How Much Does an EV Charger Cost for a Holiday Let? (2026)

Quick answer: A standard 7kW EV charger costs around £800 to £1,200 fully installed in the UK in 2026, made up of roughly £350 to £900 for the charger unit and £300 to £600 for installation. For a holiday let specifically, budget a bit more: you'll usually want an external MID-certified billing meter (around £80 to £200 plus fitting) so you can bill guests compliantly, and unlike a homeowner you can't offset the cost with a grant, because the landlord chargepoint grant excludes holiday lets. The upside is that, unlike a home charger, a holiday let charger can pay for itself by billing guests for the electricity they use.

If you're weighing up putting an EV charger at your holiday let, the first question is usually "what's this going to cost me?" The honest answer is that the headline price is fairly predictable, but there are a few holiday-let-specific costs the standard home-charger guides don't mention, and one common assumption (that there's a grant to help) that doesn't hold for a rental. Here's the full picture.

The core cost: charger plus installation

For a standard 7kW smart charger on a normal single-phase supply, which is the right setup for the vast majority of UK properties, the 2026 going rate is:

• Charger unit: roughly £350 to £900, depending on the model. Budget chargers like the Wallbox Pulsar Plus sit at the lower end; premium or billing-ready units like the Easee Charge Max sit higher.
• Installation labour: roughly £300 to £600. A qualified electrician typically needs two to four hours for a straightforward job.
• Total, fully installed: around £800 to £1,200 for a standard installation.

That total normally covers the unit, mounting it, running the cable from your consumer unit (fuse box) to the charger, and testing and certification by the electrician. A simple job, where the parking spot is close to the meter, lands at the lower end; a more awkward layout pushes it up.

The holiday-let extras the home guides miss

This is where a holiday let differs from a home install, and it's worth budgeting for these up front.

An MID billing meter (if your charger doesn't have one). To bill guests lawfully for the electricity they use, the reading has to come from a meter certified for billing under the Measuring Instruments Regulations 2016. Most chargers don't have one built in, so you fit an external MID Class B sub-meter, typically £80 to £200 for the meter plus the electrician's time to install it. The exception is a charger with the meter built in, like the Easee Charge Max, where you pay more for the unit but skip the separate meter. Either way, billing-grade metering is a cost a home charger simply doesn't have. Our MID-meter compliance guide explains what's required.

Durability and siting. A charger at a let is used unattended by strangers, outdoors, year-round. You may want a tougher unit, a sensible cable length to reach where guests actually park, and tidy weatherproof siting. None of this is expensive, but it's worth specifying rather than defaulting to the cheapest home setup.

The costs that can push the total up

These apply to any install, home or let, but they're the variables that explain why one quote says £850 and another says £1,600:

• Consumer unit (fuse box) upgrade: £250 to £1,200, if your existing board can't safely take an EV circuit. Common in older properties.
• Long cable runs: the further the charger is from the consumer unit, the more cable and labour.
• Groundworks / trenching: £200 to £500 if the cable has to cross a driveway or garden.
• Load balancing device: £100 to £250, increasingly common, to stop the charger overloading the supply when the property is using power.
• Supply upgrade (DNO): £500 to £1,500 or more, only if the property's incoming supply needs reinforcing. Rare, but worth knowing exists.

The single biggest variable is usually the consumer unit and cable route, so when you get quotes, ask the electrician to itemise these separately rather than giving one lump sum.

The grant question: there isn't one for holiday lets

Here's the assumption that trips people up. You may have read that an EV chargepoint grant can knock money off the cost. For a holiday let, in almost all cases, it can't.

• Homeowners with a driveway lost grant eligibility back in 2022, when the old home charger scheme closed.
• The grant for landlords (up to £500 per socket from April 2026) is for residential tenancies, where a tenant lives in the property. It explicitly excludes holiday and short-term lets.

So as a holiday let owner, the realistic planning assumption is that you pay the full installed cost with no grant offset. It's better to budget on that basis than to count on a contribution that won't materialise. (If a property is let on a longer residential basis for part of the year, the position can differ, so it's worth confirming with an OZEV-approved installer, but don't assume.)

The part that makes it worth it: the charger can pay for itself

This is what separates a home charger from a holiday let charger. A home charger is a pure cost, money out to charge your own car. A holiday let charger can earn.

If you bill guests per kWh for the electricity they use, the charger stops being a sunk cost and starts contributing to its own payback. Based on typical UK holiday let usage, guest charging can bring in roughly £20 to £60 per booking depending on stay length and how much guests charge, which over a well-booked season adds up to a meaningful contribution towards the install.

There's a booking benefit too, on top of the charging revenue. Airbnb's own data (from its 2024 partnership announcement with ChargePoint) found that listings offering an EV charger are booked for more nights and earn more on average than those without, with EV-charger adoption adding around two incremental nights booked per year, and searches for listings with EV chargers grew more than 80% between 2022 and 2023. That data is from the US market, so treat it as indicative rather than a UK guarantee, but the direction of travel (guests increasingly filtering for EV charging) is the same here.

How quickly it pays back depends on your bookings, your guests' charging habits, and the rate you set. You can estimate it for your own property with our earnings calculator, which is a more useful number than any generic average.

The bottom line

Budget around £800 to £1,200 for a standard 7kW charger installed, plus £80 to £200 for an external MID billing meter (unless you choose a charger with one built in), and be realistic that as a holiday let you won't get a grant to offset it. Get itemised quotes so you can see the consumer-unit and cable-route costs separately, since those are the main variables. And remember the part that makes a holiday let charger different from a home one: billed properly, it can pay for itself rather than just costing money.

For which charger to actually choose, see our guide to the best EV chargers for UK holiday lets. And for billing guests fairly and automatically once it's installed, that's what GuestCharge does.