EV Charger Installation for Bay Area Homes
Bellows has been doing electrical work in the Bay Area since 1984, and our C-10 licensed electricians install Level 2 home chargers across Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Marin and Sonoma counties. What follows is what the job actually involves: what it costs, which rebate you can claim, what your city charges for the permit, and when a charger needs a panel upgrade and when it does not.
What a Home Charger Installation Costs
We do not publish an install price, and there is a reason for that. The cost of running a 240 volt circuit depends on how far the charger sits from the panel, whether the run goes through a finished wall or across an attic, whether the panel has room for another breaker, and what your city charges to permit it. Two houses on the same street can come out a thousand dollars apart.
What we can give you is the industry range. Qmerit, the largest EV charger installation network in North America, put a residential Level 2 install at $749 to $2,500 in its 2026 installation data, with an average of $1,700. Where a panel upgrade is needed, it adds $1,500 to $3,000 on top. Permitting alone it puts at $50 to $800, averaging about $310, which lines up with what our own cities charge.
Those are industry figures, not a Bellows quote, and Qmerit does not publish how many jobs sit behind them. Use them to set a budget, not an expectation. We price your job after a technician has looked at your panel, measured the run and confirmed what your city wants to see.
The Panel Question, Which Decides Your Budget
A 48 amp charger is a 60 amp circuit. That is not a rounding error. The electrical code treats EV charging as a continuous load, so the breaker and the conductors have to be sized at no less than 125 percent of the maximum draw. Put a 48 amp charger on a house with a 100 amp service, an electric range and air conditioning, and the load calculation often will not close.
The old answer to that was to upgrade the service. The current answer is usually not to. Chargers with adjustable amperage let the circuit be set to what your panel can carry. Chargers with load management go further and watch the rest of the house, backing the charger off when the dryer and the oven are both running. A 32 amp charger delivers about 7.7 kilowatts, which is roughly 20 to 30 miles of range an hour for most cars and closer to 15 for a full size electric truck. For an ordinary day of driving that refills the car several times over while you sleep.
There is a tell in all of this. Every charger on PG&E’s rebate eligible list has adjustable amperage or load management. The utility built the list that way deliberately, because keeping households off panel upgrades costs the grid less than paying for them. So the list of chargers that earn you rebate money is the same list of chargers that can save you the upgrade.
Sometimes the upgrade is the right call anyway: a 100 amp panel with no spare spaces, an original fuse box, or a house adding a heat pump and an induction range in the same year. If that is your house, our electrical panel upgrades page covers what that work involves.
The PG&E Rebate, and Both of Its Tiers
PG&E’s Residential Charging Solutions Rebate has two tiers, and the difference between them decides how much you get.
The standard tier pays up to 50 percent of the purchase price of one eligible charger. You need to be an active PG&E residential electric customer and own or lease a battery electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle registered in California.
Rebate Plus pays up to $2,000 toward installation, and it is income qualified. Household income has to sit below 80 percent of the area median for your county, or you need to be enrolled in CalFresh, Medi-Cal, SSI, WIC or a similar program. Where that household also needs panel work to accept the charger, the Plus tier runs up to $5,000 covering the panel upgrade and the installation together.
Four conditions quietly disqualify people:
• One rebate per household, first come first served
• Apply within 180 days of buying the equipment. Buy the charger in January, install it in August, and you may have run the clock out
• The charger has to be on PG&E’s eligible equipment list, so check it before you buy rather than after
• Processing takes about 10 business days, per PG&E
One point cuts the other way, and it is the one people get wrong most often. This rebate covers community choice aggregation customers. If MCE, 3CE or Silicon Valley Clean Energy supplies your generation, PG&E still delivers your power and you are still eligible. Amounts and eligibility change, so confirm current terms with PG&E before you buy anything.
What Your Community Energy Provider Gives You
This is the part that catches out homeowners who did their homework on heat pumps. For a heat pump, your community energy provider is where the money is. MCE, 3CE, Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Sonoma Clean Power all pay real rebates on heat pump heating and water heating. For a home EV charger the answer used to be the same everywhere, which was nothing at all. That changed on 1 October 2026, and it changed for one of them.
