Do You Need A Different Charger For Milwaukee M18 Fuel Batteries?

The Milwaukee hardware brand offers a handful of different tool systems, each with its own corresponding battery packs. These include the M12 system and the M18 system. However, there are also subsets to these, such as the M18 Fuel system. This can make the notion of finding and using the correct battery packs a little more confusing than you might like, not to mention finding the right charging cradle for said battery packs.

M18 Fuel tools utilize brushless motors for greater efficiency and are equipped with Milwaukee's One-Key system for tool tracking. Besides those major factors, though, M18 Fuel tools are functionally the same as regular M18 products, and use the same M18 battery packs, including the Redlithium and Redlithium Forge lines. Both of these lines use the same connecting rails and can be connected to any M18-compatible Milwaukee battery charger. There are no dedicated M18 Fuel battery packs; any pack you use for an M18 Fuel tool can also be used in a regular M18 tool, and can therefore also be charged in an M18 charger.

Milwaukee offers both standalone chargers for M18 batteries and hybrid chargers that service both M12 and M18 batteries. The only kinds of chargers Milwaukee sells that are explicitly incompatible with any kind of M18 battery are the chargers used for MX Fuel batteries, which have incompatible connecting rails. If you're looking to charge the battery connected to an M18 Fuel tool, you can use any charger that accepts M18 batteries.

If you have both an M18 battery pack and one of the smaller M12 cartridge batteries and want to charge them both at the same time, you could do so with the Milwaukee Rapid Charger, which can cradle one of both battery types simultaneously. There are several similar chargers to this with slightly different functions and configurations, including the Super Charger, Rapid Charge Station, Multi-Voltage Charger, and Vehicle Charger. Basically, if the charger has "M12 & M18" in its store page name, it can handle both battery types.

If you're only looking to charge up an M18 battery pack for an M18 or M18 Fuel tool, there are also several dedicated M18 battery chargers, such as the Dual Bay Simultaneous Super Charger, the Dual Bay Simultaneous Rapid Charger, and the Six-Pack Sequential Charger. These chargers will only fit M18 battery packs, but those packs can be used by any tool in the M18 system, Fuel or otherwise.