What Are the Benefits of Installing EV Chargers at Workplaces?

Most of the conversation about EV charging focuses on homes, but a workplace car park is where many cars sit still for eight hours a day. That makes it one of the most useful places to charge. This guide sets out the business case benefit by benefit, how to measure each one, and the trade-offs to weigh. If you already know you want chargers and need to see how a project is scoped, our workplace EV charging installation service covers the design, access control and rollout in detail.

Attracting and keeping staff

For employees who drive an EV, reliable charging at work removes one of the biggest day-to-day frustrations of ownership. Apartment residents, renters and people who park on the street often depend on public chargers, with the detours and public rates that brings. A charger at work turns parking time into charging time.

That makes workplace charging a practical, visible perk, and once the infrastructure is in, a relatively low-cost one to keep providing. Since the FBT exemption for eligible electric cars arrived, salary packaging an EV through a novated lease has become a common way for staff to get into an electric car, and those drivers need somewhere dependable to plug in. It helps when recruiting, and gives good people one more reason to stay.

The perk works best with:

• Enough bays for demand. A short staff survey on current and planned EVs gives you a realistic starting number.
• Fair access rules, such as a move-on expectation once a car is full, so the same few people do not occupy the bays all week.
• A clear position on cost, whether charging is free, at cost or a small fee.

Cutting fleet running costs

If you run pool cars, vans or a service fleet, on-site charging is where the running-cost savings of electrification are realised. Public DC fast charging typically costs more per kWh than your own supply, and every trip to a public charger is paid time off the road.

A typical EV uses roughly 15 to 18kWh per 100km, so you can estimate each vehicle's daily energy need from its kilometres and price it using the rates on your own electricity bill. EVs also generally need less routine servicing than petrol or diesel vehicles.

The catch is demand charges. Many commercial tariffs bill on your peak demand as well as the energy you use, so a fleet that all plugs in at 5pm and charges flat out can create an expensive spike. Scheduling and load management solve this by staggering charging across the available window. Our fleet charging solutions page explains how depot systems are designed around duty cycles and tariffs.

Drawing customers and lifting property appeal

For customer-facing businesses, chargers can bring people through the door. EV drivers plan stops around where they can charge, and a site that appears on charging maps and apps becomes a destination. Because AC charging takes a while, a visitor who plugs in has a reason to stay a little longer.

For building owners and landlords, charging is becoming part of what tenants expect from a modern commercial building. The National Construction Code (NCC 2022) introduced EV-ready requirements for car parks in new buildings, so older buildings with no charging provision can start to look dated by comparison. A load-managed backbone installed now, even with a few active chargers, lets you add bays as tenants ask. Shared and multi-tenant car parks, including paid public access, are covered by our car park EV charging stations service.

If you lease, agree with the landlord up front who owns the chargers, who pays for the electricity and what happens at the end of the lease, since make-good clauses can require equipment to be removed.

Sustainability reporting and daytime solar

Charging gives a business something concrete in its sustainability story, and increasingly supports formal reporting. Australia's mandatory climate-related financial disclosures are phasing in for larger entities from 2025, and businesses that supply those entities may be asked about their own emissions. Moving fleet vehicles from petrol or diesel to electric shifts their emissions from fuel burned in the vehicle (scope 1) to purchased electricity (scope 2), and scope 2 emissions fall further when the electricity comes from your own solar.

Workplace charging also has a natural advantage over home charging: the cars are parked while the sun is up. A business with rooftop solar can use load management or an energy management system to steer charging towards times of solar surplus, so more of its own generation goes into staff and fleet cars instead of being exported for a low feed-in return or curtailed by an export limit. Larger sites need inverter settings, export limits and metering reviewed, and our guide to integrating commercial EV charging with existing solar walks through those technical requirements step by step.

FBT considerations for employers

Fringe benefits tax is often the first question finance raises, and the position is more favourable for EVs than many expect. Points to raise with your accountant:

• The Electric Car Discount. Eligible battery electric cars priced below the luxury car tax threshold for fuel-efficient vehicles can be exempt from FBT, including through a novated lease. Plug-in hybrids stopped qualifying for new arrangements from 1 April 2025.
• Charging at your premises. Electricity used to charge an employee's car at your business premises may be treated as an exempt benefit.
• Reporting can still apply. Even where a car benefit is exempt, there can be reporting obligations, such as reportable fringe benefits on an employee's income statement.
• Business-owned vehicles. How fleet charging and charger installation costs are treated depends on your structure and circumstances.

How to measure the benefits

A business case is easier to approve, and review later, when each benefit is measurable. Much of this data comes straight from an OCPP charge point management platform, which records sessions, energy and users for every bay.

Record a baseline before the chargers go in, such as fuel spend, solar export and staff interest, so you have something to compare against.

Costs and trade-offs to weigh

Benefits only count if the system is designed for the site. These considerations decide whether workplace charging runs smoothly.

Supply capacity

Every site has a finite electricity supply, and a group of chargers is a large load. Ten 7kW chargers running at full speed draw about 70kW, which can be more than a building has spare, so the site's maximum demand should be assessed from interval data first. If the supply genuinely needs upgrading, EV Install coordinates that work through trusted, fully licensed Level 2 ASP partner electricians and manages the process, so you still deal with one team. Our guide on whether you need three-phase power for an EV charger explains how supply type affects charging speed.

Load management

Dynamic load management measures the site's total demand and shares the spare capacity between chargers, slowing them when the building is busy. Because workplace cars are parked for hours, this rarely leaves anyone short: even at half speed, a 7kW charger delivers roughly 28kWh over an eight-hour day, enough for about 150 to 185km of driving. Load management is usually what lets a site add chargers without a supply upgrade, and it keeps demand charges in check.

Access and billing via OCPP

Choose networked chargers that support OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol), an open standard that lets different brands of charger connect to the management platform you choose. That gives you RFID or app access control, separate tariffs for staff, visitors and fleet, and per-user reporting without vendor lock-in. Our guide on whether all EV charging points are the same explains how access, payment and cable choices differ between charging points.

Who pays for the electricity

Decide before launch: free charging as a perk, cost recovery at your energy rate, or a fee that also covers hardware and platform costs. Whichever you choose, apply it consistently.

Policies and site practicalities

A short written policy prevents most disputes: who can use the bays, move-on expectations, fleet priority, after-hours access and fault reporting. Physically, plan for bollards or wheel stops, signage, accessible bays where required, and charger positions clear of exits and fire services. For basement car parks, involve the building's fire safety adviser early, and check whether council, landlord or strata consent is needed.

How to get started

The most reliable path is to start small, measure, then scale:

1. Site assessment. Review supply and maximum demand, the car park layout and cable routes, and survey staff about current and planned EVs.
2. Pilot with a few bays. Install a small number of networked, load-managed chargers, set your access and cost policy, and track utilisation for a few months.
3. Scale with load management. Size cable routes, switchboard space and the load management system for future bays from the start, so adding chargers later means mounting and connecting rather than rebuilding.

EV Install has specialised in EV charging since 2017 and handles workplace projects from assessment through to commissioning and certification to AS/NZS 3000, with a fixed written quote once your site has been assessed. To see how a rollout would work at your premises, read more about our workplace EV charging installation or book a free on-site assessment.