If a utility outage takes a federally funded charging port offline for an afternoon, do those minutes count against its uptime? Under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) requirements, they can be left out, provided the charging station operator “can demonstrate that the charging port would otherwise be operational.” That condition decides whether an outage is excused or counted, and in practice the demonstration comes from the operator’s own charging software.

The clause sits in Part 680 of Title 23 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), the rule for publicly accessible electric vehicle (EV) chargers built with federal highway money. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) published it as a final rule in February 2023, and its protocol deadlines passed in February 2024. It has stood unamended since then. The program can also pay for chargers shared by commercial fleets from more than one company, and that brings 23 CFR 680 to fleet electrification leads who had little reason to read it before.

Read from a depot office, Part 680 is mostly a data job. It asks a charging platform for three things: uptime above 97% on every charging port, a quarterly data file for each port plus an annual cost report, and evidence for every outage the operator wants excluded. Many fleet platforms were set up to start sessions and settle billing. Producing this file is a different piece of work, and the best time to find out whether a platform can do it is before a funding agreement is signed.

What the NEVI Requirements Ask the Software to Produce

Section 680.114 requires chargers and networks to “securely measure, communicate, store, and report energy and power dispensed, real-time charging-port status, real-time price to the customer, and historical charging-port uptime.” Every item on that list is data the platform captures at the moment it happens, or never has at all.

The rest of the reporting follows from that continuous record. In platform terms, the full text of 23 CFR Part 680 comes down to five outputs.

Requirement (plain words) Section What the platform must produce
Per-port uptime: every charging port averages more than 97% uptime a year, recalculated monthly over the previous twelve months 23 CFR 680.116(b) Status history: a timestamped record of every status change on every port, kept long enough to recalculate the trailing twelve months each month
Excluded outages: utility interruptions, vehicle faults, scheduled maintenance, vandalism, and natural disasters come out of the count only if the operator can demonstrate the port would otherwise have been operational; hours outside the station’s identified hours of operation are also excluded 23 CFR 680.116(b) Outage evidence: for each excluded minute, a record showing the port would otherwise have been operational, plus the site’s hours of operation configured in the platform
Continuous data: chargers and networks securely measure, communicate, store, and report core operating data 23 CFR 680.114(a)(4) Live and stored data: energy and power dispensed, real-time port status, real-time price to the customer, and historical port uptime
Quarterly per-port file: session and outage data for every charging port, every quarter 23 CFR 680.112(a) Session records: station and port identifiers, session start and end times, error codes for unsuccessful sessions, kWh per session, peak session kW, payment method per session, total and excluded outage minutes for each of the previous three months, and the duration of each outage
Annual cost report: the previous year’s maintenance and repair cost for each station, submitted on or before March 1 23 CFR 680.112(b) Cost link: station identifiers shared with maintenance and finance systems, so work orders and invoices roll up per station
Table 1. What 23 CFR Part 680 asks, and what the charging software has to produce.

The same part also sets protocol and interoperability requirements, which took effect by February 28, 2024, and Codibly’s guide to EV charging regulations in 2026 maps them to implementation work.

Which Fleet Sites Fall Under Part 680

Part 680 applies, in its own words, to “all NEVI Formula Program projects as well as projects for the construction of publicly accessible EV chargers that are funded with funds made available under Title 23, United States Code, including any EV charging infrastructure project funded with Federal funds that is treated as a project on a Federal-aid highway.” Two conditions do the work. The charger is open to the public, and federal funds under the highway program paid for it. When both hold, the rule applies, whatever kind of site the charger stands on.

Public access has a precise meaning here. FHWA’s NEVI interim final program guidance of August 2025 treats equipment as publicly accessible when it is available to the public without restriction, and a station limited to customers, tenants, employees, or other consumers does not qualify. A depot that serves only its own fleet is therefore not publicly accessible.

