The federal charging rules everybody quotes are conditions attached to federal money, not a general law governing public chargers. 23 CFR Part 680 binds States and other direct recipients of federal charging funds — and the Government Accountability Office counted 384 federally funded chargers open to the public in April 2025, against roughly 219,000 public charging ports. What almost certainly does reach the machine in front of you is your state's weights-and-measures law: the regime that governs petrol pumps and supermarket scales, and the itemised receipt it entitles you to.
US Government Accountability Office, Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: Improved Performance Management Needs to Be Part of Any Related Federal Efforts, GAO-25-106992, released 22 July 2025.
There is a federal rule with real teeth in it. The price must be shown before you start. A contactless card must be accepted and a membership cannot be required. Power may not be curtailed because of how you chose to pay. All of it is real, all of it is in force, and almost none of it reaches the machine you are standing at — because it is a grant condition, and the station in front of you probably never took the grant.
Even the unit of the cover figure is genuinely ambiguous, and the book says so. GAO's headline sentence reads ‘As of April 2025, 384 NEVI- and CFI-funded chargers were open to the public.’ Elsewhere in the same report it breaks the same total into 300 NEVI-funded public charging ports and 84 CFI-funded public charging ports, summing to the identical 384 — and under 23 CFR 680.104 a charger has one or more ports, so both labels cannot describe the same 384 things. This book prints GAO's sentence as GAO wrote it and does not convert it into the other unit.
23 CFR 680.116(a)(1) requires the price to be displayed prior to initiating a charging transaction, and the price at the start of the session cannot change during it. Federally funded stations only.
680.106(f)(1) and (f)(2). And the sleeper provision, 680.106(f)(3): the operator may not delay, limit or curtail power flow on the basis of payment method or membership. There is no equivalent in federal law for the charger at the shopping centre.
680.116(b). But the formula at 680.116(b)(3) subtracts excluded minutes — utility service interruptions, scheduled maintenance, vandalism, natural disasters, and failures attributed to the vehicle. A port can report above 97 per cent while three drivers in a row leave with an empty battery.
680.106(c), unamended since 30 March 2023, on every DC fast port at a federally funded station. J3400 is an SAE Recommended Practice revised 30 September 2024 — not a government mandate, and no US regulator has designated it as required.
The book is built around where you are standing: at a machine that has just taken your money, or at a keyboard trying to work out what you were owed. Each has a chapter, and each has a deadline attached to it.
There is no badge on the machine, and the network brand tells you nothing — the same operator runs federally funded sites and ordinary commercial ones side by side. Four circumstantial signals get you a working answer. Letter 6 to your state Department of Transportation settles it for certain, because the state is the recipient of the money.
The receipt, the face of the machine showing its posted unit price, the responsible party notice, the EVSE identification number, the app's session record, and the exact time and port number. Under two minutes, and not one of them can be recreated from home.
NIST Handbook 44 Section 3.40, UR.3.3 requires a receipt, printed or electronic, at the completion of all transactions — carrying nine specific items, including the EVSE identification number and the business name and location. Asking for those items produces a better answer than asking for a receipt.
Credit card: a written billing-error notice under 12 CFR 1026.13, which must reach the creditor no later than 60 days after the first periodic statement showing the charge. Debit card: none of that applies, the money has already left your account, and how fast you report is the variable you control.
A charger that mismeasures energy or prices differently from its posted price is a commercial measuring device out of tolerance. Your state weights-and-measures authority has an inspector and a certified standard. It is not how you get your $31 back — Chapter 11 is. It is how the machine gets fixed.
Instant download. PDF and DOCX, so the letters can be edited rather than retyped.
Eighteen chapters in four parts — which rules reach your charger, what you are owed at any charger, what to do when it takes your money and gives you nothing, and the paperwork.
The single sentence the whole subject turns on: 23 CFR Part 680 binds States and other direct recipients of federal charging funds. Four signals for identifying a covered station, and the one way to find out for certain.
Refund request to the charging operator; billing-error notice to a credit card issuer; error notice to your bank on a debit card; complaint to your state weights-and-measures authority; complaint to your state Attorney General; request to your state DOT on a federally funded station; and chasing a card issuer that has missed its deadline.
The number posted on the machine, from the forecourt; the network's support line after a failed session; your credit card issuer before you write; your bank on a debit card; your state weights-and-measures office; and the site host — the shop, hotel or mall.
UR.3.3 and UR.2.5 — the nine items a receipt must carry, which dispute each line wins, and the name, address and telephone number of the local responsible party that must be displayed on an unattended machine.
What to photograph and note while still standing next to the machine, in order — including the absence that is itself a reportable defect in an adopting state.
How wrong a charger is allowed to be: 1.0% acceptance and 2.0% maintenance for AC systems and for DC placed in service on or after 1 January 2025, and 5.0% either way for older DC. Plus the two expiry dates that have not arrived.
California and Colorado — what each has adopted, which edition of the code, which dates are in effect and which are still in the future. No fifty-state table, on purpose.
Four prompts that genuinely help, and a blunt list of what never to ask — starting with whether a particular charger is federally funded.
Nine routes with what each one will not do, ten terms in plain English, and honest answers to ten questions people actually ask.
23 CFR Part 680 binds States and other direct recipients of federal charging funds. Almost every account of the federal charging rules omits that sentence, and it is the sentence that decides whether any of them reaches the machine in front of you.
A charger measures a quantity, computes a price from it and takes your money, which places it in the oldest consumer-protection regime in the country. NIST Handbook 44 Section 3.40 is where the receipt, the posted responsible party and the tolerances come from — and it is a model code, enforceable only where a state has adopted it.
