Four things decide the number
Every charging project cost breaks down the same way, and the proportions shift dramatically between sites.
In rough order of how much they vary
- Electrical supply, and whether it needs upgrading — usually the largest unknown
- Civil and cabling work, driven mostly by distance from the supply point to the bays
- The charge points themselves, which is the most predictable element
- Operation and maintenance, which is a running cost rather than a capital one
Why the supply upgrade dominates
If your sanctioned load cannot carry the chargers you want, you need a supply upgrade — and that can exceed the cost of the equipment it is there to power. It also involves your DISCOM, which means it drives the timeline as well as the budget.
This is why load management matters. By sharing available capacity between charge points rather than drawing full power on every point simultaneously, it is often possible to add charging within the supply a site already has. That single decision can change a project's cost more than any choice of hardware.
Why the charger is the predictable part
Equipment cost scales with power. An AC wall unit and a 240 kW DC fast charger are different orders of magnitude, and the gap between them dwarfs the differences between brands at the same rating.
Quantity matters less than people expect, because much of a site's cost is fixed. The second charge point at a location rarely costs what the first one did.
The cost people forget to ask about
Running costs are where charging projects quietly go wrong. Electricity at the applicable tariff is the obvious one. Less obvious is maintenance: preventive servicing, fault diagnosis, spares and the call-out when something fails.
An annual maintenance contract is a real line item, and a project costed without one is not costed. The alternative is not zero — it is an out-of-service charger earning nothing.
Why we do not publish a price
We could put a figure for the equipment on this page. It would be accurate and close to useless, because it would tell you about the smallest controllable part of your budget while saying nothing about the part that actually varies.
A site survey establishes what your supply can carry, what an upgrade would involve, where charge points can physically go and how cabling would run. That is the point at which a quotation means something. We separate equipment, installation and maintenance in ours so you can see and compare each part.