UK EV road tax 2026: what electric cars actually pay now

Yes, electric cars pay road tax now. If you own an EV and you are not certain what you owe, the short version is this: the exemption that made electric cars free to tax ended on 1 April 2025, not 2026, and a lot of owners still have not caught up with the change. The renewal reminder lands, the figure is no longer zero, and the obvious question is whether that is right.

It is. What you actually pay depends on two things: when your car was first registered and what it cost new. This guide gives you the number for your car, the rules behind it, and the one change in April 2026 that quietly took a few hundred thousand EVs back out of the most expensive bracket. There is a calculator below to do the working for you, then the detail if you want to understand the reasoning.

What changed, and when

The decision to start taxing electric cars was made by the Conservative government at the Autumn Statement in 2022, legislated in the Finance Act 2023, and confirmed by the current government at the Autumn Budget in 2024. It took effect on 1 April 2025. Before that date, zero-emission vehicles were fully exempt from Vehicle Excise Duty, which is the formal name for road tax. From that date, they were brought into the same system as petrol and diesel cars.

So the 2025/26 tax year was the first in which EV owners paid anything at all. The 2026/27 year, which began on 1 April 2026, is the first full year in which every EV on the road pays. That is the practical hook for most readers: the change is no longer new, the reminders are going out, and the £0 band has gone.

April 2026 also brought a second change that works in EV owners’ favour. The Expensive Car Supplement, the surcharge on pricier cars, had its threshold for electric vehicles raised from £40,000 to £50,000. We cover that in full below, because it is the part most likely to save you money and the part most owners have not heard about.

The reasoning the Treasury gave is straightforward revenue and fairness: as EVs move from a small minority to a large share of new cars, a tax system that exempts them loses a growing amount of money, and fuel duty falls as petrol and diesel sales decline. We are not here to argue whether that is fair. The point of this page is what you owe.

How much you pay, by registration date

EV road tax is not one number. It is set by when your car was first registered, because the VED system has changed shape several times and each car stays under the rules in force when it was new. There are four groups that matter, and the calculator above places your car in the right one automatically. Here is the logic behind it.

Registered before 1 April 2017. These cars predate the current flat-rate system and are taxed under the older graduated bands. A zero-emission car in this group sits in the lowest band, which costs £20 a year in 2026/27. This covers the earliest mainstream EVs, the first-generation Nissan Leaf and similar. If you run an older EV, this is the cheapest road tax going.

Registered between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2025. This is the large middle group: most used EVs on the market today. These cars move straight to the standard rate, which is £200 a year in 2026/27. There is no first-year rate to pay, because that was settled when the car was new and these cars were exempt at the time. Crucially, this group never pays the Expensive Car Supplement, regardless of what the car cost new, because the supplement only ever applied to EVs registered from 1 April 2025. More on that below, because it is a genuine quirk worth understanding.

Registered between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026. The first cohort to pay from new. These cars paid a £10 first-year rate in the 2025/26 year, then move to the £200 standard rate from year two. If the car cost more than £50,000 new, the Expensive Car Supplement applies from year two as well.

Registered on or after 1 April 2026. New EVs today. A £10 first-year rate, then £200 a year from the second year. The Expensive Car Supplement applies from year two if the list price was over £50,000. The £10 first-year rate is locked in until March 2030, so a new EV’s first year stays cheap for the rest of the decade.

The pattern across all four groups is the same once you strip out the supplement: £20 for the oldest cars, £200 for everything from 2017 onward, and a one-off £10 in the first year for anything bought new since April 2025.

The Expensive Car Supplement, and the £50,000 line

The Expensive Car Supplement is an extra annual charge on cars with a high list price. It is sometimes called the luxury car tax, though it now catches a lot of cars nobody would call luxurious. It is £440 a year in 2026/27, paid on top of the standard rate, for five years running from the second year of registration. For an affected EV that means £200 plus £440, so £640 a year in years two through six, then back to £200 once the supplement period ends.

What counts as expensive depends on fuel type. For petrol, diesel and hybrid cars, the threshold is a list price over £40,000. For fully electric cars, the threshold rose to £50,000 on 1 April 2026, up from £40,000. That is the change worth knowing about, because it applies retrospectively to EVs registered from 1 April 2025, and the government estimates it took around 475,000 cars out of the supplement. A mid-priced EV between £40,000 and £50,000 that would have been caught is now clear of it.

