Half of Belgium's New Cars Are Electric. Nine in Ten of Them Are Company Cars

In September, for the first time, more than half of the new cars registered in Belgium were fully electric: 50.9% of 32,124. Over the year so far the figure is 39.1%, against 26.2% in the UK. Belgium got there with no national purchase grant, no sales mandate, and with private buyers who still mostly choose petrol. Nine in ten of its new electric cars last year went to companies.

This is the third stop on The Road to Norway, our series on the markets further along the road to an all-electric new-car market than the UK, which runs until 23 October, when the consultation on weakening the UK's zero emission vehicle mandate closes. France showed what happens when the money goes to private buyers; Sweden and Germany showed what happens when it is taken away. Belgium shows what a market looks like when the company car does almost all of the work, which is the road the UK is already on.

Two markets under one headline

Belgium's electric share has risen every year since 2020: 3.5%, 5.9%, 10.3%, 19.6%, 28.5%, 34.7%. The UK was ahead until 2022; Belgium passed it in 2023 and has pulled away since. But the headline hides two very different markets. Among companies and the self-employed, who buy a little over half of Belgium's new cars, 59% of purchases in the first half of this year were electric. Among private buyers the figure was just over 10%, and petrol took 61%.

Of the 143,849 new electric cars registered in Belgium in 2025, 15,483 went to private households, 10.8% of the total and 2% fewer than the year before. Everything else was a company car, a lease car or a self-employed purchase. The private share rose to 20.2% in September, the first month it has passed one in five, as record pump prices pushed buyers towards electric across Europe. One month is not a trend, and 20% is still a long way behind the company market.

The mechanism: a cliff, a floor and a fixed 4%

Belgium did not grant its way to 50%. It changed what a petrol or diesel company car costs the company. As of October 2026, three rules do the work:

• A deductibility cliff for combustion cars. A petrol, diesel or plug-in hybrid company car ordered from 1 January 2026 is 0% deductible against corporation tax: none of its lease, fuel, insurance or depreciation can be set against profit. Cars ordered between July 2023 and the end of 2025 are on a taper (75% in 2025, 50%, 25%, then 0% from 2028).
• A floor for electric cars. A zero-emission car ordered before the end of 2026 is 100% deductible for as long as the same company runs it. The rate then steps down for later orders: 95% for cars ordered in 2027, 90% in 2028, 82.5% in 2029, 75% in 2030, 67.5% from 2031.
• A fixed 4% for the driver. The taxable benefit on a company car is list price times 6/7 times a CO2 percentage. For an electric car that percentage is fixed at 4%. For a petrol car it rises with emissions, and the reference point it is measured from falls every year, so the same petrol car gets dearer to drive each January.

On top of this, employers pay a monthly CO2 contribution to social security on each company car. For combustion cars ordered since July 2023 it is multiplied by 4 in 2026 and 5.5 in 2027; electric cars pay a minimum of €42.34 (£36) a month.

Put together for a €55,000 (£47,000) car ordered this year, a petrol model at 120 g/km against an electric one:

For a company buying several hundred cars, the petrol option is simply not on the list. Belgium has no bonus and no mandate; it has a tax code in which the combustion company car stopped making sense. It is the same lever the UK pulls with benefit-in-kind tax, where an electric company car is taxed at 4% of list price in 2026-27 against 29% for the petrol car in our example, and it has produced the same shape of market.

The private gap, and the one subsidy that briefly closed it

Belgium's private buyers have had one purchase incentive. Flanders, where two in three Belgian cars are registered, paid €5,000 (£4,250) towards a new electric car under €40,000 and €3,000 towards a used one, for 2024 only. The budget ran out and the scheme closed early: cars bought after 22 November 2024 got nothing. While it ran, private electric purchases in Belgium doubled, and the private share went from 5.3% to 9.6%. The year after it closed, the private share slipped to 8.9% and private electric purchases fell 2%. Flanders then ended its registration-tax and road-tax exemption for new electric cars from January 2026.

