California’s new building codes will require EV chargers in most new overnight parking spots starting in 2026, going a big way towards solving the only actual problem with EVs.
One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.
But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at – like a garage or a driveway, or perhaps a charger at work. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.
While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.
But in California a fix is about to come, in the form of new building codes with sweeping EV charging requirements, ensuring that a huge percentage of new parking spots in California will have to be ready for EV charging.
New building codes mean huge increase in charging points
California building codes already required a lesser percentage of units to be “EV ready,” depending on the size of the development. But now, the new rules require at least one charger per unit, in most cases.
For any new unit with a parking space in a multi-family development (apartments/condos), at least one of the parking spots must be “EV Ready.” An EV Ready space is defined as having at least a 240V/20A outlet or charger for EV charging, either with a standardized outlet (NEMA 6-20, 14-30 or 14-50) or a J1772 or J3400 (NACS) charger.
However, EV ready spaces are allowed to share power between them, as we saw in one recent condo project we highlighted, as long as the system can provide a minimum of 3.3kW simultaneously to each unit. That project happened with a final cost of $405/space, though that was after a $2k/space incentive from the utility – still, quite cheap to wire up an entire apartment complex.
If the parking space is the unit’s own space, the new rules say it should be on a separate circuit wired to that unit’s electrical panel “when feasible” (a phrase that will likely do some heavy lifting in power-sharing situations). If the space is shared, then at least one EV ready space needs to exist per unit. If there are more parking spaces than there are units, at least 25% of the excess need to be EV ready (and there are options for individual cities to increase this requirement).
But the rules go on from there – beyond multi-family developments, they also apply to hotels. A new hotel or motel must have 65% EV-ready parking spaces, with an option for cities to increase that requirement to 100%.
Even non-residential parking lots have new EV requirements. 20% of spaces in any commercial, office or retail lot must be EV ready, with an option for cities to increase the requirement to 30% or 45%. In these cases though, property owners can install DC fast charging to get “extra credit” and reduce the number of lower-powered spaces required.
Presumably, this will incentivize an increase in the number of public DC charging spaces, which should make DC charging on the road just that much easier (even though it’s already pretty easy in California).
Finally, the rules don’t just apply to entirely new developments, but to any added parking on an existing development. Any time a parking space is added or altered in a way that requires a building permit, that space must be EV ready.
This last point is important – not only do new developments get covered by the codes, but we’ll gradually see older developments having to add EV charging as time goes on and they make renovations or improvements. This includes new solar canopy parking projects, which are required to add chargers, but doesn’t include retrofits of existing parking lots that add level 1 charging – they’re exempted from the minimum 240v/20a/3.3kW service requirements.
A positive reaction from advocacy groups
We spoke to a number of organizations about these changes, and everyone seems quite happy. Peninsula Clean Energy, a utility in the SF Bay Area, said the new rules are a “HUGE win,” highlighting how the success of local building codes (like Bay Area Reach Codes) helped push the state to ramp up from its previous incremental approach in setting regulations.
PCE highlighted that the “advocacy community” pushed hard for these regulations – namely, the EV Charging for All Coalition, who were the first to bring this news to our attention. EVCAC consists of EV advocates and environmental organizations who realized that building codes were a relatively underfocused area where a lot of progress could be made, and started pushing the state to accelerate improvement of its codes.
We talked to Sven Thesen, one of EVCAC’s co-founders, who highlighted that a “small group of dedicated individuals” were able to stand up against the glacial pace of change and resistance from the building industry “to get something much faster out there that needed to be out there. And it’s a win-win for everybody.”
Thesen highlighted that while this is a strong goal, it’s not excessive – the focus was on right-sizing installations, allowing for lower-power Level 2, power-sharing, and Level 1 retrofits to ensure that everyone has a charging option, but that systems aren’t oversized.
The new rules were finalized in a unanimous vote Tuesday, and will go into effect at the start of 2026 – just over a year away. And all of this can’t come soon enough – given that California also wants to ensure that all new cars have a plug as early as 2035, building codes like these need to be in place ahead of time so there’s time for them to percolate through the housing stock and make sure those EVs will have a place to charge.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve long said that charging for people who don’t own their own parking space is the only real problem with EVs. The last time I said it was in the story of a condo complex that covered all of its parking spots with charging.
In that story, I said “and, frankly, we also need legislation/building codes to hop in and require this sort of thing.” And here we are, two weeks later, and I got exactly what I asked for. Well ain’t that just a Merry freakin’ Christmas!
One note on cost: while I’m rarely sympathetic to the desires of big residential developers, who seem pathologically opposed to any sort of minimum guidelines for construction and always looking to cut corners (often putting them at odds with the state of California), it is true that California is an expensive place to build, and that’s not a problem we want to contribute more to.
But what’s great about these codes is that while they do require minimum standards, they seem open to allowing some flexibility on feasibility. A strict requirement of a certain amount of power per unit, each set up on a separate circuit, would likely still be a drop in the bucket for new developments in already-expensive California – but making lower-power installations possible, especially for existing developments without triggering new-build requirements, is a great middle ground.
So I’m in agreement with Thesen from the EVCAC that these codes strike the right balance of ensuring minimum standards for EV charging while also keeping costs reasonable and not unduly burdening multi-family developments – which are something that California desperately needs. There’s a lot of low-density, car-dependent areas in California, and we don’t want to make it too hard to build higher density neighborhoods, so we can hopefully start working towards more walkability and less car dependence.
But the codes also include some measures to help in that respect – by adjusting requirements for bicycle parking. Instead of basing bike rack requirements on motor vehicle traffic, the rules now base them on square footage, which helps to decouple these rules from their current car-centric mentality. It also eliminates an exception which allowed developments to get out of offering bike parking.
Between these two moves, it should go a long way towards solving the one real problem with EVs.
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