Workplace Charging Scheme 2026: £500 Per Socket Guide

The Workplace Charging Scheme (WCS) is the UK government grant that helps businesses, charities and public-sector organisations install EV chargepoints at their premises. From 1 April 2026 the maximum grant rose from £350 to £500 per socket, and the scheme runs through to 31 March 2027. Here's exactly how it works, who qualifies, and how to claim.

The headline figure is straightforward: from 1 April 2026, the WCS pays up to £500 per socket, up from £350 previously. But the cap is only one of two limits — the grant also covers a maximum of 75% of the total cost, including VAT. Whichever limit is hit first is what you receive.

That means the grant only pays the full £500 once your installed cost exceeds about £667 per socket (since 75% of £667 ≈ £500). For lower-spec single-socket installs costing less than that, you receive 75% of the actual invoice, not the full £500.

The WCS is open to four broad applicant types across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland:

State-funded education institutions — schools, colleges, academies, and universities — apply through a separate, parallel WCS variant with its own application route, rather than the main scheme. Same £500-per-socket rate, slightly different eligibility detail.

The site rules are where most ineligible applications fall over. Get these right before you apply:

The per-applicant cap is 40 sockets across all sites — not 40 per site. A single business with 40 sites can install one socket at each, or twenty sockets at two sites, or any other distribution. Once the 40 are gone, the applicant cannot return to WCS for the same legal entity.

For organisations with bigger needs — large fleet operators, council depots, NHS trusts — WCS is typically used to seed initial provision, with later expansion paid for outside the scheme or under separate fleet-charging programmes.

The WCS sits inside a stack of three OZEV-funded EV chargepoint grants. Knowing which one applies to which scenario saves a lot of wasted application time:

The schemes don't stack — you can't apply WCS and the household chargepoint grant to the same socket. But a business that operates from an owner-occupied workplace can claim WCS for the staff car park and the household chargepoint grant for the directors' homes (separate properties, separate eligibility).

Salary-sacrifice EV schemes — run by providers like Octopus Electric Vehicles, The Electric Car Scheme and similar — are completely separate from WCS, but the two often appear together in employer EV strategies. The salary-sacrifice scheme funds the vehicle through pre-tax payroll deductions; WCS funds the chargepoint at your workplace. They neither overlap nor block each other.

For an employer offering salary-sacrifice EVs, the obvious play is to pair the scheme with WCS-funded workplace chargers — employees get a tax-efficient car and convenient charging at work, the business gets up to £500 per socket back from OZEV against the install cost. Most employers find the chargepoint side surprisingly cheap once WCS is netted off.

Five recurring issues account for most rejected or delayed claims: