The car park became a compliance deadline, a payroll question and a recruitment argument at the same time. The EPBD 2027 obligation, how many points you actually need, the four payment flows, home-charging reimbursement, tax, hardware, load management — and a 60-day rollout plan.
Thirteen chapters written for the people who get handed this project: facilities, HR, fleet and finance. Worked numbers, the exact advisor questions, and a declared interest where our own products appear.
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The compressed version of the guide — enough to brief your own project today. The PDF adds the worked numbers, the advisor questions and the fortnight-by-fortnight plan.
From 1 January 2027, yes, in most office situations: the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EU 2024/1275, Article 14) obliges every existing non-residential building with more than 20 parking spaces to install charge points — the working minimum is one charge point per ten spaces — or pre-cabling for at least half the spaces — with national implementations able to go further. This is not a new-build rule; it applies to the building you occupy today. If you lease, the compliance risk sits with your landlord — which is negotiating leverage, and why the guide's rollout plan puts the landlord letter in week one. The full counts and national variations are on our EPBD page and in Chapter 10.
Survey, don't assume: two questions to staff (do you drive electric or will your next car be? can you charge at home?) beat every industry ratio. The arithmetic: a 60 km commute needs ≈ 11 kWh — under an hour at 11 kW — so one socket serves one to one-and-a-half cars per day once real behaviour is priced in. A typical 120-space office lands at 8–12 sockets today, which conveniently is also its EPBD minimum of 12. Install to the higher of demand or obligation, and pre-cable for double: conduit costs tens of euros per space during works and thousands afterwards.
The guide works a 12-socket office end to end: € 8.388 of hardware (six dual-socket 22 kW units with MID meters, RFID and 4G included), € 5.000–9.000 of installation, € 0 for load management and € 0 of grid upgrade — € 13.400–17.400 all-in. Running it: ≈ € 415/month of electricity, partly recovered from private-car and guest charging, for a net benefit cost of € 35–135/month. Against that, ten company cars charging at € 0,18 instead of € 0,60 public saves ≈ € 970/month. The leaks to avoid at procurement: per-socket software fees, accessory load balancers and per-card charges — € 1.728 over three years on software fees alone at market rates.
Every messy workplace project got messy here. Four flows, decided before ordering: the employee charging at work (company cars are simply company cost; private cars free, at cost or at a margin — your policy), the company car charging at home (employer reimburses per metered kWh), the driver charging on the road (charge card, one consolidated employer invoice), and the guest (free, at cost, or revenue — including the public after hours). Each flow can be bought from a different vendor; the alternative is one platform that treats all four as what they are: a metered kWh with a payer attached.
A MID-certified meter in the home charger isolates car-kWh from household-kWh — without it you are reimbursing estimates, and estimates get audited. Set one rate in policy (the employee's actual contract price, or a published average updated quarterly), and let the platform compile each employee's sessions into a monthly payroll-ready statement: kWh × rate, per session, exportable. The test to run in any vendor demo: "show me the monthly statement for one employee who charged at work, at home and on the road." If the answer involves two portals and a CSV merge, that is your future month-end.
Tax treatment is national — the guide hands you the five questions to put to your advisor, with the Dutch 2026 answers as the worked example: charging at the employer's premises is treated as nil-valued for wage tax, employer-provided home chargers generally fold into the company-car benefit, metered home reimbursement is defensible where flat allowances are not, and VAT on hardware and electricity is broadly recoverable for business use. The pattern that holds across countries: metered, attributed kWh are tax-defensible; estimates and allowances attract wage tax. The hardware requirement and the tax requirement are the same requirement.
22 kW AC, not DC: an eight-hour dwell needs 11–20 kWh delivered, and a DC fast charger costs 20–40× more to solve a speed problem the car park does not have. The seven procurement questions from Chapter 6: ungated OCPP, MID meter included, RFID reader standard (badges are how offices work), 4G included rather than Wi-Fi hope, load management without accessory hardware, ISO 15118 / Plug & Charge readiness, and the total accessory bill. Price the configured charger, not the sticker — the configurator comparison against Zaptec, Easee, Wallbox and Alfen does exactly that with sourced prices.
Usually yes — without the € 20.000–60.000 upgrade quote. Cars dwell eight hours, so charging does not need to happen at the building's load peak; dynamic load management caps total draw at the main fuse, divides spare current across active sessions per phase, prioritises the pool car over the all-day parker, and routes rooftop-PV surplus into the fleet. Twelve sockets on a standard 3×80 A office connection is routine. Before anyone quotes: pull a week of quarter-hour load data from the main meter — and if a vendor sizes your project without asking for it, that tells you something too.
An office car park is empty 128 of 168 hours a week. Opened to the public through roaming — evenings and weekends, at a public tariff, with AFIR-compliant ad-hoc payment — it returns a modest € 50–150/month in the guide's conservative case, and rather more near housing where neighbours lack driveways. Badge groups keep it clean: employees, visitors and the public use the same sockets at different tariffs on different schedules. It will not pay for the project; it does turn a dead asset into a contributor and a planning-goodwill argument.
In fortnights: survey, load data, EPBD count, landlord letter and the four flows on paper (1–2); procurement against the seven hardware questions and the platform demo tests, reimbursement rate fixed with payroll (3–4); order, install, pre-cable double, configure badge groups and tariffs in parallel (5–6); commission with a test session per socket per badge group and the DLM cap verified live (7–8); then policy one-pager to staff, badges active, go live (week 9). The two slips that cost months: the landlord letter going out in week five, and payroll hearing about reimbursement in week eight.
The 15-page PDF adds the worked 12-socket case, the advisor questions, the policy template and the fortnight-by-fortnight plan. Free, by email.
It is written by a vendor and says so on the cover — the skew is declared, not hidden. But the numbers are worked examples you can recompute with your own site's figures, the regulations are cited by name and date (EPBD 2024/1275, AFIR 2023/1804, MID 2014/32/EU), and the hardware and platform chapters are checklists to judge any vendor against — including us.
It is used to send you the PDF, a copy of your registration goes to our sales team, and you will occasionally receive updates on workplace charging, regulation deadlines and e-flo products — that consent is part of the registration. Occasional means occasional: no daily drip sequence, no list rental, and every email carries an unsubscribe that works. The privacy statement covers the details.
The people who get handed the project: facilities and office managers, HR and mobility leads, fleet managers, finance, and the director of a company whose car park just became a compliance question. No prior EV-charging knowledge is assumed.
Chapters 2, 7, 8 and 9 (payment flows, reimbursement, tax, policy) apply to any existing installation, and Chapter 11 includes the migration path: chargers that speak OCPP move to a new platform by changing one URL — the switch page documents it, including 30 months free on migrated units under two years old.
August 2026 edition. It reflects the EPBD Article 14 deadline of 1 January 2027, AFIR's ISO 15118-2 requirement in force since January 2026, and Dutch tax positions as of August 2026 — each flagged with the instruction to verify against your national rules before money or payroll depends on it.
Planning a public or commercial network rather than a staff car park? That is its own guide: How to start a charging network.