EV Charger Uptime: How to Check a Station Before You Go

If a federally funded fast charger on an interstate corridor answered your car's request for 150 kW with 40, the regulation that governs that stall does not treat those minutes as "up." It treats them as a port that failed to dispense electricity at its required power level. Most drivers assume the 97 percent uptime rule counts a charger as working whenever its screen is lit. The text says something stricter in one place and much looser in several others.

This guide is about both halves: what the rule actually measures, which stations it covers, and the checks that tell you before you leave whether the station on your route is likely to charge you. Where a section number appears, it is to the eCFR text of Title 23, issue dated 23 September 2026, read through the eCFR versioner API on 15 October 2026. Every section of Part 680 in that issue still carries its original 30 March 2023 version date, so nothing in the uptime rule has been amended since it took effect.

What counts as "up" under 23 CFR 680.116(b)

The rule itself is one sentence. Section 680.116(b) requires that "each charging port has an average annual uptime of greater than 97%." The definition that follows is where the detail lives. A port is considered "up" when "its hardware and software are both online and available for use, or in use, and the charging port successfully dispenses electricity in accordance with requirements for minimum power level (see § 680.106(d))."

That cross-reference matters. Section 680.106(d)(1) requires corridor fast chargers to have a continuous rating of at least 150 kW and to supply power "according to an EV's power delivery request up to 150 kW," simultaneously from each port. Power sharing between ports is permitted only so long as each port still meets a vehicle's request up to 150 kW. For Level 2, (d)(2) sets the floor at 6 kW per port.

So a port that is online, takes your card, and then trickles is not "up" for the minutes it underdelivers against what the car asked for. The catch is the word request. A cold battery asks for much less than 150 kW, and the charger owes you only what the car requests. If your car is the reason the session is slow, the charger is meeting the rule. The difference between those two cases is covered in what preconditioning fixes in the cold.

The equation, and the allowance it creates

Paragraph (b)(3) turns the definition into arithmetic:

µ = ((525,600 − (T_outage − T_excluded)) / 525,600) × 100

525,600 is the number of minutes in a year. Uptime is recalculated monthly, each time over the previous twelve months. To stay above 97 percent, a port can carry 15,768 minutes of counted outage in that window. That is 262.8 hours, or just under eleven days.

Three features of that equation decide what it promises you on a given afternoon:

1. It is per port, not per station. A four-port site can lose a different port for ten days each, at different times, and all four can comply. The minimum port count in § 680.106(b) (four network-connected ports, able to charge four vehicles at once) is the real protection, because it makes a fully dead site less likely than a dead port.
2. It is an annual average. Nothing in the paragraph limits how long a single outage may last, provided the year still averages out. Eleven consecutive days is within the arithmetic.
3. Excluded minutes come off before the division. The five listed causes (utility interruptions, vehicle fault, scheduled maintenance, vandalism, natural disasters) only qualify when the operator "can demonstrate that the charging port would otherwise be operational," and closed hours drop out too. The full list, and what it means for trip margins, is in the road trip guide linked further down.

The vandalism exclusion is the one most likely to meet you in person. ChargeX gave a severed output cable its own error code (CX026, covered below), and under the formula a port with a cable cut by vandals may not be counting against its operator at all.

Which stations the rule binds, and how to find out

Part 680 is not a rule for all public chargers. Section 680.102 applies it to NEVI Formula Program projects and to "projects for the construction of publicly accessible EV chargers that are funded with funds made available under Title 23." A privately financed site of the same brand, across the road, owes none of it. And the obligation has an end date: under 680.106(i), states must keep chargers in compliance "for a period of not less than 5 years from the initial date of operation."

You can check which side of that line a station sits on. The station API behind the Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center, documented on the NLR developer network, has a funding_sources field. It can hold three values: CFI (Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program), EVC-RAA (Electric Vehicle Charger Reliability and Accessibility Accelerator), and NEVI (National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program).

