Reducing employee benefits inequity with salary sacrifice charging

Most EV salary sacrifice schemes were built on an assumption: that the employee taking the car has a driveway. It is an easy assumption to make, because it describes the person most likely to have already looked into an EV, and it makes the modelling simpler. It also quietly excludes a large group of employees from getting the full benefit of the scheme.

The gap in plain numbers

Around nine million UK households have no off-street parking. Those employees cannot install a home charger or access overnight home electricity rates, so if they take an EV through a salary sacrifice scheme, they end up charging almost entirely at public rapid chargers, which cost several times more per mile than home charging.

Two employees on the same salary sacrifice EV scheme, same car, same mileage, can end up with completely different running costs, purely based on where they live. The employee with a driveway pays a few pence per mile. The employee without one can pay four or five times that. That is a real inequity sitting inside a benefit that was designed to be fair.

Why this matters to HR, not just to individuals

Left unaddressed, this gap shows up in a few predictable ways:

• Lower EV scheme uptake among employees in flats or terraced housing, which usually correlates with lower income bands
• Complaints or disengagement once employees realise the cost difference
• A benefit that on paper reaches everyone, but in practice mostly rewards employees who were already going to have the cheapest experience

None of this is intentional, but it is a foreseeable outcome of designing a scheme around the median case instead of the full range of employees who might use it.

What actually closes the gap

The fix is not to change who is eligible for an EV, it is to change how charging is paid for. Charging salary sacrifice applies the same pre-tax saving, 20 to 50% depending on tax band, to charging wherever it happens: at home, at work, or across the UK's 76,000+ public chargepoints through the app and charge card.

Because the saving is a percentage of what is actually spent, an employee relying entirely on public charging gets proportionally more relief than one who barely uses it. It does not remove the underlying cost difference in electricity pricing, but it meaningfully narrows the gap in what employees actually pay after tax.

Rolling it out fairly

A few practical steps make this work well:

1. Offer it to every EV driver, not just those on a salary sacrifice car scheme. Employees who lease privately or bought their EV outright still benefit from having their charging costs run through the scheme.
2. Communicate the saving in cash terms for both charging patterns. Show what home-heavy and public-heavy charging look like using the savings calculator, so employees without home charging can see the benefit is designed with them in mind.
3. Bolt it on to your existing scheme rather than replacing it. It works alongside any current EV salary sacrifice or company car policy with no need to change lease provider.

Where this fits in your wider EV benefits strategy

If your organisation is reviewing its EV offer for fairness as part of a broader benefits audit, charging is usually the fastest fix available, because it does not require renegotiating vehicle contracts or eligibility rules. HR teams can see the setup process on the how it works page, and our about page covers why this equity gap is the reason The Charge Scheme was built in the first place.

Next steps

If you want to check how your current EV benefit performs for employees without home charging, book a demo and we will run the comparison against your workforce data.