Getting an Electric Company Car? The Driver’s Guide to Charging at Home

So your company has handed you the keys to an electric car. Maybe it’s your first EV, maybe you’ve been quietly curious for a while, but now there’s a real one sitting on the drive and you’re wondering how exactly you’re meant to keep it topped up.

Charging at home is where most of the puzzle sits. Get it right and running an EV is genuinely easier and cheaper than petrol or diesel. Get it wrong and you end up faffing with extension leads, paying over the odds for electricity, or queueing at public chargers on a wet Tuesday.

This guide walks you through what you actually need to know as the driver, including the questions worth raising with your employer, what kit to install, the tariffs that quietly save you hundreds a year, and what to do if home charging isn’t an option for you.

Why home charging matters more than you think

The honest truth most people don’t tell you upfront: an EV that’s only ever charged on public networks can cost as much to run as a petrol car. Home charging is what unlocks the savings, and it’s also what makes the whole thing feel effortless.

Plug in when you get home, wake up to a full battery, and most of the time you’ll never think about charging again. No detours to forecourts. No standing in the cold watching a screen. You just leave the house with whatever range you need for the day.

Once you’ve lived with that for a few weeks, the idea of going back to fuel stations feels genuinely odd. If you’re brand new to electric and want the wider picture first, our introduction to electric vehicles is a useful starting point.

The conversations worth having with your employer

Before we get into kit and tariffs, this is the section most guides skip and it’s the one that matters most. There are three conversations worth having early, ideally before the car arrives. None of them are awkward, but people often don’t think to raise them because it feels cheeky to ask.

1. Will the company contribute to your home charger installation?

Many employers do, particularly when the car is being used for any work mileage at all. It’s a reasonable ask and most directors haven’t actively decided not to, they just haven’t been asked. A wallbox is essential kit for running the car you’ve been given, so it sits in the same category as a work laptop or a phone. The worst they can say is no.

We see this go both ways with the businesses we look after. Some cover the full install, some split it, some leave it to the driver. There’s no standard, which is exactly why it’s worth asking rather than assuming.

2. How will you be reimbursed for electricity used on work miles?

This is the one most drivers don’t realise exists. If you do any business mileage in the car, your employer can reimburse you for the electricity at HMRC’s Advisory Electricity Rate (often called the AER). The rate is reviewed quarterly and changes over time, so before you set anything up.

The practical bit: you’ll need to log your business miles the same way you would in a petrol car, and your employer pays the per-mile rate tax-free. It’s a few quid here and there, but it adds up over a year, and it’s money you’re entitled to that often goes unclaimed simply because nobody mentioned it. Your accountant or HR contact will know the current rate; if they don’t, point them at the HMRC guidance.

3. What happens if you move house?

If the company is contributing to a charger installation at your current home, it’s worth a quick conversation about what happens if you move during the lease. Is the charger yours to take? Does it stay with the house? Does the company contribute again? Better to agree the principle now than negotiate it under pressure later.

The two ways to charge at home

There are really only two options, and they behave very differently.

A standard three-pin plug will technically charge your car, but it’s slow. We’re talking around 10 to 14 hours for a meaningful top-up, and it isn’t designed for the sustained load. Fine for an occasional emergency, not a long-term solution.

A dedicated home wall charger (sometimes called a wallbox) is what almost every EV driver ends up with. It charges roughly three to four times faster than a three-pin, it’s built for the job, and it usually comes with a smart app so you can schedule charging when electricity is cheapest.

If you’re going to drive an EV as your daily car, the wallbox is the answer. The three-pin is a backup, not a plan.

What a home charger actually costs

In our experience, a standard 7kW wallbox fully installed typically runs from around £800 to £1,200, depending on which charger you choose and how straightforward the wiring run is from your fuse box to where the car parks.

A few things push the price up: a long cable run, an older consumer unit that needs upgrading, or the need for groundworks if the cable has to cross a driveway. A good installer will tell you all of this at the survey stage rather than springing surprises on install day. If yours doesn’t offer a survey, find a different installer.

