Free tool · United Kingdom

EV mileage tax calculator

From April 2028, electric cars pay 3p for every mile driven. This works out what that costs on your mileage, adds the road tax you already pay, and sets the total against the fuel duty a petrol driver hands over today.

A UK charge. Nothing here is payable before April 2028 — the point is what it will cost you then.

Miles you drive a yearmiles

What do you drive?

Battery electric3p/milePlug-in hybrid1.5p/mile

It is a brand-new car, in its first yearFirst-year VED for a new EV is £10 rather than the standard rate.List price was over £50,000The expensive car supplement runs from the second year to the sixth.

Petrol car to compare againstmpgThe fuel economy of the petrol car you would otherwise be driving. 45 mpg is a fair mid-size average.

Your annual bill from 2028

£440.00

Mileage charge: £240.00
Road tax (VED): £200.00
Expensive car supplement: Not known
All in, per mile: 5.5p

An estimate in sterling, for the United Kingdom.

What a petrol driver pays now

£513.53

Fuel duty plus the VAT charged on it, on 808.2 litres a year — 6.42p a mile.

Still £273.53 a year less than the fuel duty on a petrol car doing the same mileage.

The rates this uses

1 of these has not been re-checked against the source for the current tax year. It is marked below. Confirm it before you rely on the figure.

eVED, battery electricSource3p per mileChecked 2026-08-15
VED, standard rateSource£200 per yearChecked 2026-08-15
Fuel duty, petrol and dieselSource52.95p per litreUnverified
VAT applied on top of fuel dutySource20%Checked 2026-08-15

What this assumes

The mileage charge does not begin until April 2028. Everything here is what the announced rates would cost you, not a bill you owe now.
The petrol comparison covers fuel duty and the VAT charged on that duty only. Both an EV and a petrol car pay road tax, so putting it on one side of the comparison would flatter the other.
The expensive car supplement runs from the second licence to the sixth, which is why ticking "brand-new car" removes it.
Mileage is assumed to be self-reported or read at the annual MOT. The mechanism has not been finalised.
This is an estimate built on announced rates. Rates announced four years ahead have been changed before.

How this is worked out

mileage charge = annual miles × rate for your vehicle type
annual bill    = mileage charge + VED + any supplement
petrol duty    = (miles ÷ mpg × 4.546 litres) × duty × 1.2

The third line is the one worth sitting with. A petrol driver has been paying tax per mile all along — it is just collected at the pump rather than billed, so nobody sees the annual figure. Set the two side by side and the mileage charge stops looking like a new tax and starts looking like the same tax, moved.

That is also why the comparison excludes road tax on both sides. Every car pays it. Adding it only to the electric column would be arithmetic in service of an argument.

What is still not settled

How mileage gets measured is the open question. A self-reported figure invites under-reporting; an odometer reading at the MOT cannot tell a mile driven in the UK from one driven abroad. Neither has been legislated.

For the wider running-cost picture, see EV versus petrol, and for what it costs to fill up in the first place, the charging cost calculator.

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