NEVI funding itself starts on the highway. The 2021 infrastructure law directs it first to chargers along designated Alternative Fuel Corridors. Once a state determines, and FHWA certifies, that those corridors are fully built out, the state may use it for “EV charging infrastructure on any public road or in other publicly accessible locations.” The law also allows funding for chargers “open to the general public or to authorized commercial motor vehicle operators from more than one company,” and the guidance lists charging for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles as eligible. A truck charging hub shared by several carriers fits that description.

The money is real, and it is finite. Fiscal year 2026 is the final year of NEVI formula funding under the 2021 infrastructure law, with $885 million apportioned to states, according to a June 2026 Congressional Research Service report on the program. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, enacted in February 2026, transferred about $504 million of unobligated formula funds to other highway programs. The 2021 law’s highway authority was due to end on September 30, 2026, and a short-term extension signed in September now runs it to December 11, 2026. The reauthorization bill approved by the House transportation committee in May 2026 carries no new NEVI money, and the Administration’s 2027 budget asks Congress to cancel the NEVI funds states have not yet obligated.

For a fleet operator, the practical consequence sits in the funding agreement: Title 23 money for chargers the public can use brings Part 680 with it, reporting included. A private depot behind a gate is outside the rule.

The quick test for a given site:

Site Bound by Part 680? What it means
NEVI corridor station Yes: every NEVI Formula Program project is covered Full obligations: per-port uptime above 97%, the quarterly per-port file, the annual cost report, and evidence for every excluded outage
Public-access hub or depot built with Title 23 money Yes: publicly accessible chargers funded with Title 23 money are covered Same obligations: the chargers that money built carry the same uptime and reporting duties as a corridor station; confirm how any other chargers on the site are treated in the funding agreement
Private gated depot, no federal highway money No: neither condition applies A useful bar: 97% per port and a per-port status history are a sound benchmark to hold a platform to, adopted at the operator’s choice
Private depot built with other public money (state or local grant, no Title 23) No: Part 680 does not apply through that money Grant terms decide: the grant’s own terms set any uptime or reporting duties
Table 2. Is my site in scope? Four fleet site types against Part 680.

EV Charging Uptime Is Counted Per Port, Over a Rolling Year

Section 680.116(b) sets the bar. Each charging port must have average annual uptime “greater than 97%,” “calculated on a monthly basis for the previous twelve months.” Three percent of a year is about 263 hours. That is the ceiling on countable downtime for a single port across any twelve-month window: just under eleven days.

Two features of that definition matter more to a fleet site than the percentage itself.

The first is the unit. Uptime belongs to the charging port, so a site cannot average one failing port against twenty healthy ones. A site dashboard showing 99% can sit alongside a single port well below the bar. Where two ports share one power cabinet, a cabinet fault takes both down, and each needs its own outage record. The platform has to keep a timestamped status history for every port, which is the “historical charging-port uptime” Section 680.114 already requires it to store.

The second is the window. Because the figure is recalculated every month over the previous twelve, an outage stays in the calculation for a year. A port that loses a week in February carries that week in every monthly figure until the following February. That history is hard to rebuild after the fact, so it has to be captured from the day the site opens.

Part 680 also defines “up” strictly. A port counts as up when “its hardware and software are both online and available for use, or in use, and the charging port successfully dispenses electricity in accordance with requirements for minimum power level.” A port that reports itself available but does not deliver power at that level is not up. The gap between reported availability and delivered charging is the one Codibly examined in The Cost of a Failed Charge, and the rule’s definition closes part of it.

Charger vendors and networks already display an uptime figure. For a funded site, the test is whether that figure is calculated the way Part 680 calculates it: per port, over a trailing twelve months, counting a port as up only when it delivers power, with excluded outage minutes kept separately. A site-level percentage answers a different question.

The Excluded-Outage Clause Makes Evidence a Compliance Result

The same section lets outage minutes from five causes outside the operator’s control, from utility service interruptions to natural disasters, come out of the calculation. The exclusion holds only “provided that the charging station operator can demonstrate that the charging port would otherwise be operational.” A separate sentence also excludes hours outside the station’s identified hours of operation.

