How to Claim EV Charging on a Novated Lease in Australia

You claim EV charging on a novated lease in one of two ways. Use the ATO’s home charging rate of 5.47 cents per kilometre for the FBT year that started 1 April 2026, or claim the actual cost from tax invoices. You can usually pick only one per year, so someone claiming both home and public charging without any tracking is probably doing it wrong.

The exception is a combined claim, which relies on a car or charger that accurately reports where charging happened. It’s less useful than it sounds, and we run the numbers below.

This guide covers each method, the question of why money leaves your pay before you’ve charged anything, and the rules that vary by provider. For how novated leasing works overall, start at our EV novated leasing hub. This is general information, not tax advice, so check anything specific with your provider or a tax adviser.

How to claim EV charging on a novated lease: the three methods

The method you can use depends on where you charge and what data you have. The ATO sets the framework in Practical Compliance Guideline PCG 2024/2, which lets you use a flat per-kilometre rate because household power can’t usually be separated from what the car used.

Method	How the claim is worked out	Evidence	Best for
Home charging rate (shortcut)	Total km × 5.47c	Odometer readings	Mostly home charging
Actual cost (invoice)	Public charging invoices, plus home charging only if metered	Tax invoices, and meter records and bills for home	Mostly public charging
Combined	(Total km × home %) × 5.47c, plus public invoices	Home percentage report, odometer, receipts	A large public share, if your car reports it

The rate rose on 1 April 2026. The ATO’s FBT rates page lists 5.47c for the FBT year starting then, and 4.20c for earlier years. According to the guideline, the new figure draws on the top 40 selling EVs from July 2021 to June 2025 and national average electricity prices for 2025-26. A claim that spans 31 March may need splitting, because kilometres before that date use the old rate.

The choice applies to each vehicle for a whole FBT year. You can change method from one year to the next, but not partway through.

Why money comes out of your pay when you also pay the charger

Your charging budget is a pre-tax savings pot, not a prepayment to a charging network. That’s the source of most confusion on this topic.

Here’s how it works. Say your lease includes $28 a fortnight for charging. That comes out of your pre-tax pay and sits in your running cost account. You still pay your power bill and any public sessions yourself, say $30 a fortnight. You then lodge a claim, and the provider pays you back from the pot. So you aren’t paying $58 a fortnight for charging. You paid $30 from after-tax money and then moved up to $28 of pre-tax money into your bank account.

If you never claim, the money just sits there. Providers generally return any surplus at the end of the benefit year or the lease, and it comes back as taxable income, so unclaimed budget loses its tax advantage. Overspend the budget and the extra usually falls on you, or your provider adjusts your deduction.

At $28 a fortnight, your yearly budget is $728. At 5.47c, that covers about 13,300 km of claims. Compare your own driving with what your quote assumes, as our novated lease quote guide explains, because a budget that’s too high only ties up your pay.

Can you claim both home and public charging?

Yes, but only when the home share can be measured. The guideline splits this into two cases.

Your car accurately reports its home charging percentage. The costs can then include both home and commercial charging. You apply the percentage to total kilometres, then use the rate on the result. The ATO’s own example has a driver charging 75% at home over 10,000 km, leaving 7,500 km for the rate, plus receipts for commercial charging on top.

Your car can’t report it. You choose. Either use the home rate and disregard your commercial charging costs, or claim commercial charging and don’t use the home rate. In the ATO’s example, a driver with $250 of public charging receipts claims the home rate and has to leave the $250 out.

Notice what the ATO doesn’t ask for: nobody has to record which charger powered which drive. One percentage for the year does the job. Under the rate-only method, all your kilometres are counted, and the public sessions you paid for are simply not claimed.

So if someone tells you they claim for everything and don’t track anything, one of three things is true. They’re on the rate only and not claiming public charging, their provider’s method handles the split, or their claims won’t stand up. The record-keeping sits with you and your employer, and the guideline says it must be followed in good faith.

What each method is worth

The home rate pays out more than most home charging costs, and the combined method rarely adds much. To show why, take an EV using 15 kWh per 100 km over 15,000 km, which is 2,250 kWh a year. All tariffs here are assumptions for illustration, as of November 2026.

