Around £1,000 excluding VAT for a charger supplied and installed, with a typical installation taking two to four hours. Supply-only, a 7kW unit runs £450 to £800 and a 3kW unit £250 to £500, both excluding VAT and dated April 2026. A 7kW charger is the standard domestic choice.
What pushes the number up
Distance from the consumer unit is the first driver. A charger on the wall beside the board is a short cable run; one at the far end of a garden needs considerably more cable, more clipping and more labour.
Groundworks are the second. Where the supply has to cross a driveway rather than run along a wall, trenching and backfill in soft ground is published at £30 a metre, and hiring a digger carries a £300 minimum charge. Both exclude VAT.
The third is the one that turns a £1,000 job into a considerably larger one: the condition of the existing electrics. An older consumer unit may need replacing before a charger circuit can be added, and a board change is roughly £485 for a typical ten-way unit, from around £350 to £800 depending on the number of circuits, excluding VAT.
That is why an installer who wants to see the consumer unit before quoting is doing it properly, and a fixed price quoted over the phone without sight of the board carries a variable inside it.
The grant almost certainly does not apply
This is where most published advice is out of date, and the correction is worth reading carefully because it runs against expectation.
An owner-occupier of a house with a driveway does not qualify for any residential chargepoint grant. That route has gone. The residential support that remains is narrower.
Flat owners and renters can claim up to £500 per installation, where the property has private off-street parking. This is the route that matters most in South London, given how much of the housing stock is flats and rented property.
Households with on-street parking only can also claim up to £500 per installation, but the grant requires a cross-pavement solution, a channel or gully that lets the cable cross the footway safely, and that needs the local authority's cooperation to install. That is the route for terraced streets without off-street parking, and the council conversation is the long pole in it, not the electrician.
Separate schemes exist for workplaces, landlords and state-funded education institutions. New grant rates took effect on 1 April 2026 and the schemes are open to 31 March 2027.
The government collection page states flat amounts of up to £500 per installation. Cost guides that describe the grant as available "if eligible" without stating who is now eligible are behind the current position, and percentage-based versions of the grant circulating online do not appear on the government page at all.
So if you own a house with a driveway, budget the full installed cost. The £500-inclusive figures published alongside the £1,000 headline assume a grant most homeowners can no longer get.
Notification, and who handles it
Installing a charger on a new dedicated circuit is notifiable work under regulation 12(6A) of the Building Regulations 2010, because it is a new circuit. That means either a registered electrician self-certifies and the scheme notifies your council, or the work is notified to building control before it starts.
Separately, your distribution network operator has to be told about the new load. That is the company that owns the cables in the street, not your energy supplier. Your installer is responsible for determining the right notification route and making it on your behalf. The useful question is which notification they are making and when, and a competent installer answers it without hesitation.
Ask too whether the installer is registered for EV chargepoint work specifically. Scheme registration is scoped, and chargepoint installation sits as its own scope under NAPIT rather than being covered automatically by general electrical registration.
What to check in a quote
Establish whether the figure includes the charger unit itself or only the installation, since supply-only and installed prices are published separately and are easy to conflate.
Establish the VAT basis. Every figure above excludes VAT, and 20% on a £1,000 installation is £200. A sole trader under the £90,000 taxable turnover threshold charges none, which is legitimate.
Establish whether any consumer unit work is inside the price or is a provisional item. This is the single most common source of a quote moving after the survey.
And establish the cable route and length, because that is what separates two quotes for what looks like the same job. A quote built on a five-metre run and one built on twenty-five metres are not comparable, and neither installer is wrong.
Charger specification, briefly
A 7kW single-phase unit is the domestic standard and will fully charge most cars overnight. Tethered units come with the cable attached, which is convenient and fixes you to one connector type; untethered units take any cable and tidy away more easily.
Smart functionality matters more than it used to, because charging on an off-peak tariff overnight is where the running-cost saving comes from. Confirm that the unit you are buying supports scheduling against the tariff you intend to use.
A charger outlives the car it was bought for, so it is worth installing once, properly.