Share Your EV Charger UK: How to Earn Money From Your Driveway

If you have a home charger and a driveway, there's a genuine way to earn real money from it — the honest numbers, the tax rule that matters, and how to do it properly.

On this page

• How it actually works
• The real numbers
• The VAT rule that matters
• The legal bit
• Where to list your charger
• FAQ

If you've got a home EV charger and a driveway, there's a genuine, growing way to earn money from something that likely sits unused most of the day. Sharing your charger with nearby EV owners — especially the roughly 40% of UK households without a driveway of their own — is a real, legal option, provided you understand a couple of important rules first. For the wider picture on installing a charger in the first place, see our complete EV charger guide.

How It Actually Works

The concept is genuinely simple: you have a home charger that sits idle for most of the day while you're at work or your car is already charged, and a neighbour without off-street parking needs somewhere to plug in. You agree a price, they book a slot, they charge, you get paid — usually through a dedicated app that handles the booking and payment so neither side needs to manage cash or manual invoicing.

This genuinely matters more in the UK than it might first seem, given roughly 40% of households don't have private parking — exactly the audience our recent piece on cross-pavement charging rules covers from the other side. Charger sharing is a genuine, already-available alternative for many of those households right now, without waiting for any council scheme.

The Real Numbers

Real hosts sharing their charger with a small, regular group of neighbours — typically around four — report genuine annual income somewhere between £470 and £1,300, depending on how often the charger gets used and what price is set. This isn't a full-time income, but for a charger that would otherwise sit idle, it's a genuine, meaningful return on an asset you've already paid for.

The VAT Rule That Genuinely Matters

This is the single most important thing to understand before setting a price. Domestic electricity in the UK carries 5% VAT. Electricity supplied through public EV charging infrastructure carries the full 20% VAT rate. Sharing your home charger sits in a genuinely favourable position precisely because it's domestic electricity — but that favourable position depends on what you're actually charging for.

The Legal Bit — Genuinely Worth Getting Right

The cable itself needs to stay within your own property boundary. If a neighbour parks directly outside your house and the cable runs entirely across your own driveway or frontage to their car parked right there, that's genuinely straightforward. If the cable needs to cross a shared driveway, a neighbour's land, or any land you don't own, you need their written consent — and if this is going to be a regular, ongoing arrangement rather than a one-off favour, a proper Deed of Easement is worth having drawn up, since it formalises the arrangement in a way a casual verbal agreement doesn't.

Worth also checking your home insurance covers this kind of use, and being sensible about basic safety — a trailing cable across any shared path is a genuine trip hazard, same principle as the cross-pavement charging rules we covered separately.

Where to Actually List Your Charger

Rather than improvising an arrangement over text messages, several genuine UK platforms exist specifically for this — they handle booking, payment, and often insurance considerations, which is worth the modest fee they typically take:

Worth knowing honestly: some hosts on UK EV forums report the automated match-up between host and chargee doesn't always happen as often as hoped, and a number simply arrange payment directly with a known neighbour via bank transfer rather than using a platform at all — avoiding any commission, but losing the built-in booking and payment structure.

Worth genuinely comparing what each platform charges as a fee and how they handle payment before committing to one, since terms and coverage vary.

Frequently Asked Questions