Light-duty electric vehicles drew 8 percent more electricity in the first half of 2026 than in the second half of 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In recent six-month periods, EIA says, the increase ran between 13 and 24 percent, so the latest reading falls well below the range EIA gives for earlier periods.
The total is still large, nearly 14 billion kilowatt-hours in six months, and more than double the amount of the first half of 2023. What changed is the pace, and EIA names a reason for it.
The 8 percent figure and its comparison window
The figure comes from a Today in Energy analysis published September 30, titled “U.S. electricity use for electric vehicles increasing at a slower pace in 2026.” The 8 percent compares two consecutive half-years, January through June 2026 against July through December 2025, not the first half of 2026 against the first half of 2025. That matters because the comparison window is exactly the stretch in which the federal incentive disappeared: the New Clean Vehicle Credit and the Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit, both of which reduced the cost of buying or leasing a new electric vehicle, ended on September 30, 2025.
EIA also states a limit on its own number. The electricity figures are modeled estimates for on-road light-duty EVs, and the agency says it does not collect those data on its traditional surveys. The series draws on its Monthly Energy Review and its electricity end-use and EV-use tables, so the 8 percent is an estimate built from fleet and usage assumptions rather than a meter count.
EIA’s stated link to the lapsed credit
The causal sentence belongs to EIA. It writes that the slowing growth followed a decline in sales after U.S. federal tax credits expired in September 2025, and it puts the drop at 19 percent: new electric vehicle sales were down 19 percent compared with the second half of 2025. The mechanism is arithmetic. Electricity demand from EVs rises with the number of cars on the road and the miles they cover, and a smaller flow of new vehicles feeds into the fleet more slowly even as existing cars keep charging.
EIA does not say the credit’s end was the only factor, and it does not quantify how much of the slowdown it explains. Its wording is a sequence, sales fell after the credits expired and consumption growth slowed, and a reader should hold that line of reasoning to what the agency actually wrote.
Independent sales data fit the direction. Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book counts for the second quarter put U.S. EV sales at 247,226 units, 20.5 percent below the second quarter of 2025, and 462,892 for the first half, down 23.8 percent from a year earlier. Those are year-over-year comparisons and use a different window from EIA’s half-over-half measure, so the percentages should not be laid next to each other as one trend.
Sales after the credit, and what a slower curve still adds
Reporting by NPR member stations on the one-year anniversary of the credit’s end gives the sales path in more detail. As OPB carried it, EV share of new-car sales peaked at 11.4 percent in September 2025 as buyers rushed to claim the $7,500 credit, fell 36 percent year over year in late 2025, fell 27 percent in the first quarter of 2026, and then settled at 5 to 6 percent of new-car sales by mid-year.
Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ director of insights, described the pattern in that report as “clearly nothing like what it was previously, but it has not fallen off of a cliff, which is what some people’s predictions would’ve been.” His description fits EIA’s electricity numbers, which show growth that decelerated sharply while total consumption kept rising to nearly 14 billion kilowatt-hours in the half-year.
The same OPB report notes where some of the displaced demand went: hybrids, whose sales rose 27 percent over the year, with Hyundai and Kia reporting August hybrid growth of 33 and 99 percent respectively. Conventional hybrids refuel only with gasoline, so that growth does not show up in an electricity series for plug-in vehicles; OPB does not claim buyers switched directly from one to the other, and EIA does not address it.
The trade press count adds one detail that EIA’s half-year framing hides. EVWire’s summary of the Cox data shows second-quarter sales up 14.7 percent from the first quarter, a sequential rebound that EIA’s analysis, built on half-year totals, does not address and that sits alongside the 20.5 percent year-over-year drop.
EV electricity use also comes from a small base of vehicles. EIA’s own context line is that electric vehicles made up 2 percent of all registered light-duty vehicles in 2024, a context line that helps size the fleet behind the electricity figure. The agency’s Monthly Energy Review, which carries the underlying tables, is where later six-month readings will show whether 8 percent was a floor or the start of a lower trend.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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