Every Electric Car Driver in London Could Pay TfL Up to £3,780 a Year

• Electric cars lost their free pass through the London Congestion Charge zone at the start of January 2026, and most EV drivers now pay £13.50 a day through TfL’s Auto Pay scheme, or the full £18 if they are not signed up.
• A daily commuter driving an electric car into the zone on Auto Pay now faces about £3,240 a year, and that figure rises again from March 2030 when the EV discount falls further, to roughly £3,780 a year.
• Plug-in hybrids get no discount at all and pay the full £18 a day, while missing a payment brings a £180 penalty charge notice, cut to £90 if settled within 14 days.

Free Electric Driving in Central London Is Over, and the Bill Keeps Climbing

For years, an electric car was the one sure way to drive through central London without paying a penny of the Congestion Charge. That changed on 25 December 2025, when Transport for London closed the Cleaner Vehicle Discount that had given electric cars a full 100 per cent exemption. From 2 January 2026, every electric car entering the zone has had to pay, and the only choice left to drivers is how much of the standard £18 daily charge they hand over.

What TfL Actually Charges Electric Cars Now

Sign up for Auto Pay, TfL’s automatic billing scheme, and an electric car now gets a 25 per cent discount, bringing the daily charge down to £13.50. Drive into the zone without Auto Pay registered against the car’s number plate and there is no discount at all: the full £18 applies, the same rate charged to a diesel SUV. Electric vans, HGVs and quadricycles are treated slightly differently, kept at a 50 per cent discount for now, which puts them at £9 a day. Plug-in hybrids get nothing. They were never covered by the old 100 per cent exemption in the same way, and under the current scheme they pay the full £18 regardless of how they are registered.

The discount is not permanent at 25 per cent either. TfL has already set out the next move: from 4 March 2030, the electric car discount drops again, to 12.5 per cent, taking the daily charge for an EV on Auto Pay to £15.75. Electric vans and HGVs follow the same pattern, falling from 50 per cent to 25 per cent on the same date. Unless TfL changes course between now and then, every electric car entering the Congestion Charge zone will be paying close to the full rate within a few years of losing its exemption altogether.

What That Actually Adds Up to Over a Year

The daily figures sound manageable until you multiply them by how often Londoners actually drive. A commuter who takes an electric car into the zone five days a week, roughly 240 charging days a year once holidays are allowed for, is paying about £3,240 a year on the current 25 per cent discount. Someone driving in two or three days a week, around 120 days a year, is paying closer to £1,620. Even a driver who only goes in for a weekly appointment or shopping trip, about 48 days a year, is still handing over roughly £648, money that electric car owners simply did not pay at all before January 2026.

Run the same daily commuter forward to 2030, once the discount falls to 12.5 per cent, and the annual bill climbs to around £3,780, on top of whatever that driver is already paying for insurance, servicing and home or public charging. None of this includes the standard Vehicle Excise Duty that electric cars have also started paying, or the Ultra Low Emission Zone, which is separate from the Congestion Charge and still has its own compliance rules. The Congestion Charge is simply one more bill that used to read zero and now does not.

Put another way, an electric car owner commuting into central London five days a week is now paying more in Congestion Charge alone over a year than many drivers spend on a full set of replacement tyres, and considerably more than the typical annual insurance premium hike quoted by comparison sites this year. For a household that bought an electric car partly on the promise of lower running costs, a bill of this size can undo a meaningful share of the savings made elsewhere on fuel and servicing. It is also a bill that arrives automatically rather than one a driver can shop around to reduce, which is part of why it has drawn so much attention from motoring groups in the months after the exemption ended.

The £180 Catch Drivers Keep Missing

The detail that trips up the most electric car owners is not the rate itself, it is the registration. The 25 per cent discount is not automatic for every electric car on the road. A driver has to sign in to, or set up, a TfL London Road User Charging account, add the car’s registration number under Manage Auto Pay, and attach a payment card or bank details before entering the zone. If the car is not showing as registered on Auto Pay at the moment it crosses into the zone, the system treats it exactly like a diesel car with no discount arrangement at all, and the full £18 is due.

Miss the charge entirely, whether by accident or a lapsed registration, and TfL issues a Penalty Charge Notice of £180, reduced to £90 if it is paid within 14 days. Each day a vehicle enters the zone unpaid can generate its own separate penalty, so a week of forgotten payments does not produce one fine, it can produce several. The Ultra Low Emission Zone carries the identical £180/£90 penalty structure and operates alongside the Congestion Charge rather than instead of it, which means an electric car that falls out of compliance with both schemes at once can rack up two separate fines for a single day’s driving.

What Electric Car Drivers Can Actually Do About It

There is no way to get back the 100 per cent exemption. That scheme ended on 25 December 2025 and TfL has given no indication it will return. What drivers can control is making sure they are not paying more than they have to. Checking that Auto Pay is correctly set up against the car’s current registration plate, especially after buying a used electric car or changing number plates, removes the risk of being charged the full £18 by mistake. Keeping the payment card or bank details on the account up to date avoids a failed Auto Pay charge turning into an unpaid Congestion Charge and then a Penalty Charge Notice.

For drivers who only need to enter the zone occasionally, it is worth working out the real annual cost before assuming an electric car is still the cheaper option for London driving. At under fifty trips a year the Congestion Charge adds a few hundred pounds. At daily commuter levels it adds more than three thousand, a cost that was not part of the sums most owners did when they bought their car. Anyone planning a regular commute into central London in an electric car from now on should budget for roughly £13.50 a day today and expect that figure to climb again before the decade is out.

This is not an isolated change. The Congestion Charge discount is one of several electric car incentives being wound back at the same time. Company car drivers choosing an electric model are seeing the Benefit in Kind tax rate rise from 4 per cent now to 5 per cent next year, then climbing again to 7 per cent and 9 per cent by 2029, still well below the 25 to 37 per cent typically applied to petrol and diesel company cars. A separate mileage based tax for electric and plug-in hybrid cars, charged at 3p and 1.5p a mile respectively, is set to start in April 2028, collected alongside the standard Vehicle Excise Duty bill rather than through the Congestion Charge system. None of these changes removes the underlying savings an electric car still offers on fuel and servicing, but together they mark a clear shift away from the blanket, no questions asked incentives that defined the first wave of electric car ownership in Britain.

For a driver deciding whether to switch to electric, or whether to keep commuting into London in one they already own, the message from TfL’s own numbers is plain. The free pass is gone, the 25 per cent discount is temporary, and the only way to avoid paying more than necessary right now is to make sure the Auto Pay registration is correct before the next trip into the zone.

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Sources:

• The Electric Car Scheme: London Congestion Charge for Electric Vehicles 2026, What EV Drivers Need to Know
• Carwow: Will the Autumn Budget 2026 Make Driving More Expensive?