Cheapest Time to Charge Your EV Today

The cheapest — and greenest — hours to charge are when wholesale grid demand is lowest. We track each US grid region's day-ahead hourly electricity price and surface today's cheapest charging window. On a real-time or hourly-priced utility plan this is literally your cheapest bill; on any other plan it's still the lowest-demand, lowest-carbon time to plug in.

On a time-of-use (TOU) plan? Your cheapest rate almost always runs overnight, roughly 12 AM – 6 AM. That fixed off-peak window is the safe default for everyone — the daily grid window below just tells you when the live wholesale market is even cheaper than usual.

Today's cheapest grid window by region

Grid region	Today's cheapest window	See a city
California ISO (CAISO)	8 AM – 11 AM	Los Angeles
Texas (ERCOT)	8 AM – 11 AM	Houston
New England (ISO-NE)	2 AM – 5 AM	Boston
New York (NYISO)	2 AM – 5 AM	New York
Mid-Atlantic / Midwest (PJM)	2 AM – 5 AM (live update pending)	Philadelphia
Midwest / Gulf (MISO)	1 AM – 4 AM	Chicago
Central Plains (SPP)	2 AM – 5 AM (live update pending)	Wichita

Why some regions have a midday window too

In solar-heavy regions like California (CAISO) and parts of the Plains (SPP), wholesale prices often dip again in the middle of the day when solar output peaks. When that midday dip is clearly cheap, your city page shows it as a second window — handy if you can charge at work or at home during daylight.

About 20 states (most of the Southeast, Mountain West, Pacific Northwest, plus Alaska & Hawaii) have no day-ahead wholesale market. For cities there we show only the standard overnight off-peak window and never invent a price curve.

Wholesale day-ahead prices via the open-source gridstatus library, pulled once daily from each ISO's public market data. Day-ahead price is the literal bill only for customers on real-time/hourly-priced plans; for everyone else it marks the cheapest, lowest-carbon grid window. Times shown in each region's local zone.