Find Nearest EV Charger

Locate the 25 nearest EV charging stations from any city, ZIP code, address, or GPS position. Operator (Tesla, Electrify America, ChargePoint, EVgo, Ionity, BP Pulse), socket type (Type 2, CCS, CHAdeMO, NACS), max kW, distance, and bearing — worldwide, free, no sign-up. OpenStreetMap data via the Overpass API.

Why use this tool

Most EV charging-station finders are built by a single network (Tesla, Electrify America, ChargePoint) and only show their own stations — so a Tesla driver checking the Tesla app sees only Superchargers, missing every CCS-on-Magic-Dock station that would also work; a ChargePoint customer sees only ChargePoint stations, missing the Tesla Supercharger across the parking lot. Aggregator apps (PlugShare, ChargeHub, Open Charge Map) solve this but require an account, push notifications, an app install, and often have aggressive ad-funded filtering that buries lower-priority brands.

This tool is operator-agnostic and friction-free. It returns every public charging station inside your chosen radius, regardless of network, sorted by straight-line distance. The data is from OpenStreetMap — community-edited, updated continuously, public-domain — so the picture is comprehensive and the column choices are useful for the decision (operator, socket types, max kW). No account, no install, no push notifications, works on any phone or computer with a browser.

The tool does notshow real-time availability ("is the charger plugged in right now"); for that you still need the operator app or a real-time aggregator. We deliberately scope to the geographic question — “where are the chargers” — and leave the operations question (“is each one available right now”) to specialists.

How to use the tool

Five steps from blank canvas to a sortable, exportable charger list.

1. Set the search origin. Enter a city, ZIP code, or full address into the search box and pick a result, tap "Use My Location" to seed with GPS, click anywhere on the map to drop an origin pin, or pick one of the quick-example chips ("Manhattan, NYC", "Tesla HQ Austin", "Stanford University", "Disneyland", "Yellowstone West Entrance") to load a working example. The origin becomes a red pin on the map and the centre of the radius search.
2. Adjust the search radius. Use the slider to set the radius from 1 km up to 100 km. For dense urban areas, 5–15 km is typically enough — there are dozens of stations in a downtown core. For interstate trips and rural areas, 50–100 km is the right scale because charging-station density falls off fast outside cities. The slider is debounced 300 ms so dragging the handle does not flood Overpass with queries. Toggle the unit between kilometres and miles using the switch.
3. Read the results table. Up to 25 charging stations are returned, sorted by straight-line distance ascending. Each row shows the station name, operator (the network — Tesla, Electrify America, ChargePoint, EVgo, Ionity, BP Pulse, etc), the socket types installed (Type 2, CCS, CHAdeMO, NACS / Tesla, Schuko), the maximum power output in kW (the "speed" — 7 kW is slow Level 2, 50 kW is fast DC, 350 kW is hyper-charging), distance, and bearing. Click any column header to sort by that field — use it to find the fastest nearby chargers (sort by Max kW descending) or filter to your preferred operator (sort by Operator ascending).
4. Click rows or pins to focus on the map. Click a row or its numbered pin on the map and the tool highlights the result, scrolls the map to centre on it, and zooms in to street level. Particularly useful when you have several similar candidates — e.g. three Electrify America stations clustered around a freeway exit — and you want to compare their actual locations relative to surface streets, parking, and amenities.
5. Export to CSV or share the link. Click "Export CSV" to download every result with operator, socket types, max kW, distance, bearing, and full coordinates — drop the file into a fleet-management spreadsheet or a road-trip planner. Click "Copy share link" to get a URL that re-opens the same origin and radius — the state is encoded into the URL hash, so you can text the link to a friend, paste it into a planning doc, or save it as a bookmark for a recurring trip.

What people use the EV charger finder for

Seven common patterns we see in support requests and search analytics. Every pattern starts with the same question — “where can I charge from here?” — and the tool is designed to answer it cleanly.

Charger types and plug compatibility

EV charging is fragmented because different markets standardised on different plugs. Knowing what plug your car has — and what the station offers — is the most important sanity check. The table below summarises the seven plug families you will encounter; the socket column in the tool above shows you which of these are at each station.

