EV Charging for Apartment Buildings: Who Pays for What

Use this article if you:

• had a resident ask to install a charging station in the shared garage
• are quoting charging stations for a residential building
• already have stations in the garage and the electricity bill is being split by guesswork

The station does not decide who pays for the electricity. The connection does. There are three routes: the resident’s own meter, the building’s shared supply, or a separate supply for the charging installation. Only the first settles itself. The other two have to be set up to say who used what, and that is decided before the first station is installed.

Who funds the cable, the stations and the switchgear is a separate question from who pays for the energy, and it is usually the one that takes the meeting longest. It has three answers, and the third is the one most buildings have not heard of: a company funds and installs it, then charges the residents who use it a monthly access fee.

If a resident has already asked and you need an answer this month, a 30-day free trial of ELVO lets you price a session and see the record it produces before the building votes on anything.

What the rules settle, and what they leave to national law

The buildings directive binds member states rather than buildings, and the deadline for putting it into national law was 29 May 2026, so what applies to your garage is the national text, which may still be in preparation. Two of its requirements shape the job.

Member states are to remove the barriers to installing in residential buildings, in particular the need for consent from the landlord or the co-owners for a private point for the resident’s own use, with refusal allowed only on serious and legitimate grounds. They are also to ensure that residential buildings that are new or in major renovation, with more than three parking spaces, get pre-cabling for at least half of the spaces and ducting for the rest, sized so that points on every space could run at once. A new residential building also has to get at least one working recharging point, which a major renovation does not. Both apply only where the car park is inside the building or adjacent to it.

That second requirement is written for a garage that fills up slowly: the building gets wired for spaces that sit empty for years, because on the day the works finish one or two residents have an electric car. Cable once for the whole garage, add stations as residents ask, and when you compare platforms ask what you pay for a point nobody used that month.

Member states are also to ensure these points are capable of smart charging and run on non-proprietary, non-discriminatory protocols, which is why a station that can only be managed through its manufacturer’s own tool is a poor fit for a shared garage. All of this is as of August 2026.

Connection route	Who gets the electricity bill	What settlement it needs	What it asks of the building
Station fed from the apartment’s own meter	The resident, from their own supplier	None, it settles itself	Spare capacity on that apartment’s supply, and a cable crossing common property, so the association still has to agree
Stations fed from the building’s shared supply	The association, on the common bill	Identification per user, energy per session, and a price rule agreed in advance	One cable run, one shared current limit, and stations added cheaply later
A separate supply for the charging installation	Whoever holds that contract, the association or a company running the stations for it	The same, plus its own energy contract	A connection request to the distribution system operator (DSO), with its own cost and lead time

Distribution system operators have to deal with anyone owning or operating recharging points on a non-discriminatory basis, private ones included, so the third route is not asking for a favour. Ask for the date along with the price.

How to settle the cost, step by step

The first three are answered on paper, before anything is bolted to a wall, because each is expensive to change once residents are charging and money is moving. The last five are the ones the platform carries.

1. Find out who owns the parking spaces and who is paying for the installation. In many buildings the spaces are individually owned or exclusively allocated rather than common property, which decides whether the association votes at all, whose space a station goes on and who owns it afterwards. It also sets the shape of the installation: where residents park in assigned bays, two shared points in a corner are no use to them, so the cabling has to reach the bays. Then settle who funds the infrastructure the next four residents will use: the resident who asked, the building recovering it later, or a company that funds and installs it and charges the residents who use it a monthly access fee. That third answer is established in the United Kingdom, where it is how buildings that will not vote for a large one-off spend get the work done at all. Whether anyone offers it where you are is worth asking, because it turns on someone willing to fund the work and wait years for the money.
2. Get the spare capacity of the building’s connection in writing. Start with the connection agreement the building already holds, which states the power it has contracted, then ask the electrician what is genuinely spare after the building’s own peak. That number caps how many cars can charge at the same time, and it is the difference between adding stations later and rebuilding the supply. Where it is tight, load management is what lets several stations share what exists.
3. Choose the connection route before the first station goes in. A building that lets the first resident wire a station to their own meter and later moves to a shared installation pays for both.
4. Give every user an identity the station can read. A card or an app account per driver, not an open socket, because the allocation is only as good as the record of who started each session.
5. Write the price rule into the association’s decision. Price per kWh, whether anything is added to cover the standing costs, and what happens with guests. What is added can be a fixed amount per kWh or a percentage of the supply price, and the two behave differently the day the building’s electricity contract changes. A fixed amount keeps what the building keeps at the figure that was voted, whatever energy costs. A percentage moves with the supply price, which follows costs that rise with it, and also grows on its own in the month energy gets expensive and residents read the bill closely. Write down which of the two it is and when it gets reviewed. Ask the building’s electricity supplier and its accountant what the association may charge on, because cost recovery and selling electricity are not treated the same way in every market.
6. Take the kWh from the session records, not from a notebook. The station reports the energy it delivered for each session, and the allocation is built on that. Ask the installer whether the metering in the stations you are buying is accepted for billing where you are, because the first resident who disputes a bill will ask exactly that.
7. Decide how the document reaches the resident. Three normal answers: a line on the monthly building charge, a document raised from the session records by whoever collects the money, or a third party who operates the stations and bills the residents directly. Ask your platform exactly which of these it produces for residents charging on cards, because that is a different flow from a visitor paying by bank card. If the document carries an access fee as well as the energy, ask whether the two sit in the same tax category. In several markets household electricity carries a reduced rate while a service carries the standard one, and then they have to be separate lines.
8. Set the rules for visitors and for cars left plugged in. Where more cars want a point than there are points, a car left connected after it has finished costs someone else a slot, and a charge per minute after charging ends is the usual answer. Give it a free grace period long enough to cover an overnight stay, or you will be billing residents for doing exactly what the cheap night price asked them to do. Where every resident has their own bay and their own point, the charge has nothing to do.

