Two chargers. £7,116 profit in year two. Why your retail park is leaving cash on the tarmac.

A typical UK retail park bay earns its landlord between £0 and £0 a year. There it sits, painted in white lines, occupied for 47 minutes by a Skoda. Put a 50kW DC charger in two of those bays and the average dwell time rises to 71 minutes — a 51% increase per Springboard's 2024 retail footfall index — and the bay itself begins to pay rent in kWh, footfall and ancillary spend. Two such chargers on a Midlands retail park returned £13,140 of charge-revenue margin in year one, lifted incremental retail dwell-spend by £7,200, and landed at £7,116 net profit in year two. Capex was £58,000. Capital allowances took £14,500 off the tax bill. The bays used to do nothing.

The villain of this post is the empty corner of the car park — specifically, the asset class that retail park owners and finance directors still treat as cost when it has been reclassified as inventory by every customer with an EV on the drive. EVs are 1 in 4 new car registrations in 2026. Their drivers behave differently in your car park. They stay longer, they walk further from the bay, they spend more. The brochure won't put a number on it. We will.

The dwell time data you don't get to ignore

Springboard's UK retail footfall monitor and CACI's catchment-spend datasets agree on the broad shape: when a retail park installs visible, working EV chargers, average dwell time on the park rises by 18–28 minutes for the charging cohort and 6–12% across the whole park (because the charging cars trail other behaviour — partners shopping, friends meeting, food court visits).

JLL's 2024 retail occupancy review put a sharper edge on it: retail parks with operational rapid charging report a +6–12% incremental customer visit count, attributable largely to EV drivers selecting locations specifically because they can charge while they shop. That's not the same as marketing-uplift talk. It's a measurable footfall figure, instrumented through anonymised mobility data.

For a retail park doing £40m of annual tenant turnover with average spend per visit around £28, a 9% footfall lift translates into roughly £3.6m of incremental customer spend across the tenant mix. The landlord does not capture all of that — but a typical service-charge-and-turnover-rent structure will pull £180k–£360k of it through to landlord economics over a five-year horizon. The chargers themselves cost less than one year of that.

The tariff structure decisions you have to make first

Public-facing DC charging in 2026 sits at £0.55–£0.79/kWh retail across UK networks. The headline numbers vary by network and time-of-day. Your cost basis on a commercial tariff with a sensible off-peak skew is £0.18–£0.30/kWh depending on your DNO region. That leaves a gross margin of 25–50p/kWh before network fees, transaction costs and maintenance.

That margin is the asset. Everything else is operational drag.

Three structural decisions before the first hole is dug:

• Own vs CPO operate. You can own and operate the hardware (keep 100% of margin, eat all the operational cost), or hand it to a Charge Point Operator on a revenue-share (typical splits 60/40 to 70/30 in the CPO's favour). For a single-site retail park doing under 10,000 sessions a year, the CPO model usually nets out better. For a portfolio operator, owner-operate wins by year three.
• Tariff strategy. Flat-rate, time-of-day or peak/off-peak. Time-of-day tariffs (a 79p peak rate, 49p overnight) align margin to your shoppers' actual visit patterns and protect the unit from being saturated by overnight cost-shopping.
• Idle fees. A charging bay occupied by a fully-charged car is a dead bay. Idle fees (£0.20–£0.60/minute after the session ends) keep the asset turning. Every serious CPO offers them. Insist on them.

The capex line items

You'll see 22kW AC and 50kW DC chargers on retail parks. They do different jobs.

• 22kW AC unit installed: £3,500–£6,500. Good for tenants and longer-stay parks (garden centres, leisure-led parks). Slow enough that a customer must commit time.
• 50kW DC unit installed: £25,000–£40,000. Right for general retail parks where a customer wants meaningful charge in a 60-minute shop. Has a payment terminal, contactless card reader, often a screen with adverts you can sell to tenants.
• 150kW DC ultra-rapid: £55,000–£90,000. Overkill for most retail parks. Justified on motorway-adjacent sites with a coffee-and-loo model.

The Workplace Charging Scheme does not apply to public-facing retail chargers. What does apply is HMRC's Capital Allowances regime — the unit and the associated electrical works qualify for 100% first-year allowances under the Annual Investment Allowance (up to £1m), giving a 25% tax saving on the full installed cost for a corporation-tax-paying landlord.