The rule sets the condition and leaves the evidence to the operator. In practice, the evidence is whatever the platform recorded at the time. On a fleet site, each category points to a specific record:

  • Utility interruption. The ports on the affected supply drop offline in the same minute and return together when power is restored, and each one reported a healthy status right up to the cut.
  • Vehicle fault. The failed session’s error record points to the vehicle side, and the same port completed sessions with other vehicles before and after.
  • Scheduled maintenance. The window was entered in the platform before the work started, and tied to the ports it affected.
  • Vandalism or natural disaster. An incident record, time-stamped when the incident is logged and linked to the affected port identifiers.
  • Hours of operation. A depot that opens its chargers to the public only at set hours needs those hours configured in the platform, so closed-hours time is never counted as downtime.

An operator without these records faces two poor options: count the minutes against the port, or claim an exclusion it cannot support. The quarterly file makes either choice visible, because it reports excluded minutes separately.

Two operators with identical hardware and identical outages can therefore report different uptime. The difference is how much of their downtime each can document as excludable.

What the Quarterly File Expects From a Depot Platform

Section 680.112(a) sets out the quarterly data for each charging port, session by session, with every field listed in the FAQ below. Section 680.112(b) adds an annual submission, due on or before March 1, that includes the previous year’s maintenance and repair cost for each station.

States and other direct recipients must ensure this data is submitted “in a manner prescribed by the FHWA,” and any quarterly data made public “will be aggregated and anonymized.” FHWA’s current guidance points them to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation’s EV Charging Analytics and Reporting Tool (EV-ChART). The numbers still start in the operator’s platform, port by port and session by session.

Several fields are harder for a fleet platform than they look. Peak session power means keeping power readings through each session, where a system built for billing may keep only the energy total. On a depot with chargers from several manufacturers, error codes arrive in each manufacturer’s own vocabulary and have to be captured per session. Payment method is simple at a public station and awkward at a depot where fleet drivers charge on a company account and outside drivers pay by card. The annual cost report lives mostly outside the charging platform, in maintenance tickets and invoices, so the platform needs station identifiers those systems can share.

A platform built to schedule vehicles against departure times inside a depot’s power limit was designed for a different job, and may do it well. Producing the Part 680 file is a separate requirement, and it belongs in procurement documents as explicitly as load management does. Codibly’s charge point management system RFP checklist shows how to turn capability claims into questions a vendor has to answer in writing.

An Operator That Owns the Platform Owns the Evidence

Every requirement in Part 680 comes back to one capability: capturing the right record at the moment it happens, keeping it for at least a year, and producing it in the shape the funder asks for. The rule also expects chargers to stay in compliance for at least five years from the day they open. The program around the rule shifted in 2025 and again in 2026, and Congress has not yet decided its future, so an operator should expect its reporting to change over that period: a new field, a new format, or an exclusion the state wants documented differently.

That kind of change is easier to make when the operator owns the platform and its data. Part 680 already assumes the network behind a charger can change: chargers must be designed to “securely switch charging network providers without any changes to hardware.” On a rented platform, a new report field depends on the vendor’s roadmap. Building from scratch gives full control, at the cost of a long software project before the first file is produced. Codibly’s CPMS Engine is a third way: a production-ready charge point management system (CPMS), licensed once and handed over with its source code, which the operator can extend with its own reporting and keep. Codibly is delivering charging platforms on its Engine for a European energy group, a MENA charging network, and a global carmaker. The reasoning behind that model is set out in Own Your Charging Platform.

For a private depot outside the rule, three records are still a sound test of fleet charging software: a status history for every port, session-level records, and an outage log that can explain itself.

For any site where federal highway money meets public access, one question is worth asking this quarter. Can the charging platform produce the per-port file today, and can it demonstrate, for every excluded minute, that the port would otherwise have worked?