The United States now has 80,964 public fast-charging ports spread across 14,614 locations, passing the 80,000 mark for the first time, and Tesla added more of them than any other network in the third quarter. The count comes from Paren’s Q3 2026 report, summarized by Electrek on Oct. 13, and it covers July through September.
Tesla’s total for the quarter was 1,287 Supercharger ports, more than three times the 378 added by the runner-up. The wider market added 4,106 ports at 664 stations over the same three months, so one operator supplied roughly 31 percent of everything built, even as rivals started to close in on its model.
Who built the 4,106 ports
According to Electrek’s account of the Paren data, written by Michelle Lewis, Tesla’s 1,287 additions were the most in the country, with another 124 coming through its Supercharger for Business program. IONNA took second place with 378 ports, more than double its second-quarter total, and Walmart was third with 344. Much of IONNA’s growth came from converting former Circle K sites, 44 of them stations in the quarter, and Paren counts replacement chargers installed after a takeover as new infrastructure.
That partnership dates to April, when IONNA announced it would work with Circle K toward more than 350 locations, converting about 85 existing Circle K charging sites and adding chargers where none stand, according to IONNA’s announcement. Aaron Wolff, IONNA’s chief operating officer, called Circle K’s scale, customer focus and quality of location an ideal match. The first sites were expected to open to customers by the end of 2026.
The previous quarter looked different. Electrek’s July report on Paren’s second-quarter data had Tesla adding 1,185 ports, 27 percent of that quarter’s new ports, with Walmart at 368, ChargePoint at 333 and Red E at 315. Tesla therefore grew its lead in absolute terms while ChargePoint, third in the spring, fell out of the top three as IONNA’s conversion-driven surge pushed it into second place for Q3. Electrek’s summary of the Q3 data does not list ChargePoint’s third-quarter total, so the size of that slide is not reported, though it cannot exceed Walmart’s 344.
Bigger sites, faster chargers, slower overall growth
Pace is the quiet part of the story. The 4,106 ports compare with 4,618 in the second quarter, and through September ports added were about 9 percent lower than in the same period a year earlier, while stations opened were about 20 percent lower. The market is adding fewer sites but putting more ports and more power into each of them.
Tesla’s new sites averaged 13.1 ports, and the company opened 11 locations with at least 24 stalls, the largest a 48-stall site in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Sites from other networks averaged 5 ports, up from 4.1 a year earlier, and one- and two-port stops made up under a third of new non-Tesla locations, down from nearly half. Of all new ports, 73 percent were rated at 250 kilowatts or higher, against 60 percent a year earlier, and 35 percent of non-Tesla additions were 400 kilowatts or more, up from 10 percent.
Sessions, prices and reliability
Demand kept pace with supply. Drivers ran 50.4 million fast-charging sessions in the quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier, with July setting a monthly record of 17.6 million. National utilization, the share of monitored time a port spends charging a vehicle, was 15.9 percent against 15.8 percent in the second quarter, and Los Angeles led metro areas at 31.8 percent, about twice the national average.
Prices moved up, and Tesla drove the increase. Paren put the national average at 54 cents per kilowatt-hour, up 2.7 percent over the year, and attributed the increase to Tesla, whose non-member price averaged 56.9 cents, up 15 percent, while its member price averaged 39.6 cents, up 9 percent. Other networks averaged about 53.3 cents, flat for a fifth consecutive quarter. Time-of-use stations showed a peak price of 63.7 cents and an off-peak price of 43.8 cents.
Reliability scored 93.9 nationally on Paren’s index, which counts successful sessions, retries, failed attempts and downtime, not just uptime. Fifty of 52 states and territories scored at least 90, up from 46 a year earlier, and only Oklahoma and Vermont fell below. Urban markets received 90 percent of the quarter’s new stations, with rural markets getting 68 of the 664.
Analyst Loren McDonald of Chargeonomics has used the label “Charging 2.0” for this phase, in which the focus shifts from building as many chargers as possible toward reliability, customer experience and profitability, as Electrek reported in July. Paren’s own line, quoted there, is that reliability is “no longer a selling point” but “simply the baseline.” The full numbers are in Paren’s Q3 2026 report, part of Paren’s quarterly series, and the next installment will show whether the third quarter’s slower pace was a pause or a trend.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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