Can a Landlord Legally Resell Electricity for EV Charging?

A public utility is a regulated monopoly. In exchange for exclusive territory it accepts rate regulation, service obligations and oversight of how it bills. The definition of what counts as a public utility usually turns on selling a commodity — electricity, gas, water — to the public for compensation.A landlord who buys electricity at a commercial rate, meters it to residents and bills them more than it cost looks, from a statutory angle, uncomfortably like a small unregulated electricity seller. That is the trap. It is not a theoretical one: rules limiting a landlord to cost recovery on resold utilities exist in many states, sometimes in the utility code and sometimes in landlord-tenant law, and they typically carry disclosure and dispute requirements alongside the price limit.Cost recovery, by contrast, is generally uncontroversial. Passing through what you paid, with an auditable basis, is treated as allocation rather than sale in most frameworks. The line between the two is exactly where this question lives.

Beginning in the 2010s, states worked through a version of this question for public charging stations: if a business sells charging by the kilowatt-hour, is it a utility? The answer regulators and legislatures converged on, in state after state, was no — a charging provider buys electricity as a retail customer and sells a service, and treating every coffee shop with a charger as a regulated utility would have stopped the market before it started.Those determinations arrived in different forms. Some are statutes stating that an EV charging provider is not a public utility. Some are commission orders reaching the same conclusion. Some are narrower, addressing publicly accessible stations specifically, or attaching conditions about disclosure and pricing.The gap that matters to a property owner is that many of these were written with public charging in mind, not with a landlord billing their own residents. Those are different relationships — one is an arm's-length sale to the public, the other sits inside a lease with its own body of law about what a landlord may charge for. A carve-out that plainly covers a retail parking lot may or may not resolve the position of an apartment owner metering a resident's stall. That is a question for your own commission and, for the tenancy side of it, for a lawyer in your state.

If you want to stay on the safe side of this line without waiting for an answer, structure the charge as cost recovery and be able to show the arithmetic. That means a price traceable to your own energy rate, plus an explicit and documented allocation of the costs the charging actually caused — the demand contribution, the network subscription, maintenance and metering.Recovering those is not a markup. They are costs, they are attributable, and an auditable calculation showing how you derived the rate is a far stronger position than a round number nobody can explain. Where the position gets weak is a rate set by looking at what public stations charge, which is a market price rather than a cost, and which is very hard to characterise as recovery.The table below is not legal advice and cannot be — it is a map of where the arguments sit. Your state may treat any of these differently, and several states have addressed some of them explicitly.

Two calls resolve most of this. The first is to your state utility commission's consumer or general counsel line. Ask a specific question, not a general one: may the owner of a residential rental property meter and bill residents for electricity used at an EV charging stall, and is there a limit on the rate. Ask whether any EV-specific provision applies to a landlord-tenant relationship rather than only to public charging. Write down who you spoke to and when.The second is to your state weights-and-measures office, because if you are billing by the kilowatt-hour there is an entirely separate device question — whether the meter is permitted to be the basis of a commercial sale. That is covered in the submetering article in this cluster and it has caught out more properties than the resale question has.For the tenancy side — disclosure in the lease, dispute procedures, what happens on move-out — a landlord-tenant attorney in your state is the right call, and it is a short one. Almost every state has something to say about billing a residential tenant for a utility, and the requirements are usually procedural rather than prohibitive.

Where the building allows it, feeding the charger from the resident's own unit panel makes the resale question disappear. The resident buys the electricity from the utility on their own account at their own rate, and the owner is not in the transaction. No submeter, no billing process, no rate to justify, no commission to call about resale.It works in townhome and garden-style properties where panels sit near the parking, and it does not work in a podium garage where the panels are floors away. Capacity is the other constraint: a 40-amp continuous load on a unit panel that already runs electric heat may need load management, which is usually cheaper than the alternative anyway.Where it is not feasible, the next cleanest structure is documented cost recovery with the working shown, plus disclosure in the lease. It is defensible almost everywhere, it survives an annual meeting, and it does not depend on how your state resolved a question that was mostly written about public charging stations.

There is no federal tax credit to offset any of this. Section 30C terminated for property placed in service after June 30, 2026 under Public Law 119-21, and there is no federal replacement for charging equipment. A great deal of content on multifamily charging still assumes the credit runs to 2032, which is the date the statute carried before it was amended.The layer that still pays is state and utility programs, and on multifamily projects the utility make-ready programs are frequently the largest amount available. They also often require an application before work begins, so the sequence is: settle the billing structure, apply to the program, then build.