The equity gap in EV benefits: employees without home charging

Most EV benefit design starts from an assumption: the employee has a driveway, an off-street parking space, and a home charger. For a lot of employees, that assumption is simply wrong, and it quietly turns a benefit meant to help everyone into one that mainly helps people who already own a house with parking.

The scale of the gap

Roughly nine million UK households have no off-street parking. That is not a small edge case, it is a large share of the workforce, concentrated in flats, terraced streets and city centres, exactly the areas where EV adoption is often highest.

Those employees cannot install a home charger. They charge on public infrastructure: on-street chargepoints, supermarket car parks, workplace chargers if available, and rapid chargers on longer journeys. Public charging, particularly rapid charging, typically costs several times more per kWh than charging at home overnight on a cheap tariff.

Why this becomes a benefits problem

If a company offers an EV salary sacrifice car scheme but does nothing about charging costs, the driver with a driveway ends up with a genuinely cheap car to run, while the driver without one is paying public rates for every mile, from taxed income, with no support at all. Two employees on the same scheme, same car, very different real cost of ownership.

That gap tends to show up in a few predictable ways:

• Lower EV uptake among employees in flats or without driveways, even when they are otherwise interested
• Complaints or disengagement from employees who feel the scheme was not built with them in mind
• HR fielding one-off requests for support with public charging costs, with no consistent policy to point to

What a fair charging benefit looks like

A genuinely equitable benefit treats home and public charging the same way: it should be simple, and it should save the employee money, regardless of where they plug in.

The Charge Scheme is built around that principle. It works identically for:

• Home charging, calculated from the employee's actual electricity use
• Workplace charging, if you provide chargepoints on site
• Public charging, across 76,000+ chargepoints through the app and charge card powered by Plugsurfing

In every case, the cost is paid through salary sacrifice, so the employee saves 20 to 50% depending on tax band. An employee who only ever charges in public gets exactly the same tax treatment and the same simple process as one who charges every night at home. The saving in absolute pounds is often larger for the public-only driver, because their underlying charging cost is higher, which is a meaningful piece of financial support for exactly the group current benefit design tends to overlook.

What HR teams can do now

• Audit who is actually excluded. Look at how many current or prospective EV drivers do not have off-street parking, rather than assuming most people can charge at home.
• Check whether your current EV scheme already assumes home charging. Some salary sacrifice car schemes quote savings based on home electricity rates only, which understates cost for public-only drivers and can make the scheme look better on paper than it is in practice for a chunk of your workforce.
• Add a charging benefit that covers both. This does not require switching your car leasing provider. The Charge Scheme bolts on to any existing arrangement.

More on how the mechanics work for HR teams is on our HR teams page, and the wider story of why we built the scheme around this exact gap is on our about page.

Next steps

If you want to understand how many of your employees are likely affected by the home charging gap, book a demo and we will help you look at it against your own workforce data.