The U.S. campgrounds and RV parks industry is now a $10.9 billion business with 16,419 operators, and 2025 set a record with 52 million North American households camping and generating $66 billion in local economic impact. But behind those numbers, a quieter problem is bending margins for park owners: electricity. Utility costs already run as high as 35% of revenue at many parks, and the fastest-growing line item — EV charging from guests — was never accounted for when those electrical pedestals were originally specified.
The infrastructure problem is real. The financial problem is bigger. And both come back to the same root cause: most RV parks have no idea what any individual site is drawing at any given minute. They get one master meter bill from the utility, divide it across guests with a flat fee or a rough per-night charge, and absorb the variance. That worked when a 50-amp pedestal served a vacationing rig running an air conditioner intermittently. It does not work when the rig next door is pulling an extra 40 amps continuously into an electric F-150 Lightning overnight.
RV park electrical service was historically sized using diversity factors. Engineers assumed AC units would cycle, refrigerators would not run flat-out, and not every campsite would be loaded simultaneously. The total amperage available at the master service is typically only 40 to 50% of the sum of all the individual pedestal breaker ratings. Those assumptions held up for decades because RV loads were genuinely non-continuous.
Continuous EV charging, or even golf cart charging a common practice, breaks every one of those assumptions at once. A Level 2 charge pulls 30 to 40 amps for hours without cycling, and/or a golfcart at 15 amps. A guest who plugs an electric tow vehicle into the 50-amp pedestal at their site is, in load terms, behaving more like a small data center than a camper. KOA's 2026 Camping & Outdoor Hospitality Report shows that 24% of camping travelers now own an EV — far higher than the general public — and KOA has launched a program for its 520-plus campgrounds to install branded chargers. The trend is one-way.
The pedestals themselves are usually fine. Most RV pedestals already include a 240-volt / 50-amp receptacle that is electrically equivalent to a Tesla NEMA 14-50 connection. The choke point sits upstream, at the master service and at the panels and feeders that branch out across the loop roads. A park designed around an 80% diversity factor can run out of upstream capacity long before the individual pedestals do. When that happens, breakers trip, voltage sags, and equipment in nearby rigs starts to suffer — all while the operator has no visibility into which sites are responsible.
Industry analyses of RV park profitability put healthy NOI margins anywhere from 30% to over 50% for a well-run park, with EBITDA more typically landing between 13% and 17%. In every one of those models, electricity is one of the three largest operating expenses, alongside labor and insurance. When utility variable cost rises faster than nightly rates, margin compression is immediate.
The cleanest fix is to charge guests for what they actually use. Submetering benchmarks for 2026 set the target electric recovery rate at 95% or higher, because electric meters are reliable and individual usage patterns are easy to isolate. Hitting that benchmark requires five things working together: meter accuracy, vacant-site billing logic, current allocation formulas, master-to-submeter reconciliation, and disciplined collections. A failure in any one of them erodes recovery by several percentage points per cycle.
Without submetering, parks fall back on three options, all bad. Flat-fee inclusion bundles power into the nightly rate, which means heavy users are subsidized by light users and the park eats every cost spike. Punitive flat surcharges for "EV use" alienate guests and push them to competitors. Rough manual readings — someone walking the loop with a clipboard — produce billing disputes, take three to four full days a month, and miss the kind of hour-by-hour anomalies that signal a failing AC compressor or an unauthorized space heater.
Circuit-level submetering replaces all three of those approaches with a single source of truth: a current sensor on each pedestal feeder reporting actual kilowatt-hours, minute by minute, to a cloud system that knows which guest is on which site at any given moment. That data unlocks several things at once.
First, transparent guest billing. When power is billed at the pass-through rate the master meter pays — which is what Florida, Alabama, and most other states require, since reselling electricity at a markup is broadly prohibited — guests trust the bill and stop arguing. They also conserve. Studies of submetered campgrounds and mobile home parks consistently report consumption drops of 20 to 40% once guests can see and pay for their own use, with one Colorado park documenting a one-third drop in usage almost immediately after install and saving $35,000 in avoided water and sewer charges in year one. Electric recovery follows the same pattern.
