Start with the part everyone gets wrong: if you own your house and have a driveway, there is no grant for you. That scheme ended years ago, and the £500 figure you keep seeing quoted belongs to schemes with narrower eligibility.
Here is who can actually claim, as things stand in November 2026.
The five live schemes
All of them close on 31 March 2027, which the government describes as the final year of the programme.
| Scheme | Amount | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Renters and flat owners | up to £500 | You rent a residential property, or you own and live in a flat. Requires private off-street parking |
| Households with on-street parking | up to £500 | Homeowner or tenant with only on-street parking, installing a cross-pavement solution |
| Workplace Charging Scheme | up to £500 per socket, max 40 sockets | Businesses, charities, public sector organisations |
| Landlord grant | up to £500 per socket, max 200 sockets | Private landlords, social housing providers, public sector bodies, managing agents |
| Education Workplace Charging Scheme | up to £2,000 per socket, max 40 sockets | State-funded schools and education institutions |
The odd one: rent the house and you qualify
It produces a strange outcome worth spelling out. Two identical houses, identical driveways, identical chargers. The tenant in one can claim £500. The owner-occupier next door cannot.
That is genuinely how the rules work. If you are renting, claim it — the grant is yours, not your landlord's, and it applies to the property you live in. You will need your landlord's permission for the installation, which is a separate conversation.
If you are a landlord, note that you have your own scheme, covering up to 200 sockets across your portfolio.
No driveway? This is the one that changed
The cross-pavement grant is aimed at households that can only park on the street. It covers a channel or gully set into the footway, letting a cable run safely from your house to the kerb without trailing across a pavement.
This became considerably more practical in October 2026, when cross-pavement solutions became permitted development in England — meaning no planning application. The condition is that the installation must be carried out by, for, or with the authority of the highway authority, which in practice means your local council has to be involved. You cannot simply cut a channel across a public footpath yourself.
It does not apply in conservation areas, at listed buildings, or on scheduled monuments.
Start with your council. Several now run cross-pavement schemes with approved suppliers, and the process is usually: council approval first, installation second, grant claim third.
Schools: the one nobody talks about
£2,000 per socket, up to 40 sockets. That is up to £80,000 towards charging infrastructure for a state-funded school or education institution, and it is four times the rate any business can claim.
We work with schools and academy trusts in the region, and in our experience this scheme is substantially under-used — partly because it sits in a different place from the schemes business managers are familiar with, and partly because nobody markets it.
If you are a business manager, estates lead or governor, this is worth an hour of your time before March 2027. Staff car parks, minibus fleets and visitor parking all qualify, and it pairs well with rooftop solar, since a school's generation profile and a daytime charging load match almost perfectly.
Workplaces
£500 per socket, up to 40 sockets across all your sites, for businesses, charities and public sector bodies.
Worth combining with the tax position: the 100% first-year allowance for EV charge points runs to 31 March 2027, so a company can generally write off the full cost of the installation against profits in the year of purchase and claim the grant. Check the detail with your accountant — the first-year allowance landscape changed in early 2026.
What the grant does not cover
- The electrical work beyond the charger. If your consumer unit needs replacing, your supply needs upgrading, or you need a long armoured cable run, that sits outside the grant.
- Installation by anyone you like. The work must be done by an OZEV-authorised installer. We are one.
- A charger you bought yourself. The grant is claimed by the installer against an approved chargepoint, not reimbursed to you afterwards for hardware off a website.
What it actually costs without a grant
A straightforward 7 kW installation runs roughly £800 to £1,200 fitted. What pushes it up is distance from the consumer unit, a board with no spare way, armoured cable across a driveway, a detached garage, or load management hardware where the supply is tight.
We still find 60 A and 80 A main fuses on older properties around Milton Keynes. A 7 kW charger pulls about 32 A on its own, so where the supply is marginal the real question is load management or a DNO fuse upgrade — not the grant.
Worth knowing either way
If you already have solar, choose a charger that can match charging to surplus generation, not merely schedule on a timer. Over a few years the running-cost difference is larger than the price difference between units, and it is the single most common thing we see specified badly.
And if you are thinking about solar, a battery and a charger, doing them together is cheaper than doing them in sequence — one scaffold, one DNO application, one visit, and the system is designed as a whole rather than bolted together.
Check before you buy
Grant eligibility is worth confirming before you order anything, and the rules have changed repeatedly. We are OZEV authorised and NAPIT registered, and we install across Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.
Tell us your situation — owner, tenant, flat, landlord, business or school — and we will tell you straight whether there is money available to you and what the installation would actually cost. All five schemes end on 31 March 2027.