EV Charging in Italy 2026: What the PNRR Did

The 2026 headline number: 84,564 charging points

As of June 30, 2026, Italy had reached 84,564 public EV charging points, according to the quarterly monitoring report from Motus-E, the industry association covering the country's main charging operators. Just in the second quarter of the year, 6,311 new points went live, and over the trailing twelve months the network grew by 17,003 units — the fastest pace ever recorded in Italy.

That matters for anyone weighing a used electric car right now: the public network is no longer the patchy, unreliable thing it was three or four years ago, when finding a working charger outside a major city was a genuine gamble. But the national total hides big differences in where and how the network is growing, and that's exactly what's worth checking before signing anything.

AC, DC, and ultra-fast: the network is also getting faster

Of the total, 71.4% of charging points are AC (up to 49 kW) and 28.6% are DC (50 kW and above) — 60,359 AC points against 24,205 DC ones, of which 17,432 sit in the 50-149 kW range and 6,773 are rated at 150 kW or higher. The more telling figure is that 53% of everything installed in the last twelve months was fast or ultra-fast: the network isn't just growing in size, it's growing faster on average, which is exactly what matters if you're driving a used EV from a few years back and want a quick top-up mid-trip.

The real stress test: the motorway network

Highway charging points reached 1,516 in June 2026, up from 1,159 in June 2025 and 963 in June 2024. Of these, 86% are fast DC chargers and 59% deliver 150 kW or more — on paper, the best-performing slice of the whole network. The catch is scale: 1,516 highway chargers out of 84,564 nationally means fewer than 2% of Italy's charging points sit exactly where long-distance drivers need them most. If you're buying a used EV mainly for city driving, this barely registers. If you also want it for weekend trips to the coast or the mountains, plan stops with a dedicated app before you leave — don't assume the everywhere-chargers-now story covers motorway reality.

The PNRR money was there — it just wasn't spent

Here's where the story gets more interesting. In 2023, two decrees from Italy's Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (signed January 12, published in the Official Gazette on February 13) earmarked over 713 million euros in PNRR recovery-plan funds, with an explicit target of installing more than 21,000 new charging points across urban and extra-urban roads by June 30, 2026 — the exact same date behind the record above. By July 2023, the ministry had approved around 4,718 fast-charging projects for urban centers, for an estimated 70 million euros — a small slice of the total allocation.

The rest of the story, per Motus-E's own analysis reported by multiple Italian outlets in early 2025, is less flattering: with roughly a year left before the deadline, only about 15% of the PNRR funds set aside for public charging infrastructure had actually been assigned to real projects, with the extra-urban ultra-fast tender in particular lagging well behind the urban one. In plain terms: the charging boom Italy actually experienced between 2024 and 2026 was driven mostly by private investment from operators like Enel X Way, A2A, bp pulse and Ionity — not by the bulk of the public recovery-plan money, which reached the ground far more slowly than planned.

The real map: where the chargers are, and aren't

Geographic distribution is still far from even. Lombardy leads the regional ranking with 18,177 charging points, followed by Piedmont (9,003), Veneto (8,122), Lazio (7,864) and Emilia-Romagna (6,713) — those five regions alone account for nearly 59% of the entire national network. At the province level, Milan tops the list with 7,423 points (+2,819 over the past year), followed by Rome (6,109, +465), Turin (4,498, +1,535), Naples (3,470, +378) and Brescia (2,489, +597).

If you live and buy outside those provinces, the practical takeaway is simple: before you even look at a used EV's spec sheet, check an app like PlugShare, Enel X Way or A2A for how many chargers actually sit within a few kilometers of home and work. The national network is growing, but at very different speeds from one province to the next.

What this means if you're buying a used EV in 2026

Three things worth checking before you buy:

• The car's own DC charging ceiling, not the charger's rating. Many first-generation EVs (early Renault Zoe, early e-Golf, early Nissan Leaf) still cap out around 50 kW even when plugged into a 150 kW-plus charger — a faster public network doesn't automatically mean a faster charge for an older car.
• Real local density, not the national average. A used EV bought in Milan or Turin lives in a completely different charging reality than one bought in a province with few public points — check the map for your own area before comparing listings on price alone.
• Daily charging versus road-trip charging are two different questions. If you have access to a home or building outlet, the growth of the public network barely touches your everyday use; it matters far more if you'll also use the car for longer trips, where the motorway network remains the weak link.

Bottom line

Italy genuinely hit a charging-point record in 2026, but credit goes mostly to private investment rather than the PNRR public funds, which remain largely unspent. If you're weighing a used electric car, the right question isn't how many chargers Italy has overall — it's how many sit where you actually live and drive. That's the number that should guide the decision, not the press release headline.

Sources / Further reading

1. Quattroruote — Colonnine elettriche, nuovo record in Italia: superata quota 84 mila (2026-07-22)
2. InsideEVs Italia — Le Regioni e Province d'Italia con più colonnine di ricarica (2026-07)
3. Motus-E — Auto elettriche, record in Italia per le nuove colonnine di ricarica: tutti i dati aggiornati (2026-07)
4. Il Sole 24 Ore — Dal Pnrr più di 713 milioni per le colonnine di ricarica (2023-02-13)
5. AliAutonomie — PNRR. Flop dei fondi per le colonnine elettriche, assegnato solo il 15%. Il commento di Motus-E (2025-01-09)
6. MASE — PNRR: MASE, ok a oltre 4700 progetti di colonnine di ricarica elettrica nei centri urbani (2023-07-03)