EV Charging Payment Models for Strata: kWh Billing, Individual Connections or OC Cost Recovery

When a strata committee approves EV charging infrastructure, it makes one decision that's immediately visible — where the chargers go, what hardware is installed, who carries out the works. And it makes another decision that's less visible at the time but generates far more ongoing consequences: how the costs are handled.

The payment model determines who pays for electricity consumed, who pays for the infrastructure itself, and how both of those costs are tracked, recovered and documented. Get it right and the system runs itself. Get it wrong and the owners corporation ends up either subsidising residents' charging costs through the common electricity account, or managing billing disputes it was never equipped to handle.

Which Model Fits Your Building

Model	How it works	Best for	Scalability
Individual Lot Connection	Resident's own meter and circuit, billed to their own electricity account	Buildings handling individual resident requests one at a time	Low — each new connection needs its own cable run
Shared Infrastructure + kWh Billing	OC installs shared backbone; each session metered and billed per resident	Coordinated, whole-of-building rollouts	High — one platform, no per-connection rebuild
OC Infrastructure Cost Recovery	Capital cost recovered via surcharge, connection fee, special levy or capital works fund	Any building where the OC funds the shared backbone	Depends on mechanism chosen

The Two Cost Questions Every Building Needs to Resolve

Before comparing payment models, it helps to understand that there are actually two separate cost questions and they need to be answered independently.

The NSW Government's guidance on strata EV charging makes this explicit: there are two types of EV charging costs that need to be recovered in residential strata buildings. The first is electricity consumption — the power residents use when charging their vehicles. The second is infrastructure cost recovery — the capital cost of installing the shared electrical backbone, load management system, and other common property works the charging network relies on.

These two questions can have different answers. A building might recover infrastructure costs through a special levy while recovering electricity costs through per-kWh billing, or use a different mechanism for each. Both need to be addressed, and both need to be documented in the EV charging by-law before the system goes live.

Model 1: Individual Lot Connection

The simplest billing arrangement is one where the complexity is eliminated entirely: each resident who wants a charger gets their own dedicated meter and circuit, wired from the building's main switchboard directly to their parking bay.

In this model, the resident's EV charging draws on their own circuit and is billed directly to their own electricity account — the same one that covers their apartment. There's no shared billing, no OC involvement in electricity costs, and no platform required to track individual sessions.

This model works well in buildings where individual residents are making installation requests independently, rather than the OC installing a shared system. It's technically clean and administratively straightforward. The main cost driver is the length of the cable run from the switchboard to the parking bay — short in some buildings, significant in others, particularly where the electrical room sits far from the carpark.

The limitation is scalability. As more residents want chargers, each new installation needs its own cable run and circuit. At scale, this becomes more expensive per connection than shared infrastructure, and without load management software across the connections, simultaneous charging by multiple residents can create load problems the individual model isn't designed to handle.

Model 2: Shared Infrastructure with kWh Billing

The most widely recommended model for strata buildings planning a coordinated, building-wide EV charging system is shared infrastructure combined with per-kWh billing for individual usage.

Under this model, the owners corporation installs shared electrical infrastructure — backbone cabling, distribution board and a load management system as common property. Individual residents connect their chargers to this shared infrastructure. Each charging session is individually metered by the load management platform, and each resident is billed for exactly the electricity their vehicle consumed during that session.

The billing is handled automatically through the load management platform — the same software managing the distribution of available power across active charging sessions. No manual meter reading, no spreadsheets, and no administrative overhead for the strata manager beyond setting the per-kWh rate and managing the platform account.

The per-kWh rate is typically set by the owners corporation at a level that covers the building's electricity cost for charging, with a margin sufficient to recover ongoing platform and maintenance costs. The Breakfast Point Strata community, one of the earlier large-scale strata EV implementations in Sydney, documented that the OC can impose a surcharge on kWh billing to recover capital expenditure over time, turning a one-off infrastructure cost into a self-funding asset.

Model 3: OC Infrastructure Cost Recovery

Infrastructure cost recovery is a separate question from usage billing, but it's the one that catches committees off guard most often.

When the owners corporation funds the electrical backbone — cabling, distribution boards, load management hardware through the capital works fund or a special levy, it's making a capital investment on behalf of the building. That investment benefits all residents over time, including those who don't currently own EVs, because it increases the building's value and reduces the cost of future individual connections. The committee still needs a mechanism to recover that investment from the residents who actually use the infrastructure:

• Surcharge on kWh billing. The per-kWh rate includes a margin above the building's actual electricity cost. Over time, the accumulated margin offsets the capital expenditure — the cleanest model administratively and the most defensible to residents, because every dollar recovered is tied directly to usage.

• Connection fee. Each resident who wants to connect a charger pays a one-off fee before their charger is activated, recovering capital costs upfront from the residents who benefit directly.

• Special levy. The OC passes a special levy to fund the installation, with all owners contributing based on unit entitlement. Ongoing electricity costs are then recovered separately through per-kWh billing.

• Capital works fund allocation. If the building's 10-year capital works plan includes EV infrastructure — which NSW strata law now requires owners corporations to consider — the cost can be funded from the existing fund without a special levy.

The right approach depends on the building's financial position, the scale of the infrastructure investment, and the committee's preference for how costs are distributed between EV owners specifically and all owners generally.

What Must Go in the By-Law

Regardless of which payment model the committee chooses, the arrangement has no legal force until it's formalised in the EV charging by-law and that by-law is registered with NSW Land Registry Services. Multiple authoritative sources — NSW Government guidance, strata lawyers and independent strata management firms are consistent on what the by-law must cover:

• The billing arrangement itself. Name the model — per-kWh usage billing, connection fees, surcharges and the mechanism through which costs are calculated and invoiced.

• Sub-metering requirements. If chargers draw from common property circuits, accurate sub-metering ensures residents pay for their own consumption and the OC doesn't absorb individual usage into the common electricity account.

• Cost recovery provisions. Specify how infrastructure capital costs are recovered, from whom, and on what timeline.

• Maintenance responsibilities. The standard approach: each resident maintains their own charger, the OC maintains the shared backbone, load management system and distribution boards. Make this explicit.

• Load management compatibility. The by-law can require any individually installed charger to be compatible with the building's load management system, preventing ad-hoc installations that undermine the shared infrastructure.

NSW Government templates for EV charging by-laws and motions are publicly available and provide a starting point for buildings working through this process with a strata lawyer.