Charging Operators Report Better EBITDA. Most Still Aren’t Profitable. Here’s the Gap Pricing Can Close

Two industry reports landed within weeks of each other this year, and read together they describe an industry quietly changing its own definition of success.

Strategy&'s 2026 EV charging market outlook found that 82% of operators report better EBITDA than a year ago. That's the good news. The catch, buried a paragraph later: many operators are still not profitable at the EBITDA level, let alone free cash flow. Growth in the top line has outrun growth in the bottom line.

Driivz's 2026 State of EV Charging Network Operators report, based on data from 300 senior charging professionals across North America and Europe, points at why. Asked what actually drives profitability, 59% of operators ranked increased utilization of existing chargers above deploying new ones. The report frames it as a shift from "expansion" to what it calls "intelligent profitability": getting more out of the assets already in the ground instead of adding more assets.

That's a real pivot, and it's worth sitting with. For most of the last five years, the operator playbook was site count. More locations, more ports, more coverage, funded by the assumption that revenue would follow footprint. That assumption held reasonably well while grants, subsidies and land-grab economics covered the gap. It holds less well now that capital is more expensive and investors are asking about unit economics instead of network maps.

So if new sites aren't the lever anymore, what is? The same Driivz report has an answer operators didn't expect: charger reliability just overtook energy costs as the industry's number one challenge, cited by 59% of respondents, the first time that's happened in the report's history. Uptime, not power procurement, is now the thing keeping network operators up at night. That's a fair fight to pick, and largely an operational and hardware one.

But there's a second lever sitting right next to it that gets far less attention: what you charge for the sessions that already happen on chargers that already work.

The lever that doesn't need capex

Improving reliability takes money, and often takes time (better hardware, better maintenance contracts, better remote diagnostics). Building new sites obviously takes money. Pricing takes neither. The infrastructure to change what a session costs, and when, already exists on almost every charger built after roughly 2020. Most operators just aren't using it.

The default is still a flat, static per-kWh price, sometimes with a separate idle fee bolted on. That price gets set once, based on a rough sense of local competition and margin targets, and then left alone for months. It doesn't respond to the fact that a charger sitting idle at 2pm on a Tuesday is a different asset than the same charger with three cars queued at 6pm on a Friday. It treats every kWh, at every hour, as worth the same to the business. It almost never is.

This is where "utilization" and "pricing" stop being two separate profitability levers and turn out to be the same lever viewed from two angles. You don't raise utilization by discounting everything, and you don't raise revenue by raising prices everywhere. You raise both by shifting price with demand: cheaper in the hours where the charger would otherwise sit empty, pulling in price-sensitive drivers who'll happily shift their session by an hour; fuller value captured in the hours where demand already exceeds supply and price was never the constraint anyway.

It's worth being precise about what that isn't. Pricing purely off the wholesale energy price, with a fixed margin bolted on top, isn't the same thing as demand-aware pricing, and it's not a safe default either. When the market goes deeply negative or spikes, a pure energy-price pass-through can swing margin in ways that have nothing to do with how busy the charger actually is. The operators getting real EBITDA lift out of pricing aren't the ones blindly tracking spot price; they're the ones pricing to demand and utilization, with energy cost as one input among several.

What this means if you run chargers

The two reports together are a useful gut check. If your growth plan for the next year still starts with "more sites," it's worth asking whether the sites you already have are earning what they could. A network running at 15% utilization with static pricing and a network running at 15% utilization with pricing that actually responds to when people show up are not the same business, even though the site count and the kWh sold might look identical on paper.

The industry spent five years proving it could build. The data now says the next five years get decided by who can extract more from what's already built, without waiting for a bigger capex budget to do it.