The complete guide to EV charge schemes: benefits, costs and implementation

As more company car fleets and salary sacrifice schemes go electric, a new question keeps coming up in HR, finance and fleet meetings: who pays for charging, and how? An EV charge scheme answers that question. This guide covers what one is, what it costs, what it saves, and how to put one in place without disrupting anything already running.

What an EV charge scheme is

An EV charge scheme is an employee benefit that deals specifically with the cost of charging electric vehicles, rather than the vehicles themselves. In practice this means letting employees pay for charging, at home, at work and in public, through a salary sacrifice deduction from gross pay, rather than from taxed take-home pay or through manual mileage claims.

It sits alongside, rather than instead of, existing EV or company car arrangements. The car scheme deals with the lease and Benefit in Kind; the charge scheme deals with the electricity.

The benefits

For employees: a 20 to 50% saving on charging costs, applied automatically through payroll, with charging trackable through one app and charge card rather than several apps and RFID cards for different networks.

For HR teams: a benefit that is genuinely used, since every EV driver charges regularly, and one that plugs a well-known gap in existing car benefit packages. More detail for HR is on the HR teams page.

For finance and payroll teams: a predictable, payroll-integrated deduction rather than unpredictable expense claims, and an employer National Insurance saving on every pound sacrificed. See finance and payroll for the mechanics.

For fleet and procurement teams: a way to make electrification more attractive to drivers without changing lease provider or renegotiating existing fleet contracts. See fleet and procurement.

The costs

The direct cost to the employer of running a charge scheme is typically low or nil, because the employer National Insurance saved on sacrificed amounts covers the administration. The costs worth planning for are less about money and more about process:

• Payroll setup time, to add a new deduction line and confirm it interacts correctly with any existing salary sacrifice deductions.
• Eligibility decisions, deciding which employees qualify, typically anyone with a fully electric or plug-in hybrid company car.
• Communication, making sure employees understand how to log charging and see their savings, though this is largely handled by the scheme provider rather than internal HR.

Implementation, step by step

1. Confirm eligibility. Decide whether the scheme covers company car drivers only, or is opened more broadly to employees who own an EV personally.
2. Sign the scheme agreement. This sets out the terms of the sacrifice and confirms the arrangement as a contract variation.
3. Set up the payroll deduction. A single monthly gross deduction line, alongside any existing EV salary sacrifice deduction.
4. Add a minimum wage floor check. Gross pay after all sacrifices must not fall below the National Minimum Wage.
5. Onboard employees. They download the app, register their charge card, and start logging home, work and public charging immediately.
6. Run monthly. Charging activity is converted into a payroll-ready figure each month, with no manual reconciliation required from finance.

What it doesn't cover

A charge scheme deals with the cost of electricity. It does not cover business mileage reimbursement, which follows separate HMRC rules using the Advisory Electricity Rate or actual cost evidence, and which our Reimburse product is built to handle compliantly. Nor does it replace the vehicle lease itself, which continues under whatever EV salary sacrifice or company car arrangement is already in place.

A note on equity

Charge schemes are particularly valuable given how unevenly home charging access is spread across the UK. Roughly nine million households have no off-street parking and therefore cannot install a home charger, leaving them reliant on public charging at a materially higher cost per mile. A charge scheme applies the same percentage saving regardless of where an employee charges, which goes some way to levelling that gap rather than only rewarding employees who happen to have a driveway.

Choosing a provider

When comparing providers, the practical questions worth asking are: does the app and card cover a genuinely large public charging network, how quickly are payroll figures produced each month, and does the scheme bolt on to your existing car arrangement without requiring a change of leasing provider. The Charge Scheme's app and card are powered by Plugsurfing, covering 76,000+ public chargepoints, and are designed to sit alongside any existing scheme.

Next steps

Model the likely saving across your workforce with the savings calculator, or book a call to talk through implementation for your organisation.