When people picture an electric fleet, they picture chargers — rows of them in a depot, or a public station by the motorway. But a company EV actually draws its energy from three different places, each with its own cost, control and complications.

The International Energy Agency reports that the majority of EV charging happens at home and at work, not at public stations — and the cheapest of those, home charging, is the one most fleets account for least. Understanding the three layers is the first step to electrifying without nasty surprises.

The three layers of fleet charging

Public charging

Fast and convenient on the road, but the most expensive energy by far — often two to four times the cost of charging at home. Great for long trips; ruinous as a daily habit. Treat it as the exception, not the default.

Workplace / depot charging

Chargers installed on company premises. You control them and the energy is cheaper than public, but you pay to install and maintain them, and they only help drivers who actually come to the site. Ideal for pool cars and site-based teams.

Home charging

The default for most company-car drivers: they plug in overnight at their own address, on their own electricity contract. It's the cheapest energy and the most-used option — and, paradoxically, the hardest to handle, because the cost lands on the employee's personal bill.

Where the money really is

Most charging is cheap — if you let it be

For a typical fleet, the bulk of charging happens at home, overnight, on off-peak rates. That's the good news: it's the lowest-cost way to refuel a vehicle. The strategy almost writes itself — lean on home, use workplace where it helps, ration public.

But the cheap energy is bought by the employee

The catch is that home energy is paid through the employee's bill, not the company's. So it has to be reimbursed, accurately and compliantly — otherwise the cheapest layer becomes an administrative and compliance liability. (See The Real TCO of an Electric Fleet and the home-charging reimbursement guide.)

So infrastructure is really a data question

The real question isn't only "where do we put chargers?" It's "how do we account for the energy our drivers buy at home?" And that's a data question, not a hardware one, which changes how you should spend.

Do you need to install hardware everywhere?

The wallbox instinct

The instinct is to put a connected wallbox at every driver's home so charging can be metered. It works but it means buying, installing and maintaining hardware at dozens or hundreds of private addresses.

The hidden cost

That means cost, lead times, landlord permissions in flats, and devices that break or go obsolete. You've solved measurement by launching a logistics project across people's homes, the slowest, most expensive way to get the data.

The data alternative

It isn't necessary. The vehicle already records the energy it received; the employee's supplier already sets the price. Reconcile the two and you can account for every home session at the driver's real cost without installing anything.The home charger the driver already uses : standard socket, reinforced socket, any wallbox is enough. (See Do You Really Need a Wallbox?.)

A simple way to balance the three

• Use public charging as an exception, for the road.
• Use workplace charging where it genuinely helps : pool cars, site-based drivers.
• Lean on home charging as the everyday default, and solve the reimbursement with software, not hardware.

Get that balance right and your charging infrastructure becomes the cheapest, simplest part of running an electric fleet rather than its biggest project.

How VoltaBack fits

VoltaBack handles the home layer, the cheapest and most-used, but the one with no native accounting. It identifies each home-charging session from existing vehicle and energy data, applies the driver's real tariff, and produces a compliant monthly statement per vehicle, with no hardware to install. Your depot and public charging stay as they are; the home blind spot closes.

The hardest layer to account for is also the cheapest to use. Solve it with data, not boxes, and the whole infrastructure question gets simpler.

See how it works on your fleet. Book a demo →