EV Charging for Small Businesses and Hospitality (2026)

Quick answer: If you run a hotel, B&B, guest house, pub with rooms, or any small hospitality business, you can offer EV charging to your guests and customers and bill them fairly for the electricity they use. You don't need expensive commercial charge-point software or a public charging contract. A standard OCPP-compatible charger plus a per-kWh billing layer is enough for most venues, and it stays within Ofgem's resale rules as long as you don't charge more per unit than your own supplier charges you. This guide covers the options, the rules, and how to work out whether it's worth it.

EV charging has quietly become something guests look for, not a novelty. If your business has a car park and customers who stay a while, a charger is increasingly part of what people expect to find, the same way they expect Wi-Fi. The question for most small operators isn't whether to offer it, but how to do it without taking on the cost and complexity that the big public-network playbook assumes.

Who this is for

This guide is aimed at smaller hospitality and customer-facing businesses: hotels and boutique hotels, B&Bs and guest houses, pubs and restaurants with parking, farm shops, wedding and event venues, small retail and leisure sites, and self-catering or serviced accommodation operators with more than one unit. If you run a single holiday let, our complete guide to EV charging for holiday lets is the better starting point, though most of what follows applies to you too.

The common thread is this: you have customers who park on your property for a meaningful length of time, some of them arrive in EVs, and you'd like to offer charging without either giving electricity away or turning yourself into a public charging operator.

The three ways businesses usually approach it

There are broadly three models, and the right one depends on how public your charging is and how much you want to manage.

Free charging as an amenity. You absorb the electricity cost and offer charging free to draw custom, the way some hotels and restaurants treat parking. This is the simplest option and removes any billing question entirely. It works when charging is a small marketing cost and your guests are light users. It stops working when a few heavy users start charging large batteries for free on your meter, which adds up faster than most people expect.

Per-kWh billing to guests and customers. You let customers charge and bill them for what they actually use. This is the fairest model and the one most small operators settle on, because the people who charge pay for it and the people who don't aren't subsidising them. It needs a way to meter and bill each session, which is the main thing this guide is about.

Public charging. You open your charger to anyone, not just your customers, and run it as a small public charging point. This is a genuinely different business with its own rules (see the regulation section below) and usually only makes sense if charging itself is a revenue line you want to build, rather than an amenity that supports your main business.

Most small hospitality businesses want the middle option: bill our own guests fairly, keep it simple, don't become a charging network.

What you actually need to bill customers

The setup for per-kWh billing to your own customers is more straightforward than the commercial charge-point industry tends to make it sound. You need three things:

1. An OCPP-compatible charger. OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) is the open standard that lets a charger talk to billing and management software. Most modern chargers from brands like Easee, myenergi, Wallbox and others support it. A charger that's locked to its manufacturer's own closed system can't be billed through independent software, so this is the spec to check before you buy.
2. A billing-grade meter. To bill customers lawfully, the energy reading has to come from a meter certified under the Measuring Instruments Regulations 2016 (an MID Class B meter or better). Some chargers have one built in; otherwise an external sub-meter is added at installation. Our MID-meter compliance guide explains this in full, and it applies to commercial venues just as much as to holiday lets.
3. A way to take payment per session. This is the layer that turns a meter reading into a payment. The heavyweight option is full commercial charge-point management software, which is built for operators running many public chargers and priced accordingly. The lighter option, and the right fit for most small venues, is a QR-code billing tool where the customer scans, pays for what they use, and the money lands in your account, with no app, account, or front-desk involvement.

The rule that catches people out: Ofgem's resale price cap

If you bill customers for electricity you've bought from your supplier, you're reselling electricity, and that's regulated. Under Ofgem's Maximum Resale Price rules, you cannot charge more per unit than you paid your own supplier. You can recover reasonable associated costs, but the per-kWh rate you set for charging can't be a markup on your own electricity price.

In practice this means you set your charging rate at or below your own unit rate. You're recovering a cost, not running a margin on the electricity itself. This is the single rule most businesses don't know about when they first think about charging customers, and getting it wrong (typically by setting a "convenient" round number well above the supply cost) is the most common mistake. Our guide to billing guests without estimating works through the rate-setting in detail.

One important boundary: these resale rules, and the simpler setup in this guide, are about charging your own guests and customers. If you open the charger to the general public, you move into the territory of the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023, which cover payment methods, pricing transparency and reliability standards for publicly accessible charging. That's a different regime with more obligations, so if you're considering a genuinely public charger, take proper advice first.

Working out whether it's worth it

The maths for a business is the same shape as for any charger: an upfront cost, then per-session revenue or saved cost over time.

On the cost side, budget around £800 to £1,200 for a standard 7kW charger installed, plus £80 to £200 for a billing meter if your charger doesn't include one. Our full cost breakdown covers the variables (consumer unit, cabling, groundworks) that move that number. Larger sites wanting multiple chargers or faster charging will pay more, and at that scale load management between units becomes part of the design.

On the return side, it depends entirely on how many of your customers charge and how long they stay. A pub doing two-hour visits will see small per-session amounts; a hotel or guest house where cars sit overnight will see much more. The honest answer is that for most small venues the charger is best thought of as an amenity that recovers its own running cost and supports bookings, rather than a profit centre in itself. If charging revenue is the goal rather than customer service, that's the public-charging business, which is a different decision.

There's also a softer benefit that's real but harder to put a number on: appearing on the filters and maps that EV drivers use to choose where to stay, eat or stop. As the share of EVs on the road keeps rising, "has charging" is becoming one of those amenities that quietly wins the booking over the place down the road that doesn't.

The bottom line

For most small hospitality and customer-facing businesses, offering EV charging doesn't require the commercial charge-point machinery the industry tends to assume. An OCPP charger, a compliant billing meter, and a simple per-kWh payment layer is enough to let your guests charge and pay fairly, while staying inside Ofgem's resale rules. Keep it framed as an amenity that recovers its cost and supports your main business, decide early whether you're charging your own customers (simple) or the public (a different regime), and check the two specs that matter before buying any hardware: OCPP support and a billing-grade meter.

If you want guests and customers to be able to pay for charging automatically, by scanning a QR code with no app and no front-desk involvement, that's exactly what GuestCharge does. It works the same whether you're a single guest house or a hotel with a row of chargers in the car park.