EV chargers per capita: Norway has twice as many as Germany, the Netherlands four times
How well is Germany supplied with public charge points? Compared with the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, it has the fewest per person: 277 per 100,000 inhabitants. Norway has 2.1 times as many, Sweden almost exactly as many as Norway, and the Netherlands 4.0 times as many.
I wanted to see how Germany compares, and which measure is fair for that comparison. So I counted every public charge point in the four countries and set the totals against population and against the number of battery-electric cars.
Counting sites instead of charge points gives a different order: per person, Germany then has more than Norway and Sweden. But a Norwegian site holds 7.7 charge points on average, a German one 3.4. What counts as one "site" is up to each data source, and every country here comes from a different source. Charge points are easier to compare, so that is what I count for the rest of this article.
Numbers as a table
| Country | Sites per 100k people | Charge points per 100k people | Charge points per site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 82 | 277 | 3.4 |
| Sweden | 75 | 585 | 7.8 |
| Norway | 77 | 588 | 7.7 |
| Netherlands | 418 | 1098 | 2.6 |
Embed
Chart under CC BY 4.0, free to use with attribution.
<a href="https://ladepark.app/en/blog/ev-chargers-per-capita-by-country"><img src="https://ladepark.app/blog/assets/geo-11-countries-sites-vs-evses.en.light.svg" alt="Dot pairs for four countries: sites and charge points per 100,000 inhabitants; Norway and Sweden have fewer sites than Germany but twice the charge points, the Netherlands leads on both" width="800"></a><br>Chart: Ladepark (https://ladepark.app/en/blog/ev-chargers-per-capita-by-country), CC BY 4.0. Data: MobiData BW OCPDB (DL-DE-BY-2.0), Bundesnetzagentur (CC BY 4.0), Mobilithek (CC0), Hamburg UDP (DL-DE-BY-2.0); NDW / DOT-NL (CC0); NOBIL (CC BY 4.0); Eurostat demo_r_pjanaggr3, reg_area3; © BKG (2026) dl-de/by-2-0, VG1000 (data changed); © Kartverket (CC BY 4.0); Natural Earth admin-1Next I set the charge points against battery-electric cars. Now Norway comes last. It has 28.7 battery-electric cars per public charge point, Germany 8.8 and the Netherlands 3.4. Norway has plenty of charge points, but by far the highest share of electric cars: 32% of its cars are battery-electric.
The biggest surprise was fast charging at 150 kW and more. Here the Netherlands drops from first place to last. It has 147 battery-electric cars per fast charge point, against 46 in Germany. It stays the highest of the four even if every Dutch DC charge point without a power value is counted as fast.
Numbers as a table
| Country | EVs per charge point | EVs per 150 kW+ charge point |
|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 3.4 | 147 |
| Norway | 28.7 | 90 |
| Germany | 8.8 | 46 |
| Sweden | 7.0 | 40 |
Embed
Chart under CC BY 4.0, free to use with attribution.
<a href="https://ladepark.app/en/blog/ev-chargers-per-capita-by-country"><img src="https://ladepark.app/blog/assets/dem-06-countries-bev-per-point.en.light.svg" alt="Dot pairs for four countries: battery-electric cars per charge point of any power and per fast charge point; the Netherlands has the fewest cars per charge point and the most per fast one" width="800"></a><br>Chart: Ladepark (https://ladepark.app/en/blog/ev-chargers-per-capita-by-country), CC BY 4.0. Data: MobiData BW OCPDB (DL-DE-BY-2.0), Bundesnetzagentur (CC BY 4.0), Mobilithek (CC0), Hamburg UDP (DL-DE-BY-2.0); NDW / DOT-NL (CC0); NOBIL (CC BY 4.0); Eurostat road_eqs_carpda, end of 2025 (CC BY 4.0)Last, I held charging power up against the target in the EU's AFIR regulation. It asks for 1.3 kW of public charging power for every registered battery-electric car. Adding up the listed maximum power of all public charge points, all four countries are above that. Sweden has the most, with 8.9 kW per battery-electric car, and Norway the least, with 3.5 kW. Norway is not in the EU; its value is shown for comparison.
Numbers as a table
| Country | kW per EV | Charge points without power |
|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 8.9 | 0 |
| Germany | 7.8 | 82 |
| Netherlands | 4.6 | 63897 |
| Norway | 3.5 | 0 |
Embed
Chart under CC BY 4.0, free to use with attribution.
<a href="https://ladepark.app/en/blog/ev-chargers-per-capita-by-country"><img src="https://ladepark.app/blog/assets/dem-11-countries-kw-per-bev.en.light.svg" alt="Bars for four countries: listed public charging power per battery-electric car, Sweden highest and Norway lowest, all well above the EU target of 1.3 kW" width="800"></a><br>Chart: Ladepark (https://ladepark.app/en/blog/ev-chargers-per-capita-by-country), CC BY 4.0. Data: MobiData BW OCPDB (DL-DE-BY-2.0), Bundesnetzagentur (CC BY 4.0), Mobilithek (CC0), Hamburg UDP (DL-DE-BY-2.0); NDW / DOT-NL (CC0); NOBIL (CC BY 4.0); Eurostat road_eqs_carpda, end of 2025 (CC BY 4.0)What this means for drivers
In the Netherlands you will find many charge points per electric car, but few fast ones. Sweden and Germany have the most public charging power per electric car. If you compare countries, compare charge points, not sites.
Method and data
Charge points are the EVSEs of Ladepark's country packs of 7 November 2026 at sites inside each country. Germany: MobiData BW OCPDB, Bundesnetzagentur, Mobilithek and Hamburg. Netherlands: NDW (DOT-NL). Norway and Sweden: NOBIL. A site is one location after merging duplicate records of the same operator that lie within 30 m of each other. No Swiss data is used.
Population: Eurostat demo_r_pjanaggr3, 1 January 2025 (for Germany the sum of the Destatis municipality register, the same total). Cars: Eurostat road_eqs_carpda, battery-electric passenger cars at the end of 2025; Eurostat flags the Dutch value with "i". Fast means a DC charge point listing 150 kW or more. The Dutch data has no power value for 934 DC charge points; counting all of them as fast gives 122 battery-electric cars per fast charge point.
Power per car is an estimate: the sum of the listed maximum power of every charge point above 3.7 kW, divided by the battery-electric cars. AFIR (Regulation (EU) 2023/1804) leaves out devices of 3.7 kW or less whose primary purpose is not recharging electric vehicles; here every charge point of 3.7 kW or less is left out. It also asks 0.8 kW per plug-in hybrid and counts vans; both are left out here. Charge points are not used at full power all at once, which this sum ignores. 63,897 of 198,199 Dutch charge points carry no power value, so the Dutch value is a lower bound.
Ladepark shows on a map how many charge points are free right now, and when a site is usually free. The iPhone app is free in public testing: get it on TestFlight.