5 reasons charging salary sacrifice is the best benefit for HR teams to add now

Benefits budgets are tight and HR teams are cautious about adding anything new that creates admin. Charging salary sacrifice keeps clearing that bar anyway, and the reasons are fairly consistent across the employers we work with.

1. It costs the employer nothing to run

There is no subscription fee model that eats into your benefits budget. The employer saves National Insurance on every pound of salary sacrificed by employees, which typically covers the cost of running the scheme. For most employers, it is close to cost neutral, and for some it is a net saving once uptake builds.

2. It bolts on to what you already have

If you already run an EV salary sacrifice car scheme, or offer company cars, The Charge Scheme sits alongside it without any need to renegotiate your leasing contract or switch provider. It is a separate agreement covering charging costs only, layered on top of whatever car scheme is already in place. That matters because "add a new benefit" often really means "start a six-month procurement process." This one does not.

3. The saving is large enough that employees actually notice

Plenty of benefits get set up, communicated once, and then quietly ignored. Charging salary sacrifice tends not to, because the saving is real money employees see every payslip: 20 to 50% off a cost they were already paying, purely by changing how it is paid for. For an employee charging mostly in public, the saving can run into several hundred pounds a year. That is enough to drive genuine engagement rather than a benefit nobody remembers exists.

4. It closes a fairness gap in your existing EV offer

If you already offer an EV car scheme but say nothing about charging, you are implicitly rewarding employees who happen to have a driveway and cheap home electricity, while employees without off-street parking, roughly nine million households across the UK, pay full public charging rates from taxed income. Adding a charging benefit that works identically for home and public charging fixes that gap without singling anyone out.

5. It is low admin because someone else runs it

Payroll gets one deduction line and payroll-ready calculations each month. Employees get an app and charge card, powered by Plugsurfing, covering home, work and 76,000+ public chargers, and HR is not fielding questions about which charging network to use or chasing receipts. The onboarding, employee comms and day-to-day support sit with us, not with your HR team.

A quick comparison

Consideration	Typical new benefit	Charging salary sacrifice
Employer cost	Usually a net cost	Broadly cost neutral via NI saving
Setup time	Weeks to months of procurement	Bolts on to existing scheme
Employee-facing complexity	New portal, new process	One app, one card
Payroll impact	New process to build	One deduction line

Getting it in front of the business case

If you need to justify adding this to your benefits roadmap, the strongest case usually combines three things: the direct saving for employees, the National Insurance saving for the employer, and the fairness argument for employees without home charging. All three sit in your favour, which is a rare combination for a new benefit.

Full detail on setup and eligibility is on our HR teams page, and finance-specific detail on payroll and NI treatment is on finance and payroll.

Next steps

If you want the numbers modelled against your own headcount and EV uptake, book a demo and we will talk you through it.