The 30C commercial charger credit ended June 30, 2026. It's now August, and the tax angle every property owner is hearing 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 30 cents on every eligible dollar, 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.
⚠️ 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 a state-grant tax change that changes 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. Multiple CPA and tax-advisory firms (BDO, Thomson Reuters, Wilson Lewis, and others) report the IRS has issued implementing guidance, cited as Notice 2026-11, confirming there's no placed-in-service deadline tied to the old phase-down schedule; confirm the exact notice number against irs.gov/irb before relying on it for a specific filing.
EV charging equipment (the chargers themselves plus the installation labor and electrical work directly attributable to them) is treated as 5-year MACRS property under prevailing practitioner convention; there's no IRS-assigned asset class specific to EV chargers, so this is the consensus position tax advisors use rather than a bright-line rule in the regulations. Under normal depreciation rules, you'd spread that cost over five years. Under 100% bonus depreciation, you deduct the entire eligible cost in the year the equipment goes into service.
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 it's worth roughly 30% less than the credit it replaced, 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 nothing to a tax-exempt or governmental entity. 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, all of it is likely straightforward 5-year property already, and a cost segregation study won't reclassify much. 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.
- 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.
The basis-reduction rule changed, and it favors stacking with state grants today
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 have run DC fast charging grants covering up to 100% of project cost capped at $100,000 per port, and Level 2 rebates in active states commonly run $500 to $5,000 per port. 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 the charging equipment is already straightforward 5-year property on its own
- 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: August 5, 2026, against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's Section 168(k) and Section 179 provisions and 2026 Section 179 figures (Revenue Procedure 2025-32) as summarized by BDO, Thomson Reuters, AICPA, and other CPA-firm analyses; IRS Notice 2026-11 as reported by the same firms; industry cost-segregation guidance from Capstan Tax and Wipfli on EV charging depreciation; and analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act's amendment to Internal Revenue Code Section 118 from Baker Tilly and Weaver. Direct IRS.gov access was unavailable at verification time; confirm notice numbers and dollar figures against irs.gov before relying on them for a specific filing. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.