3CE now pays toward a home charger, and this is new. Until the end of September 2026 its Electrify Your Ride program went to commercial, agricultural, non-profit, industrial, public agency and larger multifamily sites only. Under the design that took effect on 1 October 2026, 3CE states that all 3CE customers with an account in good standing may apply, and it allows one EV charger rebate per site address per fiscal year, with the fiscal year running 1 October to 30 September. Multifamily properties are directed to a separate commercial program, which is what makes the residential one a single family program. Purchases and installations dated 1 August 2026 to 30 September 2027 must be submitted by 30 September 2027. So if 3CE supplies your electricity in Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito or San Luis Obispo county, there is now a charger rebate worth claiming.
We are not printing the 3CE amount on this page yet. 3CE publishes its rebate table as a graphic rather than as text, and we verify every figure before we put it in front of you. Ask 3CE directly, or ask us and we will check it with you before you buy anything.
MCE still pays a single family home nothing toward a charger. Its EV charging rebates run $2,000 to $4,500 per port and go to workplaces, multifamily buildings of four units or more, and commuter parking lots such as a park and ride or a ferry terminal. A single family home in San Rafael or Novato is not eligible. Checked again on 1 October 2026.
There is also a municipal exception. In the City of Santa Clara, where Silicon Valley Power, not PG&E, supplies the electricity, there is a $350 rebate per charging station, limited to two per residential account, with no income qualified bonus. Everywhere else in our service area the PG&E rebate is the whole picture, and it is worth confirming current terms before you buy anything.
Permits, and the Clock Your City Is On
A home charger needs a permit. There is one narrow exception in our service area, and it saves real money. In unincorporated Santa Cruz County, which takes in Soquel, Aptos and Live Oak, a Level 1 charger needs no permit at all if a 120 volt receptacle already exists where you want to charge. If a new receptacle has to be installed, you are back to a permit application. That is the single largest cost fork in the six jurisdictions we work in.
Level 2 is permitted everywhere, and the same job costs very different amounts depending on which side of a city line you live on:
• City of San Rafael: $141 flat, covering up to two chargers
• City of Santa Clara: $244, plus $98 permit issuance and a 3.37 percent technology fee
• City of Capitola: $270.50 for Level 2, $187.25 for Level 1
Those come from each city’s own fee schedule effective 1 July 2026. Campbell and Novato publish no EV line item, so a charger there gets priced off the general electrical permit rules instead of a set line item, and we tell you what your job will run before we file it. Fee schedules are rewritten every July, so confirm with your city.
State law is on your side on timing. Government Code 65850.7, from AB 1236 and AB 970, requires every city and county in California to run an expedited permit process for EV charging. For one to twenty five stations, the jurisdiction has five business days to deem your application complete and twenty business days to approve or deny it. Miss the window and the project is deemed approved, provided the jurisdiction made no finding of a specific health or safety impact, did not require a use permit, and no planning commission appeal was filed. It also gets one written correction notice listing every deficiency, not a series of them.
The honest caveat, and the state’s own fact sheet puts it this way: AB 970 does not designate an enforcement authority if the review timeline elapses. Deemed approval is a position to argue, not a permit in your hand.
In practice, cities differ widely. San Rafael commits in writing to issuing most of these same day or within 24 hours, and lets single family homes skip the expedited checklist entirely. Campbell asks applicants to allow four to six weeks for a first plan check, which does not sit comfortably next to the state’s twenty business days. We file where you live and work with whatever that counter does.
Three local details decide who can pull the permit at all. In Campbell, a permit for an EV charger cannot be issued to a property owner: it can only go to a contractor holding a C-10 electrical license. In unincorporated Santa Cruz County, the plans have to be stamped and signed by a California licensed electrical engineer or a C-10 electrical contractor. And in Capitola, a coastal development permit may be required on top of the electrical permit, depending on where the work sits. Bellows holds C-10.
Which Chargers We Install
We install Level 2 chargers from the manufacturers on PG&E’s eligible list, and we will install a charger you bought yourself. Customer supplied units are fine. If there is a Tesla Wall Connector, a ChargePoint, an Emporia or a Wallbox already sitting in your garage, we will put it in.
