Should EV charging be reported in Scope 2 or Scope 3?
Emissions from electricity used to charge company-owned and leased electric vehicles (EVs) are Scope 2, even when charged at public or third-party charge points.
Many companies assume EV charging costs should sit in Scope 3, especially when the charger isn't owned by the company or the vehicle charges at a public network. You may not collect kWh consumption data for these vehicles and therefore only have an "EV Charging" line item on your general ledger, but this doesn't mean the emissions are Scope 3. This is incorrect for the majority of fleet vehicles. The GHG Protocol determines scope based on which entity controls the vehicle and purchases the electricity for that vehicle — not who owns the charger.
Here's how to classify emissions from EVs used by your company:
- Company-owned or leased EVs (under your operational or financial control) → Scope 2, regardless of where charging occurs (depot, employee's home, public network)
- Employee-owned EVs used for business travel, or commuting → Scope 3, Category 6 (Business travel) or Category 7 (Employee commuting)
- Electric taxis or rideshare → Scope 3, Category 6 (Business travel)
- Leased vehicles not consolidated into your operational boundary (rare — most operating/finance leases are treated as controlled assets) → Scope 3, Category 8 (Upstream leased assets)
Company-owned or leased vehicles
If you have charging on-site at your company facilities, you should already be accounting for the electricity consumed as part of your usual data collection. Most of the time, this electricity will be gathered from your own electricity bills. However, many EVs will be charged at other facilities where you don't have direct visibility over the consumption.
| Charging scenario | Solution |
| EVs are charged in a shared carpark / garage in your office building |
Use sub-metered or dedicated charger data (kWh) from the building's EV charging system where available. If only a shared building electricity bill exists, request kWh consumption data from the landlord and allocate based on the number of company EVs and average charging sessions, and treat as an estimate. |
| Public charging infrastructure | Collect $ spend per charging session from expense claims or fleet cards, convert to estimated kWh using the public network's published average price per kWh. |
| Private charging points (e.g. Tesla Supercharger network) | Pull session-level kWh data directly from the provider's account/app or invoice where available (most private networks report usage in kWh, not just spend). |
| Employee homes | Use the employee's home charger data if metered separately, or reimbursement claims (kWh or $ spend) submitted through an expense process. Where only $ spend is available, convert to estimated kWh using a regional average home electricity price. |
Once the kWh data has been extracted or estimated, you can then apply an appropriate electricity emission factor to calculate emissions (location- or market-based factors as aligned with your reporting). Trace can support with this.
If you have additional electric vehicle charging consumption to include on Trace, please contact support@our-trace.com so we can help you add this in the appropriate place.
Example: converting charging spend to kWh consumption
Your fleet EVs charge on a public network. You have $340 in charging spend for the quarter from expense claims, no kWh data. Your network on average charges $0.55/kWh. To estimate the kWh consumption, divide total spend by the average price per kWh for that network.
$340 ÷ $0.55/kWh ≈ 618 kWh
For any public reporting, document the method. Record the total spend, the average $/kWh assumption used and its source, and a note that this is an estimate due to lack of metered data.
AASB S2 Considerations
If EV charging is estimated from spend data rather than metered kWh, this is a source of measurement uncertainty. Under AASB S2 paragraphs 77–81, you should disclose the estimation approach and its uncertainty where this population is material to your Scope 2 inventory.