How you charge	Actual electricity cost	Home rate claim (15,000 km)
All home, 8c/kWh EV plan	$180	$820.50
All home, 15c/kWh off-peak	$337.50	$820.50
All home, 30c/kWh flat rate	$675	$820.50
All public, 60c/kWh	$1,350	Not available, claim invoices instead

At that consumption, 5.47c per kilometre equals about 36.5c per kWh. Most drivers charging at home pay less, which is why the rate is usually the easy choice. It’s also why choosing a good EV electricity plan helps: the claim stays the same while your bill falls.

Owner experience fits that pattern. One driver on a cheap tariff reports claiming $98 for 1,800 km over three months after spending $29.40 on power.

The claim itself isn’t a profit. It returns your own pre-tax money, so its value is the tax you avoid on that amount. On $820.50, that’s about $263 a year on the 30% tax bracket and about $320 on the 37% bracket, counting the 2% Medicare levy.

Now try a combined claim. Suppose you do 80% of your charging at home and pay 60c/kWh for the other 450 kWh.

Method	Calculation	Claim
Home rate only	15,000 km × 5.47c	$820.50
Public invoices only	450 kWh × 60c	$270
Combined	(12,000 km × 5.47c) + $270	$926.40

The combined claim adds $105.90, which is worth roughly $34 to $41 a year after tax. That’s a lot of paperwork for so little. It starts to pay off as your public share grows, so it mainly suits drivers who rely on fast chargers. Our home vs public charging comparison shows where that line sits for your tariff.

Provider rules are stricter than the ATO’s

The ATO allows the combined method, but your provider doesn’t have to offer it. Check before you assume you can use it. These summaries reflect each provider’s published pages as of November 2026.

Provider	Home rate	Public charging	Combined claim
Maxxia	Yes	Tax invoices	No: home rate excludes public invoices that year
Oly	Yes	Tax invoices	No: one method per FBT year
Smart	Yes	Where home and public can be accurately separated	Possible with reports; actual-cost home claims need a dedicated meter
Paywise	Yes	Chargefox account or receipts	Yes, with manufacturer or charger app data
Easi	Yes, its only method	Not claimed at actual cost	No
Fleetcare (page dated July 2025)	Yes	Tax invoices	No: one method per FBT year

Easi’s approach matters if you rely on fast chargers, since it won’t reimburse your real public costs above the flat rate. If public charging is your main source of energy, ask this question before you sign, not after. Our guide to novated lease companies compares providers on other points.

Data quality is the other catch. The method needs a report covering the full FBT year, and not every car produces one. If your car’s app won’t show the split, a smart charger’s records plus public receipts may work, if your provider accepts them.

Records, charger costs and other traps

The odometer reading is the record you can’t recreate later. Take a dated photo on 1 April every year and when the lease starts. Kilometres don’t carry over between FBT years, so a claim you forget to lodge can’t simply roll on.

Charger hardware isn’t covered. Maxxia, Easi and Fleetcare all exclude the wall charger and its installation, and Maxxia also excludes upgraded cables. Budget for this separately using our installation cost guide.

Solar is a grey area. Maxxia excludes solar, home battery and feed-in tariff costs from invoice claims. The home rate is built around electricity you’ve paid for, so if your bill is genuinely zero, ask your provider before claiming it.

Plug-in hybrids follow different rules. PHEVs lost the FBT exemption from 1 April 2025, but the ATO extended the guideline to them in November 2025, with a calculation that applies the rate to electric kilometres only and requires petrol records. Maxxia, Oly and Fleetcare’s pages still treat the shortcut as battery EV only, so ask yours. Our PHEV charging cost guide has the detail.

Reimbursing charging won’t reduce your reportable fringe benefit. The ATO’s novated lease example treats the reimbursement as an exempt benefit, not as your contribution. Its other examples show the alternative: if you pay the electricity yourself and give your employer a declaration, that cost counts as your contribution and reduces the taxable value. On 15,000 km, the $820.50 would trim your reportable amount by about $1,548. That can matter if you’re close to an income test or repaying HELP, but you’d give up the reimbursement. Ask your provider whether it supports this, and run it through the novated lease calculator before deciding.

Free charging gives you nothing to invoice. Actual-cost claims only cover what you paid, so a free charger at work adds nothing to one. If free charging supplies most of your energy, ask your provider how it treats the home rate. Most drivers won’t face this: according to the Electric Vehicle Council’s 2024 ownership survey, 93% of EV owners charge at home.