Electric car grant
The UK government's electric car grant gives you up to £3,750 off a new battery electric vehicle priced under £37,000. The discount is applied automatically by the dealer or leasing company. You don't need to apply separately. The scheme covers orders placed from July 2025 onwards.
This is the most straightforward incentive: if the car qualifies, the price you pay already has the grant deducted. Check the list price carefully though: cars priced even a pound over £37,000 before the grant don't qualify.
EV Chargepoint Grant (home)
From April 2026 the home chargepoint grant provides up to £500 towards the cost of installing a home EV charger, covering 75% of total installation costs. But there's a catch most people miss: it's only available to renters and flat owners. Standard homeowners with a house are no longer eligible. That ended in 2022 and hasn't come back.
To qualify you need off-street parking (a driveway or allocated bay), you must own or have ordered an eligible EV, and your landlord must consent to the installation if you're renting. For what a home charger actually costs and why it's worth it regardless, see our home EV charging guide.
Workplace Charging Scheme
The Workplace Charging Scheme (WCS) covers up to 75% of the cost of installing EV chargepoints at workplaces, capped at £500 per socket and a maximum of 40 sockets per applicant. It's open to businesses, charities and public-sector organisations, and has been extended to March 2027.
If your employer hasn't installed workplace chargers yet, pointing them at this scheme is worth doing. Workplace charging on a business electricity rate is one of the cheapest ways to charge an EV outside of a home off-peak tariff.
Company car tax (BIK)
This is the big one for anyone with a company car. The benefit-in-kind (BIK) tax rate for fully electric cars is just 3% in the 2025/26 tax year. For comparison, a typical petrol car attracts a BIK rate of 20% or more. On a car with a list price of £35,000, that's the difference between paying a few hundred pounds a year in tax and paying several thousand.
This makes salary sacrifice for an EV hugely attractive, and it's the reason so many new EVs are entering the used market on three- and four-year-old lease returns.
Salary sacrifice
Salary sacrifice lets you lease an EV through your employer before income tax and National Insurance are deducted. Combined with the low BIK rate, savings can reach up to 40% compared to leasing privately, depending on your tax bracket. The package typically covers the car, insurance, servicing, breakdown cover and sometimes a home charger.
The main restriction: your salary can't drop below the National Minimum Wage after the sacrifice. For higher earners this is rarely an issue. For lower earners, check the numbers carefully. The savings are real, but the eligibility threshold matters.
To see what those savings look like in practice alongside your energy costs, run the numbers on a car page with your real mileage.
Clean Air Zone exemptions
Electric vehicles are exempt from most Clean Air Zone charges across the UK. In London, EVs get a 25% discount on the congestion charge (not a full exemption; the old 100% discount ended in 2025). In Birmingham, Bristol and Bradford, fully electric cars are completely exempt from CAZ daily charges that can cost non-compliant vehicles up to £50 a day.
If you drive into a CAZ regularly, the savings add up quickly. For a daily commuter into central Birmingham, CAZ exemption alone is worth over £1,000 a year.
Scotland-specific support
The Energy Saving Trust Scotland offers interest-free loans for purchasing new and used electric vehicles. These aren't grants (you pay the money back), but zero interest on a car loan is a meaningful saving over typical dealer finance rates. Eligibility and loan limits change periodically, so check the current terms on the Energy Saving Trust website before committing.
What's NOT available
It's worth being clear about what's gone. The Homeowner Chargepoint Grant for standard houses (not flats) ended in March 2022. The old Plug-in Car Grant, which offered up to £5,000 off any EV regardless of price, was scrapped in June 2022 before being replaced by the current, more targeted scheme.
If you see articles mentioning these, and plenty still rank in Google, they're out of date. The incentives listed above are what's actually live as of 2026.
The bigger picture: total cost of ownership
Grants and tax breaks reduce the upfront or monthly cost. But the largest ongoing saving is still the difference in running cost between electric and petrol, and that depends almost entirely on how and where you charge. Factor in VED, the expected 2028 mileage tax, and your real-world energy costs to get the full picture.