On 15 October 2026 a query of that API for electric stations returned 263 records tagged NEVI, 101 tagged CFI and 15 tagged EVC-RAA. The NEVI list is not one brand: the first records returned were Tesla Supercharger sites in Maryland, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and California. Funding attaches to the grant, not the logo, which is also why a federally funded station may not require a membership for use under 680.106(f)(2) while a sister site of the same brand may.

EVC-RAA deserves a word, because its purpose is the subject of this page. FHWA's funding notice, published 13 September 2023, offered up to $100 million "to repair or replace broken or non-operational EV chargers," according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. A station carrying that tag received money under a program set up to fix or replace chargers that were not working.

California has its own rule

Outside federal funding, California has adopted a standard of its own. The California Energy Commission describes its "EV Charger Data and Reliability Standards Regulation," adopted in October 2025, as setting "a minimum 97% uptime requirement for regulated chargers." The underlying statute, Public Resources Code 25231.5, enacted 16 September 2022, covers chargers paid for through state incentive programs or ratepayer charges. The DOE's summary of that law says the standards apply only to chargers "installed on or after January 1, 2024," and that uptime data must be reported for a "minimum of six years." Which chargers the adopted regulation reaches, and from what date, is set in the regulation text itself, so check the CEC page for the current version before relying on it for a specific site.

What the status dot in your app is really telling you

Federally funded stations must hand their data to third-party apps for free. Under 680.116(c)(8), that includes, for each port, a unique port identifier, connector types, power rating, and "Real-time status by port in terms defined by Open Charge Point Interface 2.2.1." So the vocabulary behind the coloured dot is defined in a published standard, and the OCPI 2.2.1 location module lists nine status values. The ones you will meet:

The last row is the one people misread. A charger that has lost its internet connection cannot tell the network that it is broken, and the standard's word for a charger that is offline is UNKNOWN, not OUTOFORDER. ChargeX lists NoInternet (CX013) as an error in its own right, because a port that cannot reach its network may be unable to authorize a session. And AVAILABLE is the weakest promise in the table. CHARGING is the closest thing to evidence, but the standard defines it only as "in use," so it shows that a session started for the car on it, not what power it is getting.

The AFDC carries a coarser status. Its status_code field has three values: E (Available), P (Planned) and T (Temporarily Unavailable). The useful detail is in the expected_date field. For a temporarily unavailable station that DOE added through an automated network feed, the documentation says "this is the date that the station became temporarily unavailable." In other words, it tells you how long the outage has lasted.

On 15 October 2026, five of the NEVI-tagged records carried status T. One, a Pilot travel center listing in Ohio on the EVgo network, showed an expected_date of 5 June 2026. If that date came in through the network's feed, that site has been reporting itself unavailable for more than four months. This is a snapshot that will be stale within days. The method is the point, not the five records.

A check that takes two minutes before you leave

None of this replaces a backup station. It does tell you which station to treat as the backup.

1. Open the network's own app and read the station per port, not per site. A site badge saying "3 of 4 available" hides which port is down. If two of the four show unknown, you have two ports, not four.
2. Look for CHARGING. One port in use by another car in the last hour is better evidence than any number of AVAILABLE dots.
3. Read recent driver check-ins. Crowdsourced apps such as PlugShare record what drivers saw at the stall, including low power, broken payment terminals and cut cables. These are unverified reports, but a run of recent failures is information the network's own status will not volunteer.
4. Check the AFDC record. A status of T, and the expected_date beside it, tells you whether this is a fresh fault or a long one. The funding_sources field tells you whether the uptime rule applies at all.
5. Write down the network's support number before you drive. Operators of federally funded sites must give customers ways to report outages and malfunctions under § 680.106(k), and that paragraph also requires access to multilingual service. Electrify America's FAQ points to a number above the charger screen, but you may not have signal when you get there.

How much margin to carry for the case where every check passes and the station is still down is a separate calculation, covered in the buffer route planners skip.

