Fleet charging costs: depot, home or public

Your fleet's charging bill

10, 50 and 100 vans compared

At 18,000 miles a van a year. The depot price is the average for the DESNZ business size band the fleet's charging falls in. All three fleets fall in the Small band (28.76p/kWh). From about 114 vans at this mileage, depot charging moves into the Small/Medium band at 28.08p/kWh.

What this means for fleets

Where a van charges matters more than almost anything else in its running cost. A van charged at the depot costs 10.1p a mile; the same van on public rapid chargers costs 22.5p, 2.2 times as much and more than the 20.6p a diesel van costs. For 100 vans charged 70% at the depot, the bill is £229,994 a year against £370,374 for diesel.

Depot charging has a catch that scales with the fleet: power. 100 vans on 7kW chargers draw 700kW if they all plug in at once, which for most depots means a conversation with the local network operator about a bigger connection, or smart charging that staggers the load across the night. Each van needs only 2.5 hours at 7kW for a typical day, so staggering is usually possible.

Home charging is cheap per mile (9.1p), but HMRC's advisory electric rate for home charging is 7p a mile, so a driver reimbursed at that rate is 2.1p a mile out of pocket at the current price cap. See the real cost to charge and the charging cost gap.

Depot: DESNZ Quarterly Energy Prices table 3.4.2, the average price non-domestic consumers pay for electricity by annual consumption band, including the Climate Change Levy and excluding VAT. The band is chosen from the fleet's charging energy alone; a depot that already uses a lot of electricity may sit in a larger, cheaper band. Standing charges and capacity charges are not included.

Home: Ofgem's energy price cap average electricity unit rate for Direct Debit customers, including 5% VAT. Many drivers on an EV off-peak tariff pay much less.

Public: the Zapmap Price Index, Zapmap's weighted average pay-as-you-go price across around three quarters of UK public chargers, shown here excluding 20% VAT for a VAT-registered fleet. Subscriptions and fleet deals are often cheaper.

Diesel: this week's UK average diesel pump price (DESNZ), excluding VAT, in a 36mpg van. Electric vans use 0.35 kWh a mile, THRIVE's stated assumption, the same one the Fleet Cost Index uses.

Depot chargers and payback: one 7kW charger per van, over 250 working days a year. The payback compares depot charging with the public mix it replaces and uses the installer's quote you enter; we do not estimate installation or grid connection costs because no primary source publishes them.

Figures checked against GOV.UK on 22 September 2026.

Free JSON API - no key, open CORS, cache-friendly:

• /api/v1/fleet-charging-costs - JSON
• /api/v1/fleet-charging-costs?format=csv - CSV

curl 'https://www.thrivefleet.co.uk/api/v1/fleet-charging-costs?vans=50&miles=20000'

{ "prices": { … }, "fleet": { "routes": [ { "key": "depot", "pPerMile": …, "annual": … } ], "mix": { … }, "depot": { … } } }

Free to use. Please credit THRIVE and link to the page a figure came from: a request, never a condition of use. See the data terms and the API guide.