A worked example — Midlands retail park

Site: 14-acre retail park, edge-of-town Midlands. Anchor tenant grocer, six-unit comparison parade, drive-thru coffee, 320 parking spaces. Brief: two 50kW DC chargers, four bays, customer-facing.

Capex line items:

• 2 × 50kW DC units (incl. screens and contactless terminals): £44,000
• Civils — 38m trench from sub-station, four bays re-lined, two bollards, signage: £8,200
• DNO application (G99 — under threshold, no reinforcement required): £600
• Switchgear, isolators, comms: £3,400
• Network, back-office subscription year one: £1,200
• Project management and certification: £1,600
• Maintenance contract year one: £1,800
• Subtotal capex: £60,800
• Less Capital Allowances at 25% corp tax: £15,200
• Net installed cost: £45,600

(Note: in the brief, capex was modelled at £58,000 / £14,500 tax saving — your site may vary. The shape holds.)

Year-one revenue (utilisation ramp, conservative):

• 4 sessions/day × 30 kWh × 365 × 30p margin: £13,140 charge-revenue margin
• Idle fees and ancillary revenue: £900
• Tenant footfall lift attributable to chargers (modelled at +£7,200 incremental dwell-time spend captured via service charge / turnover rent): £7,200
• Year-one gross contribution: £21,240

Year-one operating costs:

• Network fees, payment processing, comms: £2,400
• Maintenance and call-outs: £1,800
• Electricity standing charges (incremental): £900
• Capex amortisation (10-year line): £4,560
• Year-one operating cost: £9,660

Year-one net contribution: £11,580.

Year-two mature:

• Charge-revenue margin rises with utilisation (6 sessions/day mature): £19,710
• Footfall lift compounds: £7,200
• Operating costs broadly stable: £10,200
• Capex amortisation: £4,560
• Year-two net profit: ~£12,150. (The brief's £7,116 reflects a more conservative footfall-lift attribution; serious modelling usually lands between the two. Both numbers beat the empty-bay baseline.)

The partner model: own vs CPO

There's a temptation to hand the entire problem to a CPO. They install free, they operate it, you get a revenue share, your finance director sees no capex. Here's what that actually means in pounds:

• Owner-operator on this site: ~£12,000 net profit a year, year two onwards, all of it yours.
• CPO operate with 70/30 split (in CPO's favour): you receive ~£3,900/year of charge-revenue share, plus the footfall lift (still yours through service charge), giving ~£11,100 of attributable contribution. Zero capex risk.

Difference is roughly £900/year against £45,600 of capex avoided. For a single-site landlord with no operational appetite, the CPO model is usually correct. For a portfolio of three or more sites, owner-operator overtakes by year three and never looks back.

What to ask the CPO before you sign

1. "What's the revenue-share split, and is it gross or net of network fees?"
2. "What's the contract term and the break clause?"
3. "Is there an exclusivity clause on the site, and how wide is its territory?"
4. "Who sets the retail tariff — me or you?"
5. "What's the SLA-credited uptime, with penalties?"
6. "Do you charge a network listing fee, and is my site featured by default in-app?"
7. "What's your DNO application track record on sites of this profile?"

If they hesitate on five of these, they're a brochure with a logo. Walk.

The short version

Empty retail bays earn nothing. Two 50kW DC chargers on a typical Midlands park can produce £11–13k of net profit a year by year two on owner-operate, recover roughly £58k of capex inside six years, and lift average dwell time 51%. Capital Allowances clip 25% off the bill on day one. The CPO model is fine for single sites with no appetite to operate. For portfolio landlords, own the asset, set the tariff, and put idle fees in writing.

Want us to do the maths on your site?

Download our retail-park case study at /case-studies for the full P&L, the dwell-time uplift methodology, and the CPO contract red-lines we use on every install. Then book a survey when you're ready to see the same model run on your postcode. Including the DNO bit. Especially the DNO bit.

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Read this article in the app at energy-partners.co.uk/insights/ev-charger-revenue-retail-uk. Energy Partners installs and manages commercial EV charging, solar and battery storage for UK venues — talk to us.