The 30C commercial charger credit ended June 30, 2026. The tax angle commercial site owners hear about instead is bonus depreciation and cost segregation. Before you build a project budget around it, get one distinction straight: a tax credit and a tax deduction are not worth the same thing. 30C cut your tax bill by up to 30 cents on every eligible dollar (6 cents without prevailing wage and apprenticeship compliance), no matter your tax bracket. Depreciation only reduces your taxable income, so it's worth your marginal tax rate, not a dollar-for-dollar reduction. That difference matters more than any of the mechanics below. A separate tax question for employers is whether free workplace charging is a taxable benefit.
⚠️ Note: The federal 30C charger tax credit ended June 30, 2026. No federal EV charger tax credit is available for equipment placed in service after that date. What follows describes the current depreciation rules, which apply regardless of 30C's status, plus how state grants are taxed, which affects the math on stacking incentives. For the funding-source side (state grants, utility make-ready), see State EV Charging Grant Programs and Stacking Incentives.
What's actually available: 100% bonus depreciation
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed July 4, 2025, permanently restored 100% bonus depreciation under Internal Revenue Code Section 168(k). It applies to qualifying property both acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025, with no scheduled phase-down. IRS Notice 2026-11, the interim guidance on the OBBBA changes, confirms the rule: the old requirement that property be placed in service before January 1, 2027 is gone, and property under a written binding contract entered into on or before January 19, 2025 does not count as acquired after that date. Check the notice and any later proposed regulations with your tax advisor before relying on them for a specific filing.
Eligible components of an EV charging project may qualify for bonus depreciation, but recovery period and eligibility are component- and fact-specific: classification differs for equipment, building electrical systems, and land improvements, and there's no IRS-assigned asset class specific to EV chargers. Don't assume the charger, switchgear, trenching, paving, and building electrical work all share a five-year class; obtain a defensible tax classification or cost-segregation analysis before counting the whole project as an immediate write-off. For the components that do qualify, 100% bonus depreciation means you deduct the eligible cost in the year the equipment goes into service instead of spreading it over its recovery period.
What this doesn't require, compared to 30C: no eligible-census-tract check, no prevailing wage and apprenticeship documentation, no per-port cap, and no application. It's claimed on your depreciation schedule (Form 4562) for the tax year the equipment is placed in service.
What it does require: the equipment has to be used in a trade or business (a rental property, a hotel, a fleet depot, an office you operate), not personal use, and the deduction is limited by the passive activity loss rules if you're a passive investor rather than materially participating in the business. Talk to your CPA about how those limits apply to your ownership structure before you count on the full deduction in year one.
Why a deduction isn't a substitute for a credit
Run the comparison on the same project to see why this matters. Take a $250,000 commercial Level 2 installation across 20 ports, equipment and installation only, no state grant.
Under the old 30C credit (30% rate, prevailing wage and apprenticeship compliant, eligible census tract): a $75,000 credit, subtracted directly from the tax you owe.
Under 100% bonus depreciation today: the full $250,000 is deductible in year one, but that only reduces your taxable income by $250,000. What that's worth depends on your tax rate. At a 21% corporate rate, it's roughly $52,500 in reduced tax liability. A pass-through owner in a higher individual bracket does better; one with limited taxable income to offset does worse, and gets less benefit until later years if the loss carries forward.
The deduction is real money, and depreciation you'd have eventually claimed anyway is now front-loaded into year one instead of spread over five years, which has cash-flow value on its own. But on this example the deduction alone is worth roughly 30% less than the credit alone (the old path also let you depreciate the remaining basis, so the real gap was wider), and unlike a credit, its value moves with your tax bracket. Don't let a vendor or contractor describe bonus depreciation as "the new 30C." It isn't.
This entire chapter also only applies if you owe federal income tax in the first place. Churches, nonprofits, schools, transit agencies, and other tax-exempt or governmental owners paid no federal income tax before 30C either, which is why 30C offered them elective pay (Treasury paid the credit amount directly, see Federal EV Charging Funding). Bonus depreciation and Section 179 are both income-tax deductions with no direct-pay equivalent, so they're worth little or nothing to a tax-exempt or governmental entity, other than against unrelated business income. That group has no federal replacement for 30C and should focus entirely on state and utility programs.
Cost segregation: worth it mainly for larger, mixed-scope projects
If your project is only charging equipment, electrical conduit, and a panel upgrade, a full cost segregation study may not have much to reclassify, but the classification question doesn't disappear: equipment, building electrical systems, and land improvements can carry different recovery periods even in a small scope, so you still want a defensible classification from your tax advisor. Cost segregation earns its fee when EV charging is part of a bigger capital project: new construction, a major renovation, or a charging build-out bundled with parking lot resurfacing, lighting, canopy structures, or other site work that a standard depreciation schedule would otherwise lump into 39-year real property.
A cost segregation study breaks that larger project into its components and assigns each one the shortest depreciation life the tax code allows: land improvements (paving, curbing, some site electrical) typically fall into 15-year property, while equipment and fixtures land in 5- or 7-year property. With 100% bonus depreciation in place, everything the study reclassifies into a 20-year-or-shorter life becomes eligible for the same immediate write-off, instead of sitting on a 39-year schedule.
What it costs and who it's for: a cost segregation study on a commercial building typically runs several thousand to the low tens of thousands of dollars, scaling with project size and complexity, and firms that specialize in it (Capstan Tax and similar cost-segregation practices are active in the EV charging space) generally price against the tax savings they expect to generate. It's worth commissioning when EV charging is one line item in a larger capital project, not when the charging installation is the entire project.