One more payer can sit behind the resident. Where someone drives a company car, some countries have a settled way for the employer to pay for the electricity taken at home, and a bay in the building’s garage is home. Belgium is the clearest case: the employer can reimburse that electricity free of tax, either at the real cost or at a flat rate per kWh capped at a figure the energy regulator publishes every quarter, an arrangement made permanent in 2025. It changes nothing about the wiring, but it decides what the resident has to be able to hand their employer, so ask before you settle how the document is produced.

Public money for the installation also differs from country to country, and it is worth finding out what applies before the works start, because some schemes will not pay for a charging point that is already on the wall. In the United Kingdom there is a grant towards each socket for someone who owns and lives in a flat or who rents, and a separate one for landlords and for the property management companies acting for them, which covers sockets across a whole portfolio and runs to the end of March 2027. Belgium is the case where you have to ask twice, because the grants are decided by region rather than nationally, so a building in Brussels and one in Flanders do not get the same answer. France has the scheme written for this exact situation: a co-ownership, a social landlord or a single owner of a residential block can have half the cost of the shared infrastructure covered, up to 12,500 euros before tax for a car park of a hundred spaces and more above that, on condition that the work covers every space in the car park and that the application is approved before the works begin. The charging points themselves are paid for separately. Ask whoever runs the scheme what the station has to be able to do, because the technical conditions are where an application usually fails, and expect an inspection before the money is paid. All three schemes are described here as they stood in August 2026, when this was written. Public support changes with each national budget, so read the current rules before anyone counts on the money.

The wiring is the electrician’s responsibility, not the platform’s, and it has to be certified by someone authorised to do it. Ask early whether a load of this size has to be declared to the DSO where you are, because that answer arrives on its own timetable.

Per kWh, per month, or free

Four price rules turn up in residential garages. Price per kWh follows the energy actually taken. A flat monthly fee per car is simple until one driver commutes and another does not. A monthly access fee plus the energy separates the two things being paid for, the installation and the electricity, and it is how whoever funded the cabling gets that money back. Free charging from common funds means every owner pays for the few with electric cars, which holds only as long as the meeting agrees to it.

Time of use is worth setting from the start if the building’s contract has cheaper hours, because cars sit plugged in overnight anyway and a lower night price moves the load there without anyone changing their habits.

Keep any occupancy charge separate from the energy price rather than blending them into one number, and make the price components visible before the session starts, the way the rules require at publicly accessible points. A driver can only respond to a cost they can see before plugging in.

Q: Can we just split the charging electricity across the whole building the way we split the lifts? A: Only if every owner agrees to fund other people’s cars. It also removes any reason to charge at cheap hours, because nobody sees their own consumption.

What ELVO does in a shared garage

What you set up in ELVO follows the route the electricity takes. Every session is priced against the driver who started it, so whichever supply the stations sit on, the association has a record of who took what to settle against.

Where each station sits behind the resident’s own meter, the platform is there for access and for proof. Their card starts the session, the session is recorded against them, and the electricity keeps arriving on their own bill as before.

