Landlord & commercial property: EV Charging for Business

EV charging for commercial landlords, estates and business parks

As a landlord you rarely drive the cars that use the bays — your tenants do. That single fact reshapes every decision here: you fund the infrastructure, but the electricity, the billing and the day-to-day usage belong to the occupiers. The winning move is to install landlord-owned hardware with per-tenant metering, so charging becomes a recoverable service charge or a metered amenity rather than a cost you absorb.

Compliance is what bites first. Building Regulations Part S now requires EV provision on new non-residential buildings and major renovations with more than 10 parking spaces — one chargepoint installed plus cable routes (passive ducting) to at least one in five of the remaining bays. If you are refurbishing an estate or adding a unit, this is not optional, and retrofitting ducting after the tarmac is down costs multiples of laying it during works. Specify passive infrastructure to every bay you reasonably can; it is the cheapest future-proofing you will ever buy.

On funding, be clear-eyed: the dedicated commercial landlord grant closed in 2026. What remains genuinely useful is the Workplace Charging Scheme — £500 per socket, covering 75% of cost up to 40 sockets, open until 31 March 2027 — but it only applies to bays for staff and fleet, so it fits owner-occupied or single-tenant units rather than pure investment estates. For multi-tenant lets, the realistic route is capex plus the 100% First-Year Allowance (also to 31 March 2027), which lets you write off the full installation against tax in year one. See our grants and funding breakdown for which bays qualify under which route.

Sizing an estate is about breadth over brute power. Tenant and visitor parking is served well by 7kW AC bays at roughly £800–£1,500 each — most cars cap at 7–11kW AC anyway, so 22kW units (£2,500–£4,500) are usually wasted spend unless a specific tenant runs dwell-limited vehicles. Rather than one or two rapid units, put in more 7kW bays across the site. Where a business park has a shared transformer, dynamic load management lets you add far more bays on the existing supply instead of triggering a five-figure DNO reinforcement; our load management guide shows how the same headroom stretches across dozens of sockets. Any three-phase or high-load design needs G99 approval before works — build that lead time into the programme.

The commercial case is asset value, not fuel savings. EV-ready bays are becoming a letting differentiator: tenants increasingly screen for them, and under MEES the direction of travel on minimum energy efficiency standards makes future-proofed, low-carbon estates easier to let and to value. A landlord-owned, metered network turns a compliance obligation into a recoverable revenue line and a stronger rent review position. Note that if you make charging public and paid, the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 apply — contactless payment, transparent p/kWh pricing and 99% rapid reliability — so most landlords keep bays tenant-and-visitor only to stay outside that regime.

Typical payback on a well-metered estate lands in the mid-single-digit years once service-charge recovery and the First-Year Allowance are factored in — but it hinges on getting the metering architecture and supply headroom right from day one. Tell us your site's space count, supply and tenant mix and we will scope bays, ducting and load strategy to match: request a landlord estate quote.