Second, real-time load awareness. A park manager looking at a live dashboard at 7 p.m. on a Friday in July can see exactly how many sites are drawing near-pedestal-rated loads and how much headroom is left at the master service. EV-heavy weekends become a managed event instead of a guessing game. If demand starts approaching a transformer's rating, the operator can intervene — staggering charging windows, posting overnight EV charging guidance, or activating a dedicated charging area — before a breaker trips and a guest's RV freezer warms up.
Third, fault detection. Continuous minute-level data exposes the small failures that flat metering hides. A pedestal pulling 6 amps when the site is empty is leaking somewhere. A unit drawing significantly more than its neighbors at the same outdoor temperature is running a failing AC compressor. A sudden spike on a single circuit is an unauthorized high-draw appliance. Each of these is a five-minute conversation when caught early and a full electrician's call when it isn't.
Submetering rules vary substantially across the country, and operators need to confirm their local requirements before they bill the first kilowatt-hour. A few patterns matter most:
The practical takeaway: submetering is permitted almost everywhere RVs camp, but the rules around what you can charge, for how long, and how you must document it shift across state lines. Build the program around pass-through pricing and reliable records and you will be inside the lines almost everywhere.
Older campground submetering meant pulling a meter base, hiring an electrician for each site, and threading new wiring — typically $300 to $500 per pedestal, with payback in 12 to 24 months from billing recovery alone. Modern wireless, clamp-on sensors compress that math considerably. They install in minutes per pedestal, require no rewiring, and run on energy harvested from the conductor itself, which means no batteries to replace and no service trips to maintain them. Vutility's HotDrop sensor is one example of this category; the company reports more than 4,500 sensors installed at campsites and revenue-grade accuracy that meets ANSI standards.
One published case study from a Colorado park installed clamp-on sensors at roughly a quarter of the cost of conventional meters and recovered the project in 12 months from utility savings alone. Other operators report payback under a year once submetering is paired with accurate guest billing, because the recovered revenue is incremental from day one.
The practical workflow looks like this: a sensor on each pedestal feeder reports usage to a gateway, which transmits it to a cloud service. The cloud service feeds two outputs — a real-time operations dashboard for the park manager, and a billing API that pushes per-site usage into the park's reservation and PMS system. Operators using integrated tooling have reported that meter-reading work that used to take three to four full days per month now takes about 15 minutes, with bills generated automatically based on actual stay dates and current utility rates.
Operators do not need to convert every pedestal at once. The most common phased approach prioritizes the loops with the heaviest seasonal load and the longest average length of stay. Long-term and monthly sites are the highest-value submetering targets because the variance in usage between guests is largest, and because long stays produce the biggest billing exposure when usage is bundled into the nightly rate. Transient nightly sites can come second.
A useful rollout sequence:
Yes, with one caveat: submetering only pays back when it is paired with billing discipline. A park that installs sensors but keeps power bundled into the nightly rate captures the operational benefits — load visibility, fault detection, capacity planning — but leaves the cost-recovery upside on the table. A park that installs sensors and charges every guest for actual usage at the master meter rate routinely captures both, and routinely sees the project pay back inside a single season.
The operating environment is also moving in one direction. EV ownership among campers is growing every year. KOA, Westgate, and other major operators are building EV charging into their brand standards. Insurance carriers are starting to ask about electrical load monitoring after fire and equipment claims. State and utility programs are tightening accuracy and recordkeeping requirements. The parks that will weather all of that comfortably are the ones that already have a real-time picture of every circuit on the property.
If you operate an RV park or campground and are weighing this, three questions clarify the decision quickly. What share of revenue is utilities consuming today, and how has that trended over the last 24 months? What is your written guidance to guests about EV charging on pedestals, and how is it enforced? And how confident are you in your ability to identify, within minutes, which site is responsible for a sudden load spike?
If any of those answers feel uncertain, circuit-level submetering is the cleanest fix on the market. To explore what a deployment would look like at your park, including site survey, hardware planning, and PMS integration, talk to the Vutility team or learn more about HotDrop wireless energy monitoring.
