Rapid charging now costs more per mile than petrol. Your car park is the fix.

The AA's EV Readiness Index hit 60 out of 100 last week — its best score yet, up from 58.8 in the spring. Buried in the release is the number that should worry every EV driver without a driveway: per mile, ultra-rapid public charging now costs 15% more than petrol. Home charging, by contrast, is 66% cheaper.

Same car. Same electricity, roughly. A four-fold difference in what the driver pays, decided entirely by where they plug in.

That gap is not a consumer-finance curiosity. It's a commercial opportunity sitting in your car park — and most businesses are ignoring it.

The numbers, in pence per mile

Three independent sources, all from the last eight weeks, tell the same story.

Zapmap's price index (August 2026) — built from around 75% of UK public chargers and two million sessions a month:

• Rapid and ultra-rapid, pay-as-you-go: 77p/kWh
• Slow and fast public chargers: 54p/kWh
• Home, on a dedicated EV tariff: 8.6p/kWh (around 26p on the standard price cap)

The BPA's EV Connect group (with the Energy Saving Trust, August 2026) turned those into monthly running costs:

• Charging at home: 7p a mile — about £55 a month
• Public charging close to home: 16p a mile — about £135 a month
• Petrol or diesel: 16–17p a mile — £135–£137 a month
• Rapid charging only: 24p a mile — about £197 a month

The AA (Q3 2026), with petrol at 161.5p a litre at the end of August: ultra-rapid 15% dearer than petrol per mile, home 66% cheaper.

Do the sum yourself. A typical EV does about 3.5 miles per kWh. At 77p/kWh that's 22p a mile. A 45mpg petrol hatchback at 161.5p a litre runs about 16p a mile. The rapid-only EV driver is paying a petrol-plus premium for the privilege of going electric.

Who's actually paying 24p a mile

Not the commuter with a driveway and an overnight tariff. They're on 2–7p and laughing.

The people stuck on rapids are the ones with no off-street parking: flat-dwellers, terraced streets, renters, younger staff. They bought or leased an EV on the promise of cheap running costs — and they're finding out the promise came with a footnote that says if you own a drive.

Every one of those drivers is doing a weekly maths problem: where can I charge cheaply, for long enough, without sitting in a services car park for 40 minutes? The answer they're looking for is somewhere they're already parked for hours.

That's your office. Your gym. Your hotel. Your leisure park. Your stadium.

The workplace charger maths

Put a 7kW or 22kW charger in a staff car park and the economics flip.

If you charge staff at cost — say 30p/kWh, covering electricity plus a margin for maintenance — they pay about 9p a mile. That's less than half the rapid-only rate and well under petrol.

If you give it away, it's tax-free. HMRC's workplace charging exemption means electricity provided at a dedicated chargepoint at the workplace, available to employees generally, isn't a taxable benefit for the employee — whether they drive a company car or their own. (It doesn't apply via salary-sacrifice-style optional remuneration arrangements, so structure it as a straight perk.)

For a staff member with no driveway doing 8,000 miles a year:

• Rapid-only at 24p a mile: £1,920 a year
• Workplace charging at cost, ~9p a mile: £720 a year
• Free workplace charging: £0, and no tax

That's a £1,200–£1,900 annual benefit you can hand to someone for the cost of the electricity. Find another perk with that ratio. We've covered the recruitment and retention case for workplace chargers before — the new price data just made it sharper.

The grant still pays for a chunk of the hardware

The Workplace Charging Scheme is open until 31 March 2027 and now pays up to £500 per socket (up from £350 since 1 April 2026), for up to 40 sockets across all your sites. That's up to £20,000 off the install.

The catch most installers gloss over: for businesses, WCS-funded chargers are for staff and fleet vehicles only (local residents can use them outside office hours). Charities, public-sector bodies and small accommodation businesses have no restriction — customers, guests and visitors can use them too. If you open chargers to the public, the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 apply. Get this wrong and you're either breaching grant terms or building a public network by accident.

The full line-item picture is in what a commercial charger actually costs in 2026.

The venue maths: long dwell beats fast power

For customer-facing sites, the play is different but the logic is the same.

A driver paying 77p/kWh at a rapid hub will happily pay a fair price for a slower charge while they're doing something else. Even at Zapmap's 54p/kWh average for slow and fast public charging, they're saving 30% against a rapid — and you're getting a customer who stays longer and comes back.

That's why national operators are buying up leisure-park car parks on 20-year deals. It's why gyms are using chargers as a member-retention tool. A 90-minute workout, a three-hour round of golf, an evening meal, an overnight stay — all of them are long enough to put 30–100 miles into a battery on a 7kW or 22kW post. No megawatt grid connection required.

The question for a venue isn't "can I compete with a rapid hub?" You can't, on speed. You don't need to. You compete on price per mile and on not wasting the driver's time.

What this doesn't mean

Don't overcorrect.

• Rapid hubs aren't going away. Long-distance drivers will always need them, and operators are discounting off-peak (some now sell sub-40p rates overnight). The gap may narrow. It won't close for daytime top-ups any time soon.
• Your chargers need to be priced, managed and maintained. A broken workplace charger is worse than none — nearly half of UK EV drivers have a story about a dead charger. Use networked, open-protocol hardware so you can set tariffs, limit sessions and fix faults remotely.
• Grid capacity still matters. Ten 7kW posts is 70kW. Most commercial supplies can handle that with load management, but check before you order — and if the DNO says reinforcement, read our guide to flexible connections before you accept.

The bottom line

The UK has built a charging market where the drivers with the least choice pay the most — 24p a mile on rapids versus 7p at home. Every business with a car park where people stay for more than an hour is sitting on the fix.

Charge staff at cost and you've handed them a four-figure annual saving. Give it away and it's a tax-free perk. Open it to customers (where your grant terms allow) and you've bought dwell time and loyalty for the price of electricity. Either way, the grant covers up to £500 a socket until next March.

The drivers are already doing the maths. The question is whether your car park shows up in their answer.

Find out what it costs for your site

We check your supply capacity, map where staff and visitors actually park, confirm which grant terms apply to your organisation, and give you a fixed price with the WCS deduction already taken off. One visit, written quote, no obligation.

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