What 504 RV Park EV Policies Taught Us in Three Years

The RV parks most likely to let you plug in an electric vehicle at the campsite sit, on average, twice as far from a public DC fast charger as the parks that forbid it. Sixteen miles versus eight, median. The accommodating ones are the ones with no other option for their EV guests. That single finding does more to predict a park's EV policy than the state it sits in, the chain it belongs to, or the size of its electrical service.

We crossed 500 parks this week. Three years ago we started with eight California campgrounds and a simple question: can you charge an electric vehicle at an RV park? 504 verified parks later, across forty-eight US states and ten Canadian provinces, every one backed by a published policy, an operator statement, or a traveler report, here is what the data says:

• 76 of 504 (15%) allow charging at the campsite.
• 230 of 504 (46%) have a dedicated on-site charging station separate from the campsite.
• 198 of 504 (39%) forbid EV charging on the property outright.

The three buckets

Every park in the directory falls into one of three policy categories. The split is uneven, and the categories tell three different stories about how the RV industry is responding to EVs.

The 76 that say yes

The first bucket is the parks doing the most. Some advertise it. Hunters Friend Resort in Branson, Missouri describes itself as:

THRILLED to be the FIRST business to offer EV Chargers for FREE to our guests while vacationing in Branson.

Four Clipper Creek HSC50s, no charge. Hunters Friend technically lives in the stations-available bucket rather than the allow-at-campsite one, but the welcome is the same: charge here, no extra fee. Kings River RV Resort in Kingsburg, California writes the line we have seen from no one else in the directory:

Every site is EV compatible with a 30/50 amp plug for your RV and a metered 50 amp plug for your EV vehicle.

A separate metered EV plug at every single site. That is the high water mark.

The 230 in the middle

The middle bucket is the quiet majority. They built a charger. They want you to use the charger. Please do not plug into the pedestal. It is the boring answer, and it is where most of the directory now lives, including nearly every state-park system that has invested in EV-camper infrastructure.

The 198 that say no

The third bucket is the parks that have decided, in writing, that EV charging is not happening on their property. Sometimes the reason is electrical capacity. Sometimes it is concern about damage. Sometimes the website does not say. One phrase shows up across twenty-one of these parks, verbatim:

Our current electrical pedestals were originally designed for non-continuous loads typical of today's RV usage.

We are seeing the same concern, voiced in nearly identical terms, at parks from coast to coast.

The map looks like one story, the data tells another

Below is what the ranking actually looks like for the twenty-three states and provinces where we have at least eight verified parks. Sorted by share of parks that welcome EVs in some form, descending.

The top of the chart is dominated by places with strong public-park systems. South Carolina sits at 94% EV-friendly (17 of 18 parks), almost entirely on the strength of its state park network. Quebec, at the same 94% (15 of 16), runs on SEPAQ. West Virginia, at 88% (14 of 16), runs on the WV Green Initiative. Three different operating models, one result: when the public sector owns the campground, EV charging is welcome.

The middle of the chart is where private parks dominate, and the policy mix is noisier. California at 67% EV-friendly has a third of its parks forbidding charging. Colorado, Florida, and Oregon all sit close to the dataset average. The surprise here is Missouri, the most polarized region in the dataset. Fourteen parks allow charging at the campsite. Only two have stations. Fifteen forbid it. There is almost no middle ground. The chart shows it as a clean split of green and red, with a barely visible sliver of blue.

The farther from a public charger, the warmer the welcome

That distance gap is the strongest pattern in the dataset, and it is not subtle. The 76 parks that allow campsite charging sit a median 16 miles from the nearest public DC fast charger. The 198 that forbid charging sit a median 8 miles away.

28% of the parks that forbid EV charging sit within five miles of a public DC fast charger. They can refuse because they have an answer when an EV driver asks: there is a station up the road. Only 17% of the parks that allow campsite charging are that close to one. For them, the campsite outlet is the answer.

