Electric Car Tax Explained: EV Road Tax Rates for 2026/27

For the first decade of the mainstream electric car, road tax was part of the sales pitch: nothing to pay, ever. That ended on 1 April 2025, when the exemption from Vehicle Excise Duty was withdrawn for every electric vehicle on the road, not just new ones.

What an EV pays now depends on when it was first registered and, for the newest and priciest cars, what it cost when new. Here's the full picture at the published 2026/27 rates, and what it means whether you're running an EV or shopping for a used one.

What changed on 1 April 2025

Until April 2025, zero-emission cars paid no VED at all: no first-year rate, no standard rate, nothing. The reform removed that exemption in one move, and the detail that surprised most owners is that nothing was grandfathered: an EV bought in 2018 partly for its free road tax moved onto the standard rate at its next renewal, exactly like one registered the day the rules changed.

Two smaller changes landed at the same time. The £10 discount for alternative-fuel vehicles (hybrids included) disappeared, and the older CO2 letter-band system gained a £20 minimum, ending the free ride for cars under 100 g/km registered before 2017. Between them, those changes removed every zero-pound tax band except the 40-year historic exemption.

What your electric car pays in 2026/27

The registration date on the V5C decides which rules apply:

These are the published rates for the 2026/27 tax year, and they're uprated most Aprils. For a specific car, our free car tax check reads the fuel type and first-registration date from the DVLA record and shows an indicative figure; gov.uk gives the definitive number when you actually tax the car.

The Expensive Car Supplement for EVs

The supplement is the sting for buyers of premium electric cars. It adds £440 a year to the standard rate in years two to six of a car's life when its list price when new crossed a threshold, and for EVs, that threshold depends on the registration date:

• Before 1 April 2025: never pays the supplement, whatever it cost new.
• 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026: the standard £40,000 threshold applies.
• From 1 April 2026: the threshold is £50,000.

A qualifying EV therefore pays £640 a year (£200 plus £440) for five years, up to £2,200 on top of the standard rate over the affected period. The list-price rules, the year-by-year mechanics and the nearly-new traps are all covered in our dedicated guide to the Expensive Car Supplement.

Hybrids: the discount that disappeared

Hybrids were never exempt, but they enjoyed a £10-a-year discount as alternative-fuel vehicles. That went in April 2025 too, so a post-2017 hybrid or plug-in hybrid now pays exactly the same £200 standard rate as a petrol car.

Hybrids do still tend to win in year one, because the first-year rate is CO2-based: a plug-in hybrid emitting 1–50 g/km pays £115 up front, where a petrol car at 130 g/km pays £455. From year two, the fuel types converge on the same flat rate. Hybrids first registered before April 2017 sit in the CO2 letter bands like any other car of their era, and the many low-emission examples that used to pay nothing are now on the £20 minimum.

Pre-2017 electric cars: the letter bands

Early EVs (the first Nissan Leafs, Renault Zoes and other pioneers) predate the 2017 system, so they're taxed under the 2001–2017 CO2 letter bands instead. Zero grams per kilometre puts them in band A, which cost nothing for two decades and now costs £20 a year.

That still makes a decade-old EV just about the cheapest car to tax in the country, short of a 40-year-old classic. The full letter-band table, and how all three band systems fit together, is in our guide to car tax bands.

Why electric cars are taxed now

The change was announced in late 2022 and framed as making the system fairer between drivers, but the arithmetic is the real driver. VED raises billions of pounds a year and fuel duty raises far more, and both erode as the fleet electrifies. Exempting EVs made sense as a bootstrap incentive while they were a rounding error in registrations; once they became a meaningful share of new cars, the exemption had a visible and growing cost.

So EVs moved into the mainstream system: a standard rate, a first-year rate and, for the priciest new cars, the supplement. The concessions that remain (the £10 first year and the higher £50,000 supplement threshold) are the last traces of the incentive era, and there's no guarantee they'll survive future Budgets unchanged.

Buying a used EV: the tax checks worth doing

For used-EV shoppers the rules cut both ways, and the first-registration date is the fact that decides everything:

• Budget £200 a year for any EV registered since April 2017. Adverts and reviews written before 2025 still say "free road tax", and they're simply out of date now.
• Pre-April-2025 EVs never pay the supplement. A £90,000 EV registered in 2024 pays £200 flat, while the same model first registered after April 2026 can cost £640 a year in years two to six. On expensive EVs, the registration date is worth real money.
• Check the date, not the plate. A registration year isn't always the first-registration date (imports and delayed registrations muddy it). The definitive date is on the V5C and the DVLA record. Our free check shows it for any registration.

Tax is one line in a bigger picture, of course; our used car buying checklist covers the rest of the pre-purchase homework.

The bottom line

Electric cars are now taxed like everything else, with a few softened edges: £200 a year for almost all of them, £10 in year one for new registrations, and £640 a year in years two to six for post-2026 EVs that listed above £50,000. None of this is a reason to avoid an EV. It's simply a running cost that didn't exist before April 2025, and one you can check in seconds before you commit to a car.