EV Charging at Work vs Home: Which Is Cheaper in the UK?

The honest answer to EV charging at work vs home cost UK in 2026 is: it depends entirely on whether your home is on a smart EV tariff. Workplace charging that's free at the point of use beats every home option except smart overnight tariffs. Pay-as-you-go workplace charging at £0.25-£0.40 per kWh loses to Octopus Go or OVO Charge Anytime every single time.

This guide runs the numbers for the three most common UK scenarios — free workplace charging, paid workplace charging, and home charging at three tariff bands — and tells you where the actual break-even point sits.

UK workplaces typically offer EV charging under one of three models, and the model matters more than the headline rate.

Free at point of use. The employer fully subsidises charging — usually because they've taken the Workplace Charging Scheme grant of £500 per socket (up to 40 sockets) and treat residual electricity cost as a staff benefit. HMRC explicitly does not treat workplace EV electricity as a taxable Benefit-in-Kind, so there's no income tax hit. This is the gold standard for an employee — you charge while you work and pay nothing.

Subsidised tariff. The employer charges back at a flat per-kWh rate that's typically below commercial public-charging rates but above home electricity. Common range: £0.10-£0.18/kWh in 2026. Often runs through Zapmap-integrated commercial chargers (Pod Point, Mer, BP Pulse Workplace).

Commercial-rate charge-back. The chargers are run by a public network and you pay the same as you would at a roadside fast charger — £0.45-£0.69/kWh on AC, more on DC. This is unusual at workplaces because employers generally don't want their staff paying public-network rates, but it does happen with shared or multi-tenant buildings.

The home cost picture splits sharply between smart EV tariffs and standard tariffs.

Smart EV tariffs give you a deeply discounted off-peak window — typically 23:30 to 05:30 — at around £0.07-£0.08/kWh. The major UK providers in 2026:

• Octopus Go: 5-hour overnight window, ~£0.07/kWh
• Intelligent Octopus Go: scheduler-driven smart-charging window, ~£0.07/kWh, often picks up extra cheap hours when the grid is windy
• OVO Charge Anytime: smart-charging credit applied to home tariff, effective rate ~£0.07/kWh
• EDF GoElectric: dual-rate or smart-rate options, £0.07-£0.08/kWh overnight
• British Gas Electric Driver: 5-hour overnight window, ~£0.085/kWh

The catch: most smart EV tariffs require a smart meter and either a compatible smart charger or an EV with native scheduling. They also peg peak-rate electricity at a slightly higher unit rate (typically 1-2p/kWh above standard) — so a household that does most of its electricity use during the day pays a little more for that, then saves a lot overnight charging the car.

Standard single-rate household electricity in 2026 sits at roughly £0.27-£0.30/kWh after the Ofgem Energy Price Cap reset earlier in the year. If you don't shift charging to off-peak, this is what you pay per kWh — about 4x more than smart-tariff overnight rates.

For full unit-rate breakdowns and which tariff fits your driving pattern, our cost to charge an EV at home guide walks through the maths in detail.

Most UK drivers cover around 10,000 miles a year. A typical modern EV manages roughly 4 miles per kWh in mixed conditions, so 10,000 miles needs around 2,500 kWh of charging. Here's what that costs at each scenario, with no other assumptions (no public top-ups, no degradation, just plug-and-charge at one place):

Two things jump out of the table. First, the gap between smart EV tariff (£175/year) and standard household electricity (£700/year) is enormous — switching tariff is by far the single biggest cost lever an EV-owning household has, and bigger than any workplace decision. Second, commercial-rate workplace charging is the worst-value option here, costing more than every home tariff because at that point you're paying a public-charging network through your employer rather than a household electricity rate.

Free workplace charging beats everything, full stop. There's no realistic home scenario where you can charge more cheaply than £0/kWh.

Subsidised workplace charging at £0.10-£0.12/kWh wins for households that can't get on a smart EV tariff — typically flat dwellers without a home charger, anyone without a smart meter, or those who can't shift their general household use enough to make the slightly-higher peak rate work.

Subsidised workplace at £0.15/kWh and up still wins for non-EV-tariff households (£375/year vs £700/year at standard rate) but loses to a smart EV tariff at home.

Commercial-rate workplace charging never wins — it's strictly worse than even standard-rate home electricity. If your workplace charges 45p+/kWh, treat it as a public charging top-up, not a primary charging strategy.

Salary-sacrifice EV schemes have changed the maths for higher-rate taxpayers. The lease is taken from pre-tax salary, the company-car Benefit-in-Kind rate for EVs in 2026/27 is just 3% (rising 1% per year to 5% by 2028/29), and the resulting all-in monthly cost is often 40-50% below a personal lease for the same car.

That changes the workplace-vs-home calculation in two ways. First, the car effectively comes from gross salary, so the electricity discussion is the only out-of-pocket cost. Second, many salary-sacrifice schemes pair with free workplace charging — making the marginal cost of the car you commute in essentially zero. If you're on a salary-sacrifice scheme with free workplace charging, plug in at the office and don't even think about it.

One caveat: salary-sacrifice schemes deduct pre-tax, which can affect pension contributions, statutory maternity/paternity pay, and certain benefit eligibility for low earners. Worth running the numbers — or asking your scheme provider — before committing.

Households with a solar PV array (typically 4-6 kWp) and a daytime work-from-home pattern can charge from surplus solar at effectively £0/kWh — better than any workplace option. The catch: it only works when there's surplus solar available, which in the UK means daytime in spring/summer/early autumn.

For most UK households with solar, you'll cover roughly 30-50% of EV charging from surplus, with the rest from a smart EV tariff overnight. That blended cost runs £90-£130/year for 10,000 miles — cheaper than any workplace charging short of free.

Diverters like Zappi and myenergi Eddi schedule charging when solar export crosses a threshold, so you don't need to monitor anything. We cover the full setup and economics in our solar + EV charging UK guide.

Free workplace charging is the cheapest option available to UK EV drivers. Smart EV tariff home charging is a close second and is the most flexible. Standard-rate home charging is the worst-value option for any meaningful annual mileage, and commercial-rate workplace charging is worse than that.

If you have free workplace charging available, use it. If you don't, get on a smart EV tariff — Octopus Go, Intelligent Octopus Go, OVO Charge Anytime, or EDF GoElectric — and charge at home overnight. The tariff switch alone saves around £500/year for a typical 10,000-mile driver compared to standard-rate electricity, which dwarfs any decision about where to plug in.