The Charge Scheme: the world's first EV charging salary sacrifice

Salary sacrifice for electric cars has been around for a few years now, and it has been a genuine success: low Benefit in Kind rates make it one of the strongest value employee benefits available. What it never addressed was the cost of actually charging the car. The Charge Scheme, built by The Electric Car Scheme, is the world's first salary sacrifice benefit designed specifically to close that gap.

Why it needed building

Every other major running cost of a company car, the lease, insurance, maintenance, has a tax-efficient route through salary sacrifice. Electricity did not. Employees charging an EV were either paying for it entirely from taxed income, or claiming back business miles only, using HMRC's Advisory Electricity Rate, while personal charging remained untouched.

That gap mattered most for the roughly nine million UK households without off-street parking, who cannot install a home charger and instead rely on public charging priced much closer to petrol than to a domestic electricity tariff. For those drivers, the running cost of an EV could quietly erase much of the saving the car scheme was meant to deliver.

What The Charge Scheme does

The Charge Scheme lets employees pay for EV charging, at home, at work and on public chargers, out of gross salary rather than take-home pay. The mechanism is the same salary sacrifice framework already used for pensions and EV leases: the cost is deducted before income tax and National Insurance are calculated, so employees save between 20 and 50% depending on their tax band.

It works through an app and charge card, powered by Plugsurfing, giving access to 76,000+ public chargepoints across the UK, alongside automatic tracking of home and workplace charging. Every session, wherever it happens, feeds into one monthly figure that is converted into a payroll-ready gross deduction.

How it fits with what employers already have

The Charge Scheme was built to bolt on to any existing EV salary sacrifice or company car scheme, regardless of which leasing provider is used. Employers do not need to switch lease provider, renegotiate their car scheme, or change anything about how the vehicle itself is provided. The only addition is a payroll deduction line covering charging costs, alongside whatever deduction already exists for the car.

For teams weighing this up:

• HR teams get an EV benefit that covers running costs as well as the vehicle
• Finance and payroll teams get a predictable monthly deduction and an employer National Insurance saving
• Fleet and procurement teams get a benefit that supports electrification targets without touching existing lease contracts

What "world's first" means here

Salary sacrifice has applied to the vehicle for a while. What had not existed before The Charge Scheme was a scheme applying the same tax-efficient mechanism to the cost of the electricity itself, tracked consistently across home, work and public charging and converted automatically into a payroll deduction. That combination, the tax mechanism plus the tracking infrastructure needed to make it workable at payroll speed, is what makes it the first of its kind.

Where it sits alongside mileage reimbursement

Charging salary sacrifice covers the cost of electricity. It is not a replacement for business mileage reimbursement, which has its own HMRC rules and needs to be handled with proper evidence and rates. That is what our separate Reimburse product is for, so employers can run both a compliant business mileage process and a tax-efficient charging benefit without the two overlapping or conflicting.

Who is behind it

The Charge Scheme is built by The Electric Car Scheme, the team behind one of the UK's established EV salary sacrifice providers. Read more about the reasoning behind the product on the about page, or see the mechanics in full on how it works.

Next steps

See what The Charge Scheme would save your employees using the savings calculator, or book a call to talk through bringing it into your existing benefits package.