How much does it cost to charge a golf cart in the UK?

Charging a typical electric golf cart from flat costs roughly 80p to £2.30 at a standard UK electricity price of 26p per kWh, and as little as about 25p to 70p on an off-peak EV tariff. That range covers the usual spread of cart battery sizes, from a compact two-passenger to a large people-mover. It is one of the quietest advantages of running electric: the "fuel" for a full day's use costs less than a coffee. Below is the arithmetic in full, with the assumptions stated, so you can rerun it for your own vehicle and tariff.

The arithmetic, shown in full

Three numbers decide the cost. First, the battery's capacity in kilowatt-hours: golf cart packs typically hold roughly 3 to 8 kWh of usable energy, smaller packs in compact two-seaters, larger ones in six-seaters and utility vehicles (a common example: a 48-volt, 100 amp-hour lithium pack stores 48 × 100 = 4,800 watt-hours, about 5 kWh). Second, charging efficiency: not every unit from the wall reaches the battery, chargers lose a little as heat, so assume around 90 per cent and divide the pack size by 0.9. Third, your electricity unit price: we use 26p per kWh as a standard-tariff example, in line with typical capped UK rates at the time of writing, and 8p as an off-peak EV-tariff example. So for the 5 kWh pack: 5 ÷ 0.9 = 5.6 kWh drawn from the wall, and 5.6 × £0.26 = £1.44 for a full charge from flat. On the 8p off-peak rate, the same charge is 5.6 × £0.08 = 45p.

Two honest caveats. Real-world charges are usually partial, you rarely run to flat, so day-to-day top-ups cost less than the full-charge figures above. And tariffs move: rerun the sums with your own unit rate from your bill, the method holds even when the prices change.

What that means per mile and per round

To get a per-mile figure, divide the charge cost by the range you actually get. Range varies with terrain, load and battery, but the shape of the answer barely moves: if a £1.44 full charge carries you 30 miles, that is about 4.8 pence per mile; even a cautious 20 miles from the same charge is only 7 pence per mile, and off-peak charging pulls those numbers under 2.5p. For golfers, the sums are even smaller: if one charge comfortably covers two or three rounds, the electricity per round is somewhere around 50 to 70p at the standard rate, and pence on an off-peak tariff. However you cut it, the energy cost of running an electric cart is small change.

How it compares with gas

A gas cart pays for every mile in litres at forecourt prices, and pays something even while idling. At UK gas prices, the fuel cost per mile of a gas cart is several times the electricity cost per mile of an equivalent electric one, before you count the servicing an engine demands, oil, filters, plugs, that an electric drivetrain simply does not have. We work the full comparison, fuel plus maintenance over a life of ownership, in our guide to electric versus gas running costs; the short version is that electric wins on running cost, and charging is the cheapest part of the whole picture.

Why pennies per charge matters for the bigger decision

Charging cost sounds like small beer, and per charge it is, but it compounds across a life of ownership. A cart in daily use at a venue or on an estate charges hundreds of times a year, and doing that for pence rather than pounds is a structural saving that shows up every single day, alongside lower servicing and no fuel storage on site. It is a large part of why total cost of ownership so often favours electric even when the purchase price is similar, and it changes the hire-or-buy sum too: the more you use a cart, the more the cheap miles argue for owning one. If you are weighing that up, our guide to charging times covers the other half of the practicality question.