The 60-day billing-error right at 12 CFR 1026.13 is a credit card right. The Federal Trade Commission states its own limit plainly: the dispute process is for billing errors on credit cards and other types of revolving credit. Merging the two regimes is the most damaging mistake a book like this can make.
No government publisher produces a national session-failure rate, and the federal collection tool is not public. No final federal accessibility standard for EV charging stations was found. The Regulation E deadlines were not verified at the primary source, so they are not printed. Chapter 18 lists ten refusals and the reason for each.
Chapter 10 is the first thirty minutes, and what you collect in them decides everything that follows. Then Chapter 11 if you tapped a credit card, or Chapter 12 if you tapped a debit card.
Chapter 1, and it is short. The federal charging rules people quote at each other are conditions attached to federal money, and the odds are very high that your charger never took any.
Chapter 13. The machine's own two indications disagreeing is Handbook 44 S.2.4.4 on its face — a weights-and-measures complaint, not a customer service one, and it needs no comparison with your car.
Chapters 2 to 4 for what a corridor station is obliged to do, then Chapter 5 for whether the federal programme that builds them is still running — told in date order, without tidying up the ending.
680.106(f)(3) at a covered station, and the receipt showing the maximum rate of energy transfer you were sold is how you show it. Chapter 2.
It recommends none. Every reliability ranking in circulation is built from an app company's own users' check-ins or from the networks' own self-defined uptime figures.
No federal or state publisher produces one, and the survey houses that do sell data to the networks they measure. Chapter 18 says so instead of filling the gap.
The rules cited are US federal regulations and US state weights-and-measures law.
The worked example running through Chapters 11 and 13 is a $31 charge against 0.4 kWh actually dispensed. The two-minute evidence routine in Chapter 7 is free to run, and it is the thing that makes every letter afterwards work.
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An explanation of charging rules and how to use them. Not legal advice and not financial advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship.
Only your state's weights-and-measures authority can decide that. Chapter 13 is how to reach them, and Call 5 is what to establish before you file — whether the state has adopted Section 3.40, which edition, and whether the programme is in enforcement yet.
California and Colorado. Both adopt Handbook 44; they do not adopt the same edition of it. For anywhere else it gives you Call 5 rather than a row in a table it never checked.
No uptime percentage published by the company being measured. No reliability league table built from check-ins in a mapping app. No national session-failure rate, because no government publisher produces one and the private houses that do sell data to the networks they measure.
This edition has just been released. Rather than publish testimonials from people who do not exist, these spaces are held for the first genuine reader reviews. On a product whose whole argument is that unsourced numbers should not be trusted, that seemed like the only defensible choice.
If asking for the receipt in the code's own terms produced the itemised document, we would like to hear how — and to publish it in your own words, with your permission.
We will not publish claims about amounts recovered. What a card issuer decides depends on facts no book controls.
Reserved for someone who used Letter 6 and found out from their state DOT which chargers on their regular route took federal money. That is the letter we would most like to hear worked.
Take the six records in Chapter 7 before you drive away — the receipt, the face of the machine, the responsible party notice, the EVSE identification number, the app's session record and the exact time and port number. Then send Letter 1 the same day. Not one of those six can be recreated from home.
There is: 23 CFR 680.116(a)(1). It applies to stations funded under the NEVI or CFI programmes. GAO counted 384 federally funded chargers open to the public as of April 2025, against roughly 219,000 public ports as of May 2025. The rule is real and you are probably not standing at a station it covers. What may cover yours is your state's weights-and-measures law.
It is at 23 CFR 680.116(b) and applies to federally funded ports. Its formula subtracts excluded minutes — utility service interruptions, scheduled maintenance, vandalism, natural disasters and failures attributed to the vehicle. A port can be over 97 per cent while your charge failed. Chapter 3.
At a federally funded station, no: 680.106(f)(2) says a membership cannot be required, and (f)(1) requires a contactless method accepting major debit and credit cards. Everywhere else, yes. There is no general federal rule, and the FTC's fee rule covers only live-event tickets and short-term lodging.
In a state that has adopted NIST Handbook 44 Section 3.40, UR.3.3 requires one, printed or electronic, at the completion of all transactions, carrying nine specific items. It is a model code, so the answer depends on your state and on which edition it adopted. Ask anyway, in the code's own terms — Letter 1.
No, and this is the mistake most worth avoiding. The 60-day billing-error right at 12 CFR 1026.13 is for credit cards and other types of revolving credit; the Federal Trade Commission says so in terms. Debit sits under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and Regulation E. This book does not print those deadlines, because it did not verify them at the primary source — it tells you to telephone your bank today and get the answer in writing instead.
Both. Every purchase includes the PDF and an editable DOCX, so the letters can be filled in and sent rather than retyped.
Email sales@viralbydesign.co within 7 days of purchase for a full refund. No forms, no explanation required.
Open it, read Chapter 1, and work out whether the charger you use every week took federal money — because that one fact decides which rules you can invoke at it. If it is not what you expected, email sales@viralbydesign.co within 7 days of purchase and you get a full refund. No forms, no explanation required.
The regime that reaches yours is the one that governs petrol pumps and supermarket scales. In a state that has adopted it, it entitles you to an itemised receipt carrying the device's identification number, and it requires the name, address and telephone number of the local responsible party to be displayed on an unattended machine. Both are what turn a complaint into a case. Almost nobody asks for either.
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