faq EV Charging Guide

Is the NEVI Program Still Active?

Yes — restarted under new FHWA guidance in August 2025 after a seven-month pause. What survived, what changed, and what's actually getting built.

Yes. NEVI is active. The program was suspended in early 2025, then restarted on August 11, 2025, when FHWA issued updated guidance and required states to submit new deployment plans. Money is flowing again and stations are being built — slower than the program’s original timelines, but genuinely being built.

What happened, briefly

FHWA froze the $5 billion program in early 2025 and rescinded its guidance, leaving funded projects in limbo. States sued. The August 2025 restart guidance resolved it with real changes: states got more discretion over site selection, the 50-mile spacing requirement was dropped, and operator-owned sites were encouraged. The core driver-facing standards survived intact — 97% uptime per port, minimum four ports at 150 kW each, and public reporting.

What “active” looks like on the ground

Active does not mean fast. Across the seven states we track (WA, OR, ID, MT, WY, CO, UT), 13 NEVI-funded sites are in our pipeline: one live — Cle Elum on I-90, open since January 2026 — four under construction, and eight still in funding or permitting stages. Expected-live dates slip more often than they hold. The pause added roughly six months to a year to most timelines.

The per-state detail, with every site’s status and source, is in our NEVI tracker and its state build-out pages — Washington is the furthest along.

Why it matters to a driver

NEVI sites are held to a higher standard than most of the commercial network: the 97% uptime floor is a funding condition with public reporting, not a marketing claim, and the four-port minimum kills the single-stall failure mode. What the program requires and how to tell if a station is NEVI-funded is covered in NEVI Explained.


About this guide

Updated 2026-07-18. Written by Chester Beard for The Juice Index. Information verified from manufacturer specifications, network pricing pages, and NREL Alternative Fuels Data Center data.