EV Charger Installation Cost in Melbourne (2026 Guide)

A home charger installation is three things: the charger itself, a dedicated circuit from the switchboard to wherever the car parks, and the labour and compliance work to connect it safely. The charger is the part people compare online. The circuit is the part that makes two quotes on the same street differ by $600.

Every home charger needs its own dedicated circuit with appropriate protection. It cannot share a circuit with anything else, and it cannot run off a standard outlet as a permanent arrangement. That circuit has to physically get from the board to the parking position, and how far that is, and what it has to pass through on the way, is the single largest variable in the price.

A single-phase 7kW charger installed runs $1,200 to $2,200 and suits the large majority of Melbourne homes. At 7.4kW you add roughly 40 to 50 kilometres of range per hour, so an overnight charge comfortably covers typical daily driving several times over. For a household that drives 40 to 60 kilometres a day, the car is full again in a bit over an hour.

A three-phase 22kW capable installation runs $2,500 to $3,000 or more. It is worth considering if the property already has three phase supply, if there are two electric vehicles sharing one charger, or if the driving pattern involves long distances with short windows to recharge. It is not worth paying to bring three phase into a house solely to charge one car faster than you need to, and many vehicles cannot accept 22kW AC anyway.

This is the line item that surprises people, and it is the reason we look at the board before quoting rather than after. If the switchboard has no spare capacity, no space for the new protective device, or is an older board without RCD protection, it has to be dealt with before a charger circuit can go in. That adds $800 to $2,500 depending on the scope.

It is not wasted money. A board that can take a charger can generally also take the next thing, whether that is a heat pump, an induction cooktop or a battery inverter. Doing it once, sized for what you expect to add, is materially cheaper than modifying the same board three times. That is the most common avoidable cost we see in this category.

If you want to predict roughly where in the range your quote will land before anyone visits, these are the things to look at.

With feed-in tariffs where they are, exported solar is worth very little, so charging the car from your own generation is one of the better uses of a rooftop array. A number of chargers can do this automatically, following available surplus and modulating the charge rate to match.

Whether that feature is worth paying for depends on your driving pattern. If the car is home during the day, solar diversion is genuinely valuable. If the car leaves at 7am and returns at 6pm every weekday, it will spend most of its charging hours on grid power regardless of what the charger can do, and a simpler unit on a timer may serve you just as well.

A permanently connected EV charger is prescribed electrical work in Victoria. It must be installed by a licensed electrician and a Registered Electrical Contractor must issue a Certificate of Electrical Safety. If a quote does not mention that certificate, ask why.

Your distributor may also need to be notified of the new load, and in some cases will have requirements about load management. That is normal and it is the installer job to handle it rather than yours. Pivot Trade Services holds REC 37223 and SAA accreditation S3962281, and every installation carries a 12 month workmanship guarantee on top of the manufacturer warranty on the charger.

Position drives cost more than any other decision you make, so it is worth thinking about before you get quotes rather than after. The cheapest position is on a wall close to the switchboard, on the same side of the building, with a clear path for the cable.

From there the cost climbs in predictable steps. Going around the building adds cable. Going through a roof space or under a floor adds labour. Crossing a driveway to a detached garage adds a trench or a conduit run and can double the cable cost on its own. A pedestal in the middle of an open driveway adds a base, a conduit and the labour to install both.

The other consideration is which side the car charges from and how it parks. A charger on the wrong side of the garage means the cable stretched across the bonnet every night, which people tolerate for about a fortnight. Walk the parking position with the electrician and work out where the cable actually needs to reach.

The two reliable savings are position and planning. Choosing a charger location close to the board, even if it is slightly less convenient than the ideal spot, is usually worth several hundred dollars. And telling the electrician what else you plan to add over the next few years means the board gets designed once rather than modified repeatedly.

Load management is the other one worth knowing about. Where switchboard or supply capacity is tight, a charger that can throttle its output to suit what is available is often considerably cheaper than upgrading the supply to accommodate full output you would rarely use. For a car that sits at home for ten hours overnight, a slightly slower charge rate makes no practical difference.

What is not worth saving on is the circuit itself. Undersized cable, shared circuits and improvised arrangements are how charging installations become problems, and a charger draws a sustained high load for hours at a time, which is precisely the condition that finds weaknesses in an installation.