The taxes a charging site pays that aren't income tax

Ask what a charging site pays in tax and the answer that comes back is usually about income tax — depreciation, credits, pass-through treatment. But an operating site pays four other tax families first, none of which care whether the site is profitable. They tax the build, the equipment, the kilowatt-hour, and the revenue line — and across the 49 states + DC the model covers, which ones apply and at what rate is one of the larger sources of state-to-state spread.

This post is the general map. The wave-8 field notes walk five specific states through the same lines.

1. Sales tax on the build — a day-one cost, and a moving base#

Charging hardware is taxable equipment in most states, so year zero starts with sales tax on the purchase. At the model's default calibration — 9.375% on the hardware line — an eight-stall build pays about $47,000 of sales tax before the site exists.

The subtler variable is the base. In most states, installation labor is a nontaxable service, so only the hardware half of the construction bill is taxed. A handful of states pull labor into the base too: the model carries this as a share input, set to 1 for Washington (a construction-labor exemption there expired mid-2025) and Ohio (which classes chargers as business fixtures), and 0.5 for Mississippi's contractor's tax. With install running at or above hardware cost in the cost stack, taxing labor roughly doubles the taxed base — same headline rate, very different check.

2. Business personal property tax — the annual bill on the equipment#

Most states levy an annual property tax on business equipment — the chargers, cabinets, and switchgear — assessed on a value that declines with a published depreciation schedule. It is the least visible line in the family because it arrives as a county bill, not a utility charge, and it varies more than any other:

• Providence, Rhode Island carries the heaviest rate in the modeled set — about 5.3% of assessed value per year.
• New York exempts business personal property outright, and Indiana zeroes it by statute; a site there pays nothing on this line.

On a seven-figure equipment base, that spread alone is tens of thousands of dollars a year between jurisdictions — before a single kWh moves. Each state guide lists the locality assumptions the model applies.

3. Per-kWh excise — the fuel-tax replacement#

A growing list of states tax public charging by the kilowatt-hour, the EV analogue of the gas tax. Filed rates in the modeled set include Pennsylvania at 1.72¢/kWh, Georgia at 2.8¢, and a 3¢ cluster — Oklahoma, Montana, Wisconsin, Nebraska — with Wyoming down at 0.715¢. Some start immediately; Georgia's applies from the model's second year and Nebraska's from its third, matching the statutes' effective dates.

The mechanics matter more than the size suggests: the excise is levied on dispensed kWh — the sale — while energy cost runs on purchased kWh, 13.6% higher at the default loss factor. Three cents on a million-kWh year is $30,000 off the margin, indexed to volume and indifferent to profitability.

4. Percent-of-revenue taxes — the widest spread in the family#

A few states skip the meter and tax the revenue line directly. The modeled examples span a factor of twenty:

• Washington's B&O tax takes about half a percent of gross charging revenue (stepping from 0.471% to 0.5% in January 2027).
• Hawaii's general excise tax takes 4.5%.
• Utah's charging tax, read as absorbed into the retail price the way the model carries it, takes about 11.1% of gross revenue — at a $0.45 retail price, the equivalent of roughly 5¢/kWh, larger than any per-kWh excise in the set.

Because these bite revenue rather than energy, they scale with price increases too — raising the retail price raises the tax with it.

Where the boundary sits#

What this family excludes is owner-level income tax: federal tax, pass-through treatment, and the depreciation and credit mechanics that depend on an owner's individual situation. The model computes to a pre-income-tax boundary and says so — with one refinement: states that levy income-style taxes on the entity itself (New Hampshire's business profits tax is the clean example) are modeled on their own line, because they arrive regardless of the owner's return.

The practical use of the map is comparative. Two sites with identical tariffs and identical traffic can differ by tens of thousands of dollars a year purely on lines two through four — and each line is public record, filed and dated, which is why the model carries them per state instead of folding them into a single overhead percentage. The returns pillar shows where the after-tax-stack margin lands from there.