The pattern shows up most clearly at the extremes. Worland RV Park in Wyoming, 74 miles from the nearest public charger, allows charging if you call ahead. Paisano Village outside Big Bend, Texas, 72 miles out, allows charging at the campsite. Neither park is heroically generous. They are pragmatic. An EV driver who pulls in with ten percent battery is not driving 74 miles back out for a charger.

The inverse holds too. The KOAs in Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida that forbid EV charging are mostly sitting within five miles of an Electrify America, a Tesla Supercharger, or a ChargePoint cluster. The corporate policy line about non-continuous loads lands more comfortably when you can also tell the guest where to go instead. Fort Pierce West KOA in Florida turns this into a feature: pedestals cannot support EV charging, here is the Wawa up the road. A surprisingly generous refusal.

Read the chart bottom row. The 8 percent of permissive parks that sit 50 or more miles from the nearest charger are the parks doing the actual work of keeping EV road trips possible in the parts of the country that public infrastructure has not reached. They are not on a press release. They are mostly small, mostly rural, and mostly operated by people who decided, on their own, that a 50-amp outlet and a handshake was a reasonable thing to offer.

Caught charging? The penalties run up to $500

Thirteen parks in the directory publish a specific dollar amount for plugging in where you are not supposed to. Eleven of them ban EV charging outright, which works out to 11 of 198 refusals, or 6%. The other two run on-site charging stations and still publish a fine for guests who plug into the pedestal instead. The remaining 94% of refusals leave the consequence unstated. The fines are striking because they are loud, not because they are common, and a reader should keep that ratio in mind.

The thirteen that do publish a number range from a $30 minimum at a KOA in Washington to a pair of $500 fees that sit alone at the top. Some come with eviction. Some are charged per occurrence. Some, by their own description, are charged for stealing.

The $500 outliers

The two $500 fees are Tropic Hideaway RV Resort at OWA in Foley, Alabama, and Camp Margaritaville RV Resort Auburndale in Florida. Both use almost the same wording. The Margaritaville language reads like an HOA bylaw:

Guests caught charging at their site will face a $500 violation fee.

The Alabama version adds a damage-liability clause to the same fee. Neither park provides EV charging anywhere else on the property. If either property is on your itinerary, plan your charging around it: top up at a public station before you arrive, and find your next station after you leave.

Where the operators have a fair complaint

The $275 fine at Silverline Lakeside Resort in Winthrop, Washington uses unusual language. The policy describes pedestal charging as "stealing power" and applies the fine "per occurrence". The phrasing is unique in the dataset. We do understand where it comes from. In parts of the country where residential electricity runs as high as $0.55 per kWh, fully charging a large EV like a Hummer EV with its 200 kWh battery is north of $100 in raw power costs. A flat-rate campsite quietly absorbing that has a legitimate complaint.

The cleaner answer, and the one a meaningful share of the directory has arrived at, is to meter the charging and bill the guest for what they actually pull. A framework that says "yes, plug in, here is the kWh rate" treats the EV traveler as a customer instead of a thief, and it solves the cost-absorption problem at the same time.

Metering is still rare on this side of the Atlantic. Most US RV parks bill electricity as part of the nightly site fee, which works for a 30-amp RV doing microwave-and-air-conditioning duty and breaks down fast when an EV is pulling 200 kWh into its battery. A small but growing share of US campgrounds have installed metered pedestals or dedicated metered EV plugs, and the pattern is clearly the right one. Across much of Europe, paying only for the kilowatt-hours you actually use at a campsite is the default, and the cost-absorption argument we just walked through does not really come up. The billing model already solves it.

Stations and fines, side by side

The most telling park on the list is Sunset View Campground in Hawkshaw, New Brunswick. Sunset View has a Level 2 charging station on site. It also publishes a $250 fine, immediate eviction, and no refund if you plug into your campsite. The station and the fine exist in the same park for the same reason: the operator wants EV traffic, on the operator's terms. The investment in a station is sometimes a way of removing the excuse for unauthorized pedestal use.