North American non-Tesla cars use Type 1 (J1772) for AC and CCS1 for DC — most public US DC fast chargers are CCS1. North American Tesla cars natively use NACS but ship with adapters for J1772 and CCS1. European cars use Type 2 for AC and CCS2 for DC — including Tesla cars sold in Europe. Older Japanese imports use CHAdeMO for DC; this is being phased out. The 2025+ wave of "open" Tesla Superchargers in North America serve both NACS (native) and CCS1 (via the Magic Dock); in the tool you will see both connector types listed for those stations.

How the tool works

1. Query — Overpass + OpenStreetMap

Every search fires a single Overpass query against the public overpass-api.de instance, filtering for nodes and ways tagged amenity=charging_station within the chosen radius. The query is wrapped by our /api/overpassproxy, which adds a User-Agent string and a 15-second abort timeout, and gracefully degrades to a “service unavailable” message on any upstream failure.

2. Distance and bearing — haversine, in the browser

For each returned station the server computes great-circle distance from your origin using the haversine formula on a spherical Earth (R = 6,371 km, IUGG mean radius). Forward bearing comes from the standard atan2 form of the great-circle bearing formula. Both are rounded — distance to one decimal kilometre, bearing to the nearest degree — and 16-point compass labels are derived client-side. The math is identical to what professional GIS systems use.

3. Why operator and kW data is sometimes missing

OpenStreetMap is community-edited, so tagging quality varies. A station mapped by an enthusiast often has every relevant tag — operator, socket types, capacity, max kW, fee, opening hours. A station mapped by an automated import or a casual contributor might have only the bare-minimum location and amenity type. We display whatever is in OSM and show an em-dash (—) for missing fields, so you can see at a glance whether the database has the metadata for the station you care about. If a station near you is under-tagged, editing it on OSM is a 30-second job that benefits every OSM-based tool.

4. Socket type extraction — multi-tag parsing

Charging stations in OSM use the socket:<type> tag family — socket:type2, socket:ccs, socket:chademo, socket:tesla_supercharger,socket:nacs, socket:schuko, and many others. The tool walks the tag set in priority order (Tesla, NACS, CCS variants, CHAdeMO, Type 2, others) and assembles a comma-separated list of the first three present, so the most decision-relevant connector appears first. The full tag set is in the CSV export for downstream analysis.

5. Max-kW extraction — multi-tag scan with unit normalisation

Power output is recorded in OSM under several different keys — maxpower, capacity:power, charging_station:output, and per-socket socket:<type>:output. The tool reads all of them, parses out every numeric value, normalises watts to kilowatts when the unit is clearly W (rather than kW), filters out junk values (> 1000), and returns the largest plausible kW figure. The result is the “speed of the fastest plug at this station” — a practical answer for the question “is this station fast enough for my road trip?”

How this tool compares to alternatives

Quick comparison against major EV-charging finders. We are deliberately scoped to the geographic question rather than booking, real-time availability, or operator-specific features.

Related tools and resources

For the sister "find-nearest" question — airports rather than EV chargers — find nearest airport runs the same Overpass-backed search for aerodromes, with IATA / ICAO codes, distance, and bearing. The two tools are built from the same engine and behave identically.

Once you have a charger short-list, the next questions are usually distance and travel time. Drive time map shows the isochrone — every neighbourhood within a chosen drive time of a charger, so you can answer “does this charger cover the area I care about?” Crow flies distance compares straight-line vs driving distance for any pair of points (useful for the crow-flies-vs-driving overhead on a station with a detour), and distance between cities gives a clean haversine number with multiple unit toggles. For finding everything inside a radius (not just chargers), see find cities in radius and find ZIP codes in radius.

For the inverse question — “what city or county is this charging station in?” — paste the lat/lng into coordinates to address. For US-only county lookups, what county am I in gives the canonical answer with FIPS code and demographics. PlugShare and Open Charge Map remain the right places to check user reviews and real-time availability before you commit to a long detour for a critical charge.

Frequently asked questions

More EV and trip-planning tools