Colorado's public electric-vehicle charging network has reached a milestone, according to state officials, though the numbers behind the announcement reveal a more complicated picture for drivers on the road.
Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Department of Transportation released a statement calling the state's public fast-charging network nearly built out. The Aug. 27 news release reports there are now 486 DC fast-charging locations and that 83% of the state highway system is now within 30 miles of a station. Coverage of the highway network has more than doubled from 40% in August 2020.
"Every one of these projects makes the map a little more complete," said Shoshana Lew, executive director of the transportation department. "Five or six years ago, the challenge was establishing fast charging across broad portions of Colorado. Today, we're increasingly talking about individual gaps — a mountain corridor, a rural community or a stretch of highway that still needs a station." Seventeen federally funded National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure sites are open, and another 33 awarded NEVI sites are not yet open and remain under development.
Raw station counts, however, do not tell the full story of how the charging network compares to traditional gasoline infrastructure. The Energy Department lists 2,857 public electric charging locations in Colorado and 7,748 public ports. Counting only the 1,646 public DC fast ports that do the work of a pump, those stand against roughly 15,000 gasoline fueling positions in the state — about nine pumps for each fast-charge stall, using the industry average of 9.8 positions per gas station.
The time required at a charging stop also differs substantially from a conventional fill-up. Public fast-charging sessions averaged 33 minutes in late 2025, according to a Transportation Energy Institute study of millions of sessions, adding on the order of 100 miles of range to a typical EV, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A 12-gallon gasoline fill adds about 300 miles — three times that range — in about five minutes at the pump, according to standard pump volumes and fuel-economy figures. A public fast-charge port averaged about seven vehicles a day in late 2025, according to the Transportation Energy Institute, while a gasoline pump handled about 40 vehicles a day, based on National Association of Convenience Stores pump-transaction counts.
On cost, the gap narrows considerably. Public fast-charging electricity costs about four times as much per unit of energy as gasoline, but on the road the costs land near each other — about 17 cents a mile either way — because the EV uses about one-fourth the energy to cover the same distance, according to posted fast-charge rates, Energy Department pump prices and standard energy conversions.
The build-out comes as the state works toward ambitious adoption goals that remain far from reached. The administration's target is 940,000 light-duty electric vehicles on Colorado roads by 2030, while registrations today sit near 200,000 to 220,000 — about one-fifth of that goal. Plug-in vehicles made up about a quarter of new light-duty sales in Colorado at the 2024–25 peak, but they remain about 3% to 4% of registered light-duty vehicles, according to U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center data and an Alliance for Automotive Innovation tally.
Whether the pace of both network expansion and vehicle registration can close the gap with the 2030 target remains the central question heading into the next phase of the state's EV build-out.