Short answer: on fuel alone, an electric pickup usually costs less per mile than a gas truck, as long as you charge at home. Electric trucks are heavy and inefficient, but the gas trucks they replace are thirsty too, so the comparison isn't as lopsided as the raw numbers first suggest. The catch is that "usually" hides some big exceptions, and the sticker price can push your break-even point out for years.
Why a 2 mi/kWh truck can still beat gas
Electric pickups are not efficient by EV standards. A full-size electric truck often manages around 2 mi/kWh, while a compact EV can do roughly three times that. But cost per mile is price divided by efficiency, and electricity is cheap. At the US home-charging average of about $0.17/kWh, 2 mi/kWh works out to roughly $0.085 per mile.
Now the gas side. A full-size pickup that gets about 18-20 mpg, burning regular gas at roughly $3.30/gallon, costs about $0.17 to $0.18 per mile. So even a "wasteful" electric truck runs at roughly half the per-mile fuel cost of the gas truck it replaces. Over about 12,000 miles a year, that's a real gap. The reason the math favors the EV isn't that the truck sips power — it's that the gas truck it stands in for is genuinely expensive to feed. You can run any of these pairings yourself in the gas-vs-EV calculator to see your own numbers.
The three big trucks, and the same trade-off
The popular electric pickups tell a similar story. The F-150 Lightning replaces a truck most buyers know intimately, and on home charging its per-mile fuel cost lands well under the gas F-150. The Tesla Cybertruck and the Rivian R1T follow the same pattern: modest efficiency, but a per-mile cost that still undercuts a comparable gas truck when the electrons come from your garage.
Where they differ is sticker price, and that matters more here than in the car segment. Electric trucks tend to cost more up front than their gas equivalents, and that gap is what you're slowly paying back with cheaper miles. A larger fuel saving per mile helps, but a bigger price premium can still stretch the payback out. If you want to line the contenders up side by side, you can compare EVs across efficiency and running cost before you commit.
Towing and hauling break the math
This is the caveat that catches truck buyers off guard. Electric range and efficiency fall hard under load. Pull a heavy trailer and an electric pickup can lose a large chunk of its range — a truck rated for a few hundred miles unloaded may cover far less while towing. Your effective mi/kWh drops, so your cost per mile climbs, and you charge more often.
Gas trucks lose efficiency towing too, but the practical pain is different. A gas truck refuels in five minutes almost anywhere; an electric truck towing across the country stops more often and charges slower, and it's leaning on public chargers exactly when it's least efficient. If your truck spends most of its life hauling near its limits, the fuel-cost advantage narrows and the inconvenience grows. If it mostly commutes empty and tows occasionally, the EV keeps its edge.
Public charging and sticker price: the two things that erase the win
The home-charging number is what makes electric trucks look good. Swap it out and the picture changes fast. Public DC fast-charging averages around $0.48/kWh — nearly three times home rates. At 2 mi/kWh, that's roughly $0.24 per mile, which is more than the gas truck you were trying to beat. A truck that road-trips on fast chargers, or that can't charge at home at all, may spend more on energy than it would have on gas.
Price is the other lever. Electric trucks aren't cheap, and the federal $7,500 EV tax credit ended on September 30, 2025, so that cushion is gone. Some state or utility incentives may still apply where you live, but they vary and you should confirm what's actually available to you rather than assume. Without a federal credit, the higher up-front cost takes longer to earn back through fuel savings, and the break-even can land several years out depending on your mileage and how much you paid.
One thing that quietly helps: maintenance. Electric drivetrains skip oil changes and have fewer moving parts, worth roughly $0.03 per mile in saved upkeep. It's not the headline number, but over the life of a truck it nudges the total in the EV's favor.
So who actually saves?
You save if you charge at home, drive a normal 12,000 or so miles a year, tow only occasionally, and keep the truck long enough to work off the price premium. You may not save if you rely on public fast-charging, tow heavy loads most of the time, or trade out before break-even. The truck's low efficiency isn't the problem — how and where you charge, and what you paid, are what decide it. Plug your gas truck, your electricity rate, and your real mileage into the gas-vs-EV calculator and let the numbers tell you which side of the line you're on.