When the screen shows an error code

Error messages used to differ by manufacturer. The DOE's ChargeX consortium, which ran from June 2023 to September 2025, published a list of 26 Minimum Required Error Codes, numbered CX001 to CX026, and assigned each one to the party responsible for resolving it: the driver, the charging station operator, the charger itself, or the vehicle. These are recommendations rather than federal requirements, and many chargers will not show you a CX code at all. Where the screen or the app's session record does give you one, it helps you decide whether to try again or move bays.

Five of the 26 list the driver among the responsible parties:

Those are worth one retry: reseat the connector, check that the car is in park and unlocked if your model needs it, and start payment again promptly. The codes assigned only to the charger or operator are not worth a second attempt at that port. They include HighTemperature (CX003), NoInternet (CX013), PowerLoss (CX015), BrokenLatch (CX025) and CutCable (CX026). Move to another bay, and report the port.

Electrify America's FAQ gives the same order: end the session, unplug, reconnect and start again, and "if the error persists, we suggest moving to another charger and reporting the issue by calling the Contact Center number located above the charger screen." The same FAQ notes you "will need to resubmit payment to begin a new session," so a retry is a new payment, and it is worth checking your statement for both.

Error codes do not vanish once you leave. Section 680.112(a)(3) requires states to submit, every quarter, each session's start and end time "and any error codes associated with an unsuccessful charging session by port," along with each port's uptime, T_outage and T_excluded for each of the previous three months, and the duration of each outage.

Getting money back for a session that failed

Before you leave the bay, record four things: the station name, the port identifier printed on the charger, the time, and a photo of the screen message. The port identifier is not decoration. Under 680.116(c)(8)(ii), it is the same identifier the station must use in the data it gives app developers, and under 680.112(a)(2) it is the identifier attached to the session record the state sends FHWA. It is the one detail that ties your complaint to the network's own log.

Then mind the clocks, which are shorter than most people expect.

The network's own window. Electrify America's terms of use, effective 1 June 2026, tell you to call Customer Assistance at 1-833-632-2778 to dispute a transaction, and say the company "has no obligation to review or correct any error unless You provide notice of the claimed error within sixty (60) days of the date of the transaction in question." Refunds go only to the payment method used for the original transaction. If that payment method is no longer available, the terms say the company "will not be required to refund or return the funds by any other means." Other networks set their own terms. Find the dispute clause before you need it.

The card issuer's window. If you paid by credit card and the network will not fix a charge for a session that delivered nothing, the Fair Credit Billing Act dispute process applies to billing errors, which the FTC describes as including being billed for something you "never got." Your letter must reach the issuer "within 60 days after the first bill with the error was sent to you," at the billing-inquiries address. The issuer must acknowledge it within 30 days and resolve it within 90. The FTC notes that this process covers credit cards and other revolving credit, so a debit card dispute runs under different rules.

The two 60-day windows start from different events, the session for the network and the statement for the card. Write the session date on the receipt the day it happens.

Where your report goes, and what you can see afterwards

A complaint made to the network reaches the operator. For a federally funded site, the state DOT that awarded the grant is responsible under 680.106(k) for ensuring those reporting mechanisms exist, so the state's NEVI program office is the escalation point if a funded station stays broken.

What you cannot do is look up that station's uptime percentage. Section 680.112(a) says "any quarterly data made public will be aggregated and anonymized to protect confidential business information." The per-port uptime figure goes to FHWA, and what comes back out is a summary. The closest public views of a single site are its live status through the apps, the AFDC status and date, and the check-ins left by drivers.

For a sense of scale beyond any one station, J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience Public Charging Study, released 12 August 2026 and based on 6,594 EV and plug-in hybrid owners surveyed from January through June 2026, puts the non-charge visit rate at 12 percent in the most recent quarter, down from 14 percent in the same period a year earlier. Roughly one visit in eight still ends without a charge. That is survey data about visits, not a measurement of uptime, but it is the gap between those two numbers that your two-minute check is meant to close.

Before your next unfamiliar stop, look the station up once in the AFDC locator, note whether it carries a NEVI, CFI or EVC-RAA tag and whether it shows status T, and save the network's support number in your phone with the station name beside it.

For what the session will cost once it does start, see per-kWh, per-minute, session and idle fees.