Two things to check before you buy. Confirm the model is on PG&E’s current eligible list if you intend to claim the rebate, because the list moves. And tell us the amperage, because a 40 amp unit and a 48 amp unit are different jobs on an older panel.
We are not on any manufacturer’s certified installer program and we do not claim to be. What we bring is a C-10 license, a load calculation run properly against the code, a permit filed with your city, and an inspection signed off at the end. What we will not do is install used or unlisted equipment, or do the work without a permit.
Who Turns Up
The technician who arrives is a Bellows employee. Bellows has been in business since 1984 and holds California contractor license 483881, which carries C-36 plumbing, C-20 heating and air conditioning, and C-10 electrical. Technicians are background checked and licensed.
Estimates for a new installation are free. If we are diagnosing a fault on existing wiring, the diagnostic visit is $189 and we waive it if you go ahead with the repair. Either way you get a written price before anyone starts work, and we do not bill by the hour.
We cover Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Marin and Sonoma counties from branches in Soquel, Campbell and Novato. Call us or book online and we will get a licensed electrician to your panel.
Rebate positions on this page were last reviewed 1 October 2026.
Frequently
Asked Questions
Here are answers to the questions we get asked most about home charging:
Do I need a permit to install an EV charger at home?
Almost always, yes, and a licensed electrician pulls it. The one exception in our area is unincorporated Santa Cruz County, where a Level 1 charger needs no permit if a 120 volt receptacle already exists at the spot. Every Level 2 installation is permitted. In Campbell the permit cannot be issued to a homeowner at all: it has to go to a contractor with a C-10 electrical license.
What does an EV charger installation cost?
We quote after seeing the panel, because the run length, the wall construction and the local permit fee move the number more than anything else. For budgeting, Qmerit, the largest installer network in North America, put a residential Level 2 install at $749 to $2,500 in its 2026 installation data, averaging $1,700, and adds $1,500 to $3,000 where a panel upgrade is needed. Those are industry figures, not our price.
Will I need a panel upgrade?
Often not. The code treats charging as a continuous load, so a 48 amp charger needs a 60 amp circuit, and that is where older panels run out of room. A charger with adjustable amperage or built in load management can be set to fit the capacity you already have. We run the load calculation first and tell you which situation you are in before you spend anything.
What rebate can I actually claim?
PG&E’s Residential Charging Solutions Rebate pays up to 50 percent of the purchase price of an eligible charger. Its Rebate Plus tier pays up to $2,000 toward installation, or up to $5,000 where panel work is needed, and it is income qualified against 80 percent of area median income or enrollment in a program like CalFresh or Medi-Cal. You have 180 days from buying the equipment to apply, one rebate per household. Confirm current terms with PG&E.
Does my community energy provider offer an EV charger rebate?
It depends which one supplies you, and this changed on 1 October 2026. 3CE now accepts applications from all 3CE customers with an account in good standing, and allows one EV charger rebate per site address per fiscal year, so a single family home in Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito or San Luis Obispo county can claim one. We are not printing the 3CE amount here, because 3CE publishes its rebate table as a graphic rather than as text and we verify every figure before we publish it. Ask 3CE, or ask us and we will check it with you. MCE still pays a single family home nothing: its EV charging rebates go to workplaces, multifamily buildings of four units or more and commuter lots. The other exception is the City of Santa Clara, where Silicon Valley Power pays $350 per charging station with a limit of two per residential account.
Can you install a charger I bought myself?
Yes. Customer supplied chargers are fine. Check that the model is on PG&E’s eligible equipment list if you plan to claim the rebate, and tell us the amperage when you book so we size the circuit correctly.
How long does the city take to approve the permit?
California law gives the jurisdiction five business days to deem your application complete and twenty business days to approve or deny it, for one to twenty five stations. San Rafael says in writing that it issues most of these the same day or within 24 hours. Campbell asks for four to six weeks for a first plan check. The law says a project is deemed approved if the window is missed, but the state’s own guidance notes that no enforcement authority is named, so that is a position rather than a permit in hand.