It’s worth checking whether any government grants currently apply to your situation. There has historically been support for renters and people in flats through schemes like the EV chargepoint grant, but eligibility and amounts change, so before you assume you qualify.

Which charger should you choose?

There’s a long list of brands and the differences are smaller than the marketing suggests. Rather than work through every feature, here’s a way to think about it based on your situation.

Don’t overthink it. A reputable 7kW smart charger from any of the well-known brands will do everything you need, and almost all of them now support smart scheduling as standard.

The tariff is where the savings hide

Here’s the part many new EV drivers miss for the first six months: your electricity tariff matters as much as the charger itself.

Standard domestic electricity sits at roughly 25 to 30p per kWh at the time of writing, but EV-specific tariffs from suppliers like Octopus, EDF, OVO and British Gas offer dramatically cheaper overnight rates, often around 7 to 10p per kWh between roughly midnight and 5am.

On a typical family car covering 10,000 miles a year, the difference between charging on a standard tariff and a proper EV tariff can easily run to several hundred pounds. It’s the single biggest lever you have, and it’s a five-minute switch on your supplier’s website.

The catch: you usually need a smart meter, and the cheap window is overnight. So you’ll want a charger that can schedule itself to start at, say, half past midnight and stop before the cheap rate ends. Every decent smart charger does this, and so does the app on most modern EVs.

If you want the maths on what an EV actually costs to run compared with a petrol equivalent, our page on what you’ll save with an electric car breaks the numbers down properly.

What if you can’t charge at home?

This is a real question and it’s not a deal-breaker, but it does change the calculation.

If you live in a flat, rent your home, or park on the street, home charging may not be straightforward. The options are:

• Workplace charging. If your employer has chargers on site, this can replace home charging entirely. Worth asking before you assume.
• Public rapid chargers for a fast top-up on the way home or during the weekly shop. More expensive per kWh than home charging, but fine as your main method if you accept the cost.
• On-street charging through lamp post chargers or council schemes, which are slowly rolling out in many areas.
• Destination charging at supermarkets, gyms and car parks, often free or cheap, which can quietly cover a surprising amount of your weekly mileage.

If your situation makes home charging genuinely difficult, it’s worth being honest about that with whoever’s choosing your company car. Some EVs suit life without a home charger better than others, particularly those with bigger batteries and faster public charging speeds. We go into the practicalities of range and charging speeds in more depth if it’s relevant to you.

What people learn the hard way

A handful of things that come up again and again with the drivers we look after:

• Don’t run the battery to zero, and don’t charge to 100% every day. Most manufacturers recommend keeping the battery between roughly 20% and 80% for daily use, with the occasional full charge before a long trip. Your car’s app will let you set this once and forget it.
• The cable lives in the boot, not on the drive. Leaving a cable plugged in unnecessarily isn’t dangerous, but coiling it back up after each charge keeps it in better nick and saves it walking off.
• Cold weather genuinely affects range. Expect 10 to 25% less range in winter, more if you use the heater a lot. Pre-conditioning the car while it’s still plugged in is a small trick that helps a lot, because you’re warming the cabin on mains electricity rather than the battery.
• Public charger apps are a faff. Get two or three set up before you need them, not when you’re sitting in a service station car park trying to download something on patchy signal.
• Tell your insurer. Some policies want to know there’s a home charger installed. A two-minute call.

None of this is hard. It’s just the kind of thing you learn in the first month and then never think about again.

Where we come in

Most of what we do at The Car Network is sit between busy business owners and the leasing market, sourcing the right vehicles, sorting the paperwork, and keeping things simple. But a lot of our job is also looking after the people who actually drive the cars, because if your team finds their EV awkward to live with, nobody’s happy.

So if you’re driving a company car your employer arranged through us, do feel free to come to us directly with the practical questions. We’d genuinely rather you ask us than spend an evening down a forum rabbit hole.

And if you’ve found this useful, it might be worth forwarding to whoever arranges the cars at your end. We work with a small number of businesses precisely so we can look after their teams properly, and we’re always happy to have a proper conversation about what that looks like.