Two details trip people up. First, the threshold is the list price when the car was new, not what you paid. Buy a used EV that was £52,000 new, and the supplement follows the car. Second, the supplement runs by the car’s age, not by ownership, so if you buy a two-year-old EV that is liable, you inherit the remaining years of the charge.

Then there is the quirk we flagged earlier. The supplement for EVs only ever applied to cars registered on or after 1 April 2025, and it only starts in year two. The first cars in scope reached year two in April 2026, by which point the threshold was already £50,000. So in practice, electric cars registered from April 2025 are assessed against the £50,000 threshold rather than the old £40,000 one. EVs registered before April 2025 are outside the supplement entirely, even the expensive ones, because they were exempt during the years it would have applied. If you own a £60,000 EV registered in 2023, you pay the £200 standard rate and nothing more. That is not a loophole, it is how the timing fell.

One narrow exception is worth noting for completeness: per the Autumn Budget 2025, the retrospective £50,000 threshold does not apply if an EV registered between April 2025 and March 2026 was sold before April 2026, in which case the £40,000 threshold applies to the new owner for a single year. The calculator above assumes the standard case and does not model resale history, so if you bought a used EV in that narrow window it is worth checking your own reminder.

What’s coming: per-mile road pricing

The next change is on the horizon but not yet in force, so treat the figures as the current proposal rather than settled law. The government has announced a per-mile charge for electric and plug-in hybrid cars, referred to as eVED, with a target start of April 2028. A public consultation on how it would work closed in March 2026, and the detailed mechanics are still being finalised.

As proposed, electric cars would pay 3p per mile and plug-in hybrids 1.5p per mile, on top of the standard VED rate, not instead of it. On the government’s own estimate, an EV driver covering 8,000 miles a year would pay around £240 extra. The reasoning is the same as before: as more drivers go electric, fuel duty receipts fall, and the Treasury wants a replacement.

The part that has drawn the most attention is how mileage would be counted. The government has confirmed there would be no GPS tracking and no requirement to report where or when you drive. The current plan is to capture mileage through MOT testing centres, reading the odometer once a year. Whether that survives the consultation intact is not yet known.

For now, nothing about eVED affects your bill. If you are costing out an EV bought in 2026, the relevant numbers are the ones above. We will update this section as the scheme firms up, because a moving target like this is exactly where stale guidance gets things wrong.

How to pay, check, or take a car off the road

The most common problem we hear about is not the amount, it is the assumption. Owners who taxed an EV when it cost nothing assume it still does, miss the renewal, and find out when a penalty arrives. Driving or keeping an untaxed car on a public road is an offence, and the DVLA cross-checks number plates against its register automatically, so an out-of-date assumption is an expensive one.

Three practical points. First, the DVLA sends a renewal reminder by post or email before the tax is due, and you can tax the car online, by phone, or at a Post Office using the reference on the reminder or your logbook. Second, you can pay annually, every six months, or by monthly Direct Debit, which spreads a £200 bill into manageable amounts and renews automatically so you cannot forget. Third, you can check your car’s current tax status free on gov.uk with just the registration number, which is worth doing if you have an EV you taxed before April 2025 and are not sure it has been renewed since.

If the car is genuinely off the road, for example stored on a driveway and not used, you can declare a Statutory Off Road Notification, or SORN. A SORN is free and means no VED is due while the car stays off public roads. It is the correct route for a car you are not driving, not a way to avoid tax on one you are.

EV road tax versus petrol and diesel

Electric cars pay road tax now, but they are still the cheaper choice on this particular line, especially when the car is new. A new EV pays £10 in its first year. A new petrol or diesel pays a first-year rate based on emissions that runs from a few hundred pounds to £5,690 for the highest-emitting models. That gap is deliberate: the 2024 Autumn Budget widened it to keep a reason to buy electric at the showroom, and the £10 first-year EV rate is held until 2030.

From year two the standard rate is the same £200 whatever the fuel, so the running difference narrows once a car is past its first year. Where EVs keep an edge is the Expensive Car Supplement: the £50,000 threshold for electric cars is £10,000 higher than the £40,000 that still applies to petrol, diesel and hybrid, so a £45,000 car attracts the supplement if it burns fuel and avoids it if it does not.

Road tax is only one line in the cost of running a car, and for most EV owners it is a small one next to charging and, for company cars, benefit-in-kind tax. If you are choosing a car through work, the figure that dwarfs road tax is BIK, and our BIK and company car tax calculator gives you that number for any model. For the rest of the ownership picture, our running-costs guides cover charging and the comparison with petrol.

Frequently asked.