Section 179: usually the smaller lever here, but useful to know
Section 179 lets you elect to expense equipment immediately, similar to bonus depreciation, but with real differences. For tax years beginning in 2026, the Section 179 limit is $2,560,000, phasing out dollar for dollar once total qualifying purchases exceed $4,090,000 in a year (fully phased out at $6,650,000), per the IRS's 2026 inflation adjustments in Revenue Procedure 2025-32.
Two differences matter for an EV charging project:
- Section 179 can't create a loss. The deduction is capped at your business's taxable income for the year (with a carryforward for the disallowed amount). Bonus depreciation has no such limit and can push a business into a net operating loss, though individual owners still face the excess business loss limit.
- Section 179 lets you pick and choose asset by asset. If you want to expense the chargers now but keep depreciating something else on its normal schedule, Section 179 gives you that flexibility in a way that's more cumbersome under bonus depreciation elections.
For most standalone EV charging projects, the dollar limits on Section 179 aren't the binding constraint (a $250,000 or even $2 million project fits comfortably), so bonus depreciation, which is automatic unless you elect out, usually does the same job with less paperwork. Section 179 becomes the more relevant tool when a business is already near its taxable income limit for the year, or wants to fine-tune which specific assets get expensed immediately versus depreciated normally.
Since 2017, a state grant is usually taxable income, not a basis reduction
Under the old 30C rules, a tax-exempt state grant reduced the cost basis you used to calculate the credit, shrinking your 30C dollar for dollar against the grant received (see Stacking Incentives for that math). Property owners planning around today's state vouchers should know the underlying tax treatment of those grants changed years ago, and it changes how this stacks.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act narrowed Internal Revenue Code Section 118, which used to let a corporation exclude government grants from taxable income as a "contribution to capital." For contributions received after December 22, 2017, that exclusion no longer covers grants from a governmental entity. Section 118 by its own terms only ever applied to corporations, so if your project sits in a pass-through LLC or partnership (the more common ownership structure for commercial charging), this specific statute was never the one governing your grant; pass-through grants were already taxed under general income rules before this change. But the practical result lands in the same place for most owners regardless of entity type: state and local EV charging grants a for-profit business receives today typically count as ordinary taxable income when you get them, not a tax-free capital contribution.
That has a real, if imperfect, upside: when a grant is taxable income rather than an excluded contribution, there's no requirement to reduce your depreciable basis by the grant amount. You pay tax on the grant when you receive it, but you keep your full basis in the equipment for bonus depreciation purposes. A $50,000 CALeVIP or NYSERDA grant on a $200,000 project no longer quietly shrinks your write-off the way it used to shrink a 30C credit; it just becomes income you report separately. Whether a specific state program's payment is structured as taxable income or something else varies by program and by your entity type (the analysis is different for a nonprofit, a government elective-pay filer, or a pass-through than for a C-corp), so confirm the treatment of your specific grant with a tax professional before you build a project pro forma around it. Wipfli and other firms working in this space flag the same basis-reduction question as the first thing to check when a project stacks a state grant with depreciation.
Where state vouchers now carry more of the load
With no federal credit in the mix, the incentive side of a project rests more heavily on whatever your state and utility offer. State EV Charging Grant Programs covers the landscape in detail; the short version is that programs like California's CALeVIP are offering DC fast charging grants covering up to 100% of approved project cost, in its October 7, 2026 to January 14, 2027 window capped at $55,000 per port for chargers guaranteeing 150 to 274.99 kW and $100,000 per port at 275 kW and above, and in the window after it (February 24 to May 27, 2027, with full details still to be released), capped at $55,000 per port at any qualifying output. Sites must be publicly available and ready to build. Level 2 rebate amounts vary widely by state and utility, so check the current figure for your site. None of that replaces what 30C did at the federal level, but paired with 100% bonus depreciation on whatever you spend out of pocket, a well-sequenced project in an active state can still get meaningfully cheaper than the sticker price. Sequence the state application before you install; most of these programs require pre-approval and won't reimburse a completed project.
Before you commit: what to confirm with a tax professional
- Whether your ownership structure (C-corp, pass-through, REIT, tax-exempt entity) changes how bonus depreciation and Section 179 apply to your specific return
- Whether passive activity loss rules limit how much of the deduction you can use in year one
- Whether the state grant or rebate you're counting on is taxable income to you or handled some other way, and what that means for your depreciable basis
- Whether a cost segregation study is worth commissioning given your project's actual scope, or whether a simpler component-level classification from your CPA is defensible for what you're installing
- Current Form 4562 instructions and any state conformity gap, since some states don't fully conform to federal bonus depreciation and add back part of the deduction on the state return
None of this is a substitute for what 30C did. It's the next-best set of levers, and for most commercial charging projects going forward, it's what's actually available.
Last factually verified: 2026-10-20. Re-checked today: the 30C termination date, credit rates, and elective pay (IRS 30C page and Form 8911 instructions); the status of IRS Notice 2026-11 and the 100% bonus depreciation rule (CPA-firm summaries from BDO, EY, PwC, and others; the IRS notice PDF could not be read, and no proposed regulations had been published as of those summaries); the 2026 Section 179 figures (Revenue Procedure 2025-32, via CPA-firm summaries because the IRS document could not be opened, so check them against irs.gov before relying on them for a specific filing); and the CALeVIP Fast Charge California windows and per-port caps (calevip.org). Not refreshed today: the Section 118 and state-grant tax treatment, the cost-segregation cost range, and the passive-loss and state-conformity cautions, which rest on the 2026-10-03 check against Baker Tilly, Weaver, Capstan Tax, and Wipfli. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.
Corrections (October 20, 2026): added the exact CALeVIP application window dates (October 7, 2026 to January 14, 2027, then February 24 to May 27, 2027). No other figures in this article changed.