Where the stations sit on the building’s shared supply, the association pays the whole bill and has to get the money back per resident. A connector carries a price rule with an energy price per kWh, an optional charge for parking, and an optional charge for the minutes after charging ends. The energy price can change by hour and day, so a night rate is a setting rather than a project, and every session is attributed to the card that started it.

Where the charging installation has a supply of its own, the same records apply, and the building manager and whoever runs the stations get their own logins, so the installer is not the one answering billing questions afterwards.

Residents get a physical card or a card in the app, cards are imported in bulk rather than typed in one at a time, and a card that belongs to the association itself charges nothing.

The usual shared garage has stations from more than one manufacturer, and where each brand is managed through its own maker’s tool, every new resident is set up once per brand. Stations from different manufacturers sit in the same ELVO account, provided they speak OCPP, and the list of compatible models is over 700. They can share one current limit, so extra stations divide the power that already exists.

ELVO holds an Open Charge Alliance certificate, Full and Security.

Q: What happens when a resident sells the apartment? A: The old card is deactivated and a new one is issued to the new owner, from a desk, without touching the stations.

Frequently asked questions

Who pays for the electricity when EV chargers are installed in an apartment building? Whoever holds the supply the station is wired to. A station fed from an apartment’s own meter is paid by that resident, with no settlement needed. Stations fed from the building’s shared supply arrive on the building’s bill, and the cost has to be allocated back to each driver from the session records.

Can a residents’ association refuse a request to install an EV charger? That depends on the national law in your country. The buildings directive tells member states to remove the need for co-owner consent for a private recharging point for the resident’s own use, and allows refusal only on serious and legitimate grounds. Member states had until 29 May 2026 to put that in place.

Should each apartment have its own charger, or should the building share a few? Start from the parking. Where residents park in assigned bays, a few shared points in a corner are no use to them and the installation has to reach each bay. Stations on the building’s shared supply are still usually cheaper per space and easier to extend, because one cable run serves everyone and the power is shared between them. Individual runs from each apartment’s meter avoid the settlement work but need spare capacity on that apartment’s supply.

How do you bill residents for charging in a shared garage? Every session has to be tied to a person before it starts, using a card or an app account rather than an open socket. The station reports the energy it delivered, the platform prices it per driver, and the building decides whether that becomes a line on the monthly charge or a separate document.

Can the association charge more than the electricity costs? Ask the building’s electricity supplier and its accountant before deciding, because cost recovery and selling electricity are not treated the same way in every market. Settle the question before residents start charging, not after.

Are there grants for installing EV chargers in an apartment building? That depends on the country, and sometimes on the region. The United Kingdom has a grant towards each socket for people who own and live in a flat or who rent, and a separate one for landlords and the property management companies acting for them. In Belgium the grants are decided by region, so Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia answer differently, and separately an employer can reimburse the electricity a company car takes at home. France covers half the cost of the shared infrastructure in a residential block, up to a ceiling that rises with the number of parking spaces. Find out what applies before the works start, because some schemes will not pay for an installation that is already in place. This is the position in August 2026 and it changes with each national budget.

Is it safe to charge electric cars in an underground car park? European guidance published in 2025 for covered parking notes that the evidence has electric cars at a lower fire risk than combustion cars, while still calling for measures on prevention, detection, evacuation and limiting spread. Give it to whoever writes the fire safety documentation.

Read next

• How many charging stations a building can take
• EPBD Article 14: what the directive requires from charge management software
• EV charging billing: a practical guide for operators
• EV charging management software: what it is and who needs it
• OCPP backend: what it is and how to choose one

Sources

• European Union, Directive (EU) 2024/1275 on the energy performance of buildings, Article 14
• European Union, Regulation (EU) 2023/1804 on alternative fuels infrastructure, Article 5
• European Union, Directive (EU) 2019/944 on the internal market for electricity, Article 33
• Advenir, Infrastructure collective
• Office for Zero Emission Vehicles, Electric vehicle chargepoint grants
• Vandelanotte, Flat CREG rate for home charging of company cars now permanently allowed
• European Commission, Guidance of fire safety for electric vehicles parked and charging infrastructure in covered parking spaces, 2025

Bottom line

Ownership of the spaces, spare capacity in writing, and the connection route decide everything else in a residential garage. All three are cheap to settle early and expensive to revisit once cars are charging.

Try ELVO free for 30 days. Price one connector, run one session on one card, and look at the record that comes out.

ELVO Team. We operate CPMS for manufacturers, distributors, installers, and operators across Europe and beyond.

Published 24 August 2026.