Why parks say no

Read the 198 refusals end-to-end and a clear pattern emerges. The reasons sort into three categories that together cover 180 of the 198 refusals (91%). The remaining 18 parks (9%) gave idiosyncratic or mixed reasons that did not fit cleanly into any single bucket.

The first bucket is the one to take at face value. Older pedestals were specified for the duty cycle of an RV, which draws hard on arrival and then idles low. An EV pulls 32 amps continuously for hours. The boilerplate line about "non-continuous loads" is generic. The underlying concern is not.

The third bucket is the smallest but it tells you the most about a park's posture. When the published rule leads with the dollar figure before the reason, deterrence is the policy. That is a fair signal to plan your stops elsewhere.

Public lands, quietly leading

The most welcoming results in the dataset are also the least promoted. The big EV charging announcements come from car companies and networks. The campgrounds doing the real work are mostly public agencies that did it years ago and never put out a press release.

The directory shows state and provincial park systems forbidding EV charging at about 1% of their sites, against roughly 45% at private campgrounds. Exactly one public park in the directory publishes a refusal: Kartchner Caverns State Park in Benson, Arizona, whose facility page reads "Electric Vehicle charging is not permitted at the park." One refusal across roughly 96 public-park sites. That gap is real, but it is not entirely apples-to-apples. Public park sites tend not to publish prohibitions at all; they tell you when a charger is on site and stay quiet otherwise. The public-park number reads more like a floor than a ceiling.

We also suspect the gap has something to do with who pays the bill. A private RV park owner is the one absorbing the electricity cost and, eventually, the repair bill on an aging pedestal that was not specified for continuous 32-amp draw. A state park ranger is not. That difference in who carries the downside probably shapes the published policy more than any other single factor.

The West Virginia State Parks system has been offering free EV charging since 2017 under the WV Green Initiative. Ten state parks in the directory, all with Tesla NACS chargers, all free. The program predates the bipartisan infrastructure law that funded most of the public network it now coexists with.

Georgia partnered with Rivian to install Waypoint J1772 stations at five state parks, including Cloudland Canyon and Tallulah Gorge. Quebec's SEPAQ system and New Brunswick's NB Power eCharge program account for nearly all of the strong Canadian numbers in the directory. Parks Canada, in partnership with Tesla, has accepted donated chargers at over two dozen sites including Riding Mountain, Cape Breton Highlands, and Kouchibouguac.

None of these programs got the headlines. All of them are doing more for EV road trips than most of the named-network rollouts of the past five years. Public lands had a head start, and most of them still do not realize they were the ones leading.

What we still do not know

Two honest caveats are worth landing before this gets cited.

The 504 is not a random sample. It is the set of parks that publish a policy, or whose policy a traveler has reported to us. Parks with no published EV policy are systematically missing from the dataset. The real national distribution probably has a much larger "no policy yet" bucket. Treat our numbers as the lower bound on awareness and the upper bound on policy maturity.

Most parks have not published a policy at all, and many of the policies that do exist are years out of date. A significant share of the campground websites we reviewed have not been substantively updated in five or more years. A policy written before the 2020 EV boom may not reflect what the office actually does in 2026, and a park with no online statement is not the same as a park with no opinion. If a park's policy matters to your trip, call ahead before you arrive. The phone number is almost always more current than the website.

Thank you to the contributors

Most of the 504 listings in this directory came from our own research: cross-referencing campground websites, reading reservation pages, and calling offices when the page went quiet. But the entries we are proudest of are the ones we got from readers. The tip about a park that quietly lets EVs plug in despite saying nothing on the website. The correction noting that a policy changed last spring. The forwarded email reply from a campground office that finally got the wording right. A handful of those readers have quietly improved entire state pages. To everyone who has written in, shared an experience, sent a correction, or passed this directory along to another EV traveler, thank you.

If you spot a park we have missed, or a policy that has changed since we documented it, please email us at [email protected]. The goal has not changed: keep each other from being surprised at the check-in window, and keep each other from getting stranded with an empty battery.