Who pays for the electricity in a shared condo garage?

Which panel the circuit originates from decides the conduit route, and the conduit route is most of the cost. That is why this is not an administrative detail to settle afterwards.

The energy lands on your own bill, nobody has to measure anything, nobody has to invoice you, and there is nothing left for the association to argue about later.

It fails on geometry. Your panel is inside your unit and your space sits in a structure below or beside it, often several floors away, and the conduit has to get there through common elements — so the association is approving a route through its property even though the circuit is entirely yours. Fire-rated assemblies, finished ceilings in other people's units and post-tensioned decks all turn a simple run into a specialist one.

It also fails on capacity in older buildings. A unit panel sized for a 1980s condominium may have no spare breaker spaces and a service a load calculation says is already committed. A load-management device that sheds the charger when the unit draws hard is the usual answer, and it is far cheaper than any attempt to upsize a unit's service in a multifamily building.

Where the route does exist, this arrangement is worth paying extra to achieve. Every dollar spent making the energy land on your own meter is a dollar spent on never having this conversation again.

A submeter is cheap hardware and ongoing human work. A networked charger is more expensive hardware and almost no human work.

The submeter route puts a meter on the charger circuit and someone reads it. Agree in writing who reads it, how often, what rate you are billed at, and what happens if you dispute a reading. Raise the rate question with the association's counsel: whether an association may bill for electricity, and whether it may bill above its own cost, is regulated at state level and is not uniform. The safe posture in most places is to rebill at actual cost with no margin.

The networked route lets the charger meter and bill you directly, which removes the association from the money entirely — an underrated benefit, because the association's real objection is usually the administration rather than the dollars. The trade is an ongoing per-port subscription priced by the network operator, which continues for as long as the charger is in service. Ask what it costs per port per year, what happens to the equipment if you stop paying it, and whether you or the association holds the account.

Whichever you pick, put the arrangement in the same written agreement that covers maintenance, insurance and removal. A metering arrangement that lives only in a board meeting's minutes does not survive a change of property manager.

The reason is not principle, it is arithmetic that becomes visible once there is more than one EV in the building.

Charging is roughly a third of a kilowatt-hour per mile for most EVs, so a resident driving a thousand miles a month puts about 330 kilowatt-hours through a garage circuit. What that costs depends entirely on the association's rate, and residential rates across the United States differ by more than a factor of two, so the only honest way to present it is as a grid.

Five EVs at $80 a month is $400, and that is the meeting where the arrangement gets reversed — usually badly, and sometimes retroactively.

So if your association offers to absorb the cost, the sophisticated response is to decline it and propose a submeter. An arrangement that survives is worth more than one that is free until it is not, and being the resident who proposed paying their own way is worth a great deal the next time you need something from the board.

The one place worth spending more than the minimum is conduit. If the association is opening a deck or trenching a lot at all, running spare conduit for the eventual layout during that excavation costs a fraction of coming back to do it again. This is the single most reliable way an association saves money on charging, and it has nothing to do with the chargers.