The rulebook
The 750-Watt Question
Canada draws the legal line at 500 watts. The United States draws it at 750. Of the 407 machines on this index that publish a motor rating, the median is exactly 750 — and more than half the shelf is past the Canadian cap before it leaves the box.
By The Data Desk Jul 11, 2026 7 min read 1,366 words
Two numbers, written into two countries’ laws, are supposed to describe the same machine. In Canada, a power-assisted bicycle is built around a 500-watt ceiling and a 32 km/h assist cutoff — the benchmark set federally and adopted, almost word for word, by every province that regulates e-bikes at all. In the United States, federal consumer law calls anything under 750 watts and 20 mph on motor power alone a low-speed electric bicycle, and most states sort those machines into three classes. Between 500 and 750 lies a border you cannot see on the bike lane, and the continental shelf is being stocked as if only one side of it exists.
What the shelf actually sells
Of the 669 machines this index tracks, 407 publish a motor rating. The median of those ratings is 750 watts exactly — the largest motor American law will call a bicycle is now the middle of the market.
Line the shelf up against the two legal lines and the picture sharpens. 229 machines — 56.3% of everything with a published rating — sit above Canada’s 500-watt benchmark. 162 machines (39.8%) sit above the US 750-watt line too, meaning they exceed the bicycle definition on both sides of the border. And 106 machines, a full 26% of the rated shelf, publish four digits:
| Published rating | Machines | Share of rated shelf |
|---|---|---|
| 250W and under | 79 | 19.4% |
| 251–500W | 99 | 24.3% |
| 501–750W | 67 | 16.5% |
| 751–1,000W | 56 | 13.8% |
| 1,001–1,500W | 62 | 15.2% |
| Over 1,500W | 44 | 10.8% |
One honest caveat before anyone is condemned by a table: makers do not rate motors the same way. Some publish the nominal (continuous) rating the law cares about; others lead with a peak figure roughly double it, because bigger sells. The index records what the listing leads with. That ambiguity is itself a finding — on today’s shelf you often cannot tell, from the number in the headline, whether a machine is legal to ride to work.
The categories doing the pushing
Power is not distributed evenly. The push comes from specific corners of the market:
| Category | n | Median rating | Over 500W | Over 750W |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commuter | 134 | 500W | 38.1% | 18.7% |
| E-dirt | 75 | 750W | 53.3% | 37.3% |
| Mountain | 43 | 1,000W | 67.4% | 53.5% |
| Fat tire | 41 | 1,500W | 87.8% | 82.9% |
| E-trike | 30 | 1,400W | 86.7% | 63.3% |
| E-scooter | 29 | 500W | 41.4% | 34.5% |
| Folding | 23 | 1,000W | 87% | 73.9% |
| Cargo | 17 | 250W | 29.4% | 11.8% |
| Road | 8 | 625W | 50% | 12.5% |
| Moped-style | 7 | 750W | 85.7% | 42.9% |
Read the extremes. The cargo category — the machines built to carry children — has the lowest median on the shelf at 250 watts, squarely inside every definition. The fat-tire category medians at 1,500 watts, three times the Canadian cap, with 82.9% of its machines past the American line as well. Even the folding category, nominally the apartment-commuter’s segment, medians at 1,000 watts. The commuter category is the shelf’s centre of gravity and its median sits at 500 exactly — parked on the Canadian line to the watt.
Canada: 500 watts, 32 km/h, and thirteen rulebooks
Canada’s number comes from the federal Motor Vehicle Safety Regulations’ old definition of a power-assisted bicycle: pedals, one or more electric motors totalling 500 watts or less, no assist past 32 km/h. The definition was formally repealed in February 2021 — importation is now assessed on design characteristics — but it remains the reference point every province builds on, which is why the provincial table below reads like one law with local accents:
| Jurisdiction | Power cap | Assist cutoff | Min age | Helmet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Federal benchmark | 500W | 32 km/h | — | — |
| Ontario | 500W | 32 km/h | 16 | All riders |
| British Columbia | 500W | 32 km/h | 16 | All riders |
| Quebec | 500W | 32 km/h | 18 | All riders |
| Alberta | 500W | 32 km/h | 12 | All riders |
| Manitoba | 500W | 32 km/h | 14 | All riders |
| Saskatchewan | 500W | 32 km/h | 14 | Operator |
| Nova Scotia | 500W | 30 km/h | — | All riders |
| New Brunswick | 500W | 32 km/h | — | All riders |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 500W | 32 km/h | — | All riders |
| Prince Edward Island | 500W | 32 km/h | 16 | All riders |
| Yukon | 500W | 32 km/h | — | Municipal bylaws |
| Northwest Territories | — | — | — | Municipal bylaws |
| Nunavut | — | — | — | Not specified |
The accents matter at the margins — Nova Scotia cuts assist at 30 km/h rather than 32, minimum ages run from 12 in Alberta to 18 in Quebec, and Nunavut, with no e-bike category of its own, treats motorized cycles under rules that can require licensing and registration. But the headline is uniformity: wherever an e-bike is defined in Canada, it is defined at 500 watts. Against that, recall the shelf: 56.3% of rated machines publish more.
The United States: 750 watts and three classes
South of the border, the Consumer Product Safety Act sets the product-level definition — under 750 watts, under 20 mph on motor power alone — and the widely adopted three-class framework does the traffic sorting: Class 1 (pedal-assist to 20 mph), Class 2 (throttle to 20 mph), Class 3 (pedal-assist to 28 mph, typically with age and helmet strings attached). It is a more permissive line, and still 39.8% of the rated shelf publishes past it. Those machines — the 1,000-watt and up tier, one in four of everything rated — are not in a legal category at all on either side of the border. They are simply sold next to machines that are.
The unlockable gray zone
Between the paper and the pavement sits a settings menu. It is now common for machines to ship configured to a legal profile — 500 watts, 32 km/h — while the hardware underneath is rated for considerably more, with the difference reachable through an app toggle, a dealer code, or an “off-road mode” the manual mentions in passing. This index does not test unlock procedures and makes no claim about any specific machine’s behaviour; we report the phenomenon because the arithmetic above makes it visible at market scale — a shelf whose median hardware exceeds the strictest law it is sold under has, by construction, a compliance layer made of software.
What we can state plainly is the legal mechanics: in Canada, a machine assisting past 500 watts or 32 km/h is no longer a power-assisted bicycle. It becomes an unregistered, uninsured motor vehicle, with everything that implies the moment there is a collision, a claim, or a constable with a radar gun. The unlock is one tap. The reclassification is automatic.
Where you stand
The rules for every Canadian jurisdiction, with sources, live in the rulebook, and each machine’s published motor rating is a sortable column in the database — filter at 500 or 750 and the border redraws itself in front of you. The question in this story’s headline does not have a settled answer yet; legislatures on both sides are being lobbied to move their lines. Until they do, the most useful number on any spec sheet is not the biggest one. It is the one your province wrote down.