How to charge an electric car without a driveway

Why this is a big group

In England, 40.8% of homes have no parking on their own plot, and 26.3% have no designated parking of any kind, according to the English Housing Survey’s 2024 sample. Those households can still buy electric cars. They just cannot plug in on a driveway.

The government’s Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) Fund describes itself as “primarily targeted at addressing the need for EV charging in areas with lower levels of residential off-street parking”. What it has not done is solve the problem quickly. The UK had 121,171 public chargers on 1 July 2026. On the Department for Transport’s measure there were about 25 plug-in vehicles for every public charger at 1 April 2026.

Your options at a glance

A home charger with a cross-pavement channel

A cross-pavement solution is a channel set into the pavement. Your charger sits on your house wall, and the cable runs out of the wall, through the channel and up to the car at the kerb. The government’s legal definition is “a pavement-embedded cable channel that allows a cable for the recharging of electric vehicles to safely cross a footway from a domestic premises to a parked vehicle”.

It is the only no-driveway route that gives you home electricity prices. It is also the only one the OZEV on-street grant supports: 75% of the charger and its installation, up to £500, until 31 March 2027. The grant needs your highways authority’s consent and a permanent channel. It does not pay for the channel and does not reserve you a parking space.

The catch is availability. The channel is installed by or with your council, and Kerbo Charge, the supplier with the widest council footprint we found, lists 55 councils live and 22 on trial. Prices run from £250 to £1,425 for the channel alone depending on where you live. Our cross-pavement guide has council-by-council prices, the permission process and the grant steps.

Two rule changes matter. From 21 October 2026, England no longer requires a planning application for a council-authorised channel outside conservation areas, listed buildings’ grounds and scheduled monuments. Highways consent and a street works licence are still required. Wales has no planning right for channels. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own permit routes, covered in the cross-pavement guide and on our Scotland grants page.

Council lamp-post and kerbside chargers

LEVI is a £381 million programme for English local authorities: £343 million capital and £37.8 million for staff and expertise. In June 2025 the government said it was delivering over 100,000 new chargepoints from it, “ideal for charging overnight for drivers without access to off-street parking”. Councils pick an operator, then roll chargers out on lamp columns and in parking bays.

Two examples show how it works for residents:

• Hackney: more than 1,200 charge points installed, with a target of 3,000 by 2030. The operator, Zest, funds, installs and runs them. Residents can fill in a short survey to request a location.
• Enfield: 1,000 chargers on lamp columns, delivered by Char.gy and aimed at “residents who do not have private driveways”. Residents suggest a spot through an online form.

A request is a suggestion, not a promise. Whether a charger appears outside your home is up to the council and operator. Prices are the operator’s, so check the rate per kWh and any parking rules before relying on one. Zapmap’s September 2026 average for standard public chargers (3kW to 49kW) is 54p/kWh.

LEVI funds English councils only. We have not researched equivalent Welsh or Scottish schemes for this page.

A neighbour’s home charger

Community charging lets you book a home charger when its owner is not using it. Octopus Electric Vehicles partners with Co Charger, which it describes as working “a bit like Airbnb for electric car chargers”. You search the Co Charger app for a nearby host, request a session, charge once the host approves and pay through the app.

Octopus claims most UK residents live within a mile of a host and that hosts can earn “anywhere between £200 to £1,000 a year”. Those are supplier claims, and the page lists no charging rates. The practical issue is that the charger sits on the host’s property, so your car has to be parked there while it charges. Home chargers are slow enough that a session often means several hours.

Workplace charging

If you drive to work, your employer’s car park may be your home charger. The Workplace Charging Scheme pays up to 75% of the cost, capped at £500 per socket and 40 sockets per applicant, until 31 March 2027, so there is a case to put to an employer who has not installed any. Pricing is the employer’s choice. The scheme also lets employers install chargepoints at employees’ homes for company vehicles where the employee cannot charge at work.

Supermarket, destination and rapid charging

Zapmap’s September 2026 index gives weighted averages for pay-as-you-go charging: 54p/kWh for standard chargers (3kW to 49kW) and 79p/kWh for rapid and ultra-rapid (50kW and above). Network averages vary: believ 66p, Tesla Superchargers open to all 69p (48p for Tesla drivers) and Sainsbury’s Smart Charge 72p. Memberships and promotions can cut these.

Public charging carries 20% VAT. HMRC says it is “always treated as standard-rated”. Domestic electricity is at 0% in Great Britain from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, so the gap with home charging is wider than it looks.

What it costs per mile, and per year

Rapid charging at the Zapmap average costs about 20% more per mile than petrol at 40 mpg (computed). If rapid chargers are your only source, an electric car costs you more to run than a petrol one.

The channel route pays back fast against public charging. A project costing £850 to £2,050 saves, at 9,400 miles a year, between £783 and £1,313 a year compared with standard public charging, depending on whether you charge at the price-cap rate or on Intelligent Octopus Go. That is a payback of roughly 8 to 31 months (computed). Lower mileage stretches it. Intelligent Octopus Go needs a compatible car and charger and a smart meter, so check the conditions on our EV tariffs pages.

A private space you can rent or buy

Not every no-driveway household is stuck with the street. A garage or parking space within reach, rented or owned, can host a charger with its owner’s permission. For the OZEV renters and flat owners grant, designated private parking “may be co-located with the property or separate from it”, provided you can show a legal entitlement to the space and reach it at all times. That grant excludes people who own a house they live in, whatever their parking.

Which option suits you?

• Your council runs a channel scheme and you usually find a space near your home: a channel plus a home charger, claiming the OZEV on-street grant.
• Your street has lamp-post chargers, or your council has a request form: request one near your usual parking spot and use it for overnight charging.
• You live in a flat with a parking bay: you may not need a channel at all. See our flats and renters guide.
• You drive about 5,000 miles a year or less: the saving over standard public charging falls to roughly £420-£700 a year (computed), so an £850-£2,050 project takes between about one and five years to pay back. Run your own numbers in our charging cost calculator.
• You drive long distances and rarely park near home: workplace charging plus rapid chargers on trips, and keep an eye on supermarket rates.
• None of the above: ask your council when its LEVI rollout reaches your street, and check Kerbo’s location list as it updates.

Rules in short

• Planning: In England, the wall unit itself is normally permitted development. From 21 October 2026 England also allows a unit anywhere in the curtilage of a house or flats (outside conservation areas) provided any cable crossing the pavement goes through an authorised channel. See planning permission for an EV charger.
• Highways: s.178 consent plus a street works licence, from the council, for any channel.
• Landlords and freeholders: a rented or leasehold home needs written permission before the OZEV grant application.
• Grant timing: OZEV’s closing date is 31 March 2027. Nothing has been announced after that.