is expected to continue growing in the U.S. in 2025 and beyond, despite current political and trade headwinds imposed by the Trump administration.
This story was produced by The Daily Yonder and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.