So Belgium's private market has sat under 10% for three years while the company market went from 26% to 59%. The 20.2% in September is the first sign of movement, and it came from fuel prices rather than policy. EV Belgium, the industry body, marked the 50% month by asking the federal government for a social leasing scheme for new and used electric cars, the French model we covered at stop one, because it can see the same gap.

Where the gap shows up: the used market

A company car in Belgium is on a lease for three or four years, and then it is sold. So the electric company cars of 2022 and 2023 are now arriving on the used market, in a country where the private buyers who would normally take them are still buying petrol.

The volumes are growing fast, 42% a year, but from almost nothing: used electric cars were 5.9% of Belgium's used market in the first half of 2026. Half of them are bought by companies, not households. FEBIAC's own description of the market, in its 2025 review, is blunt: prices are low because supply is large and demand is weak, and ex-lease electric cars do not find buyers easily. In its first-quarter 2026 note it added that fleet residual values are below normal as a result, and that stock is turning over slowly. By mid-year it reported rotation picking up as energy prices rose. Low prices are good news for the buyer who wants one. They are a problem for the leasing companies carrying the residual-value risk, and a reason the next lease costs more.

This is the early-warning system. A market that electrifies through fleets alone builds a wave of three-year-old electric cars that private buyers were never brought along to want. Belgium is riding that wave now.

The UK is the same shape, three years behind

Fleet and business buyers took 57.5% of UK new cars this year to September; private buyers 40%. SMMT does not publish a monthly split of electric registrations by buyer, but in 2025 it put private buyers at under a quarter of new electric cars, so roughly three in four go to fleets and company-car drivers. The lever is the same as Belgium's: benefit-in-kind tax on an electric company car is 4% of list price in 2026-27, rising a point a year to 7% in 2028-29 and 9% in 2029-30, against 25% to 37% for most petrol cars.

Salary sacrifice is where that lever bites hardest. The BVRLA reports that virtually every car on a salary sacrifice scheme is electric, as are more than 90% of many leasing companies' business orders; battery-electric cars are now 49% of the whole BVRLA lease fleet. Salary sacrifice grew 51% year on year in the second quarter of 2026, down from a near-tripling the year before. In personal contract hire, the channel a private household uses, 23% of cars are electric.

And the UK's used wave is forming on the same timetable. Cars leased in the salary sacrifice boom of 2023 and 2024 come back in 2026 and 2027. So far the used market has absorbed them: Auto Trader's September 2026 index had used electric prices up 2.8% year on year at an average £25,091, with demand up 40% against supply up 26%, the fifth month of annual growth after more than two years of falls. Leasing firms told the BVRLA they cannot find enough used electric stock for the salary sacrifice and personal-lease customers who want it. That is a healthier picture than Belgium's, and it is the mandate that made the difference: carmakers chasing their targets have discounted new electric cars to private buyers, and the grant has brought sub-£25,000 models into showrooms, so UK households have been learning to want these cars while Belgian households have not.

If you are shopping in that used market, our used EV finder works from dealer asking prices by model year, and Check a used EVplaces a specific car's price against the others listed. Our salary sacrifice calculator shows what the 4% rate is worth on a given car.

Why this matters for the mandate review

The government is consulting, until 23 October, on cutting the ZEV mandate's 2030 target from 80% of new cars to 70%, 60% or 50%. Belgium is the case for leaving it alone, from two directions.

First, the UK's fleet market is already electrifying on tax alone, as Belgium's did. The mandate's remaining job is the private buyer, and the private buyer is exactly who a lower target lets carmakers stop courting. The discounts and the small, cheap models that have appeared in UK showrooms this year exist because carmakers need the volume. Cut the target and the fleet channel carries on regardless, as it does in Belgium, while the household market goes back to being the gap in the chart above.

Second, the used market. Every electric car sold new to a fleet in 2027 is a used car for a household in 2030, at a price that household can afford. On a market the size of this year's, cutting the 2030 target from 80% to 50% means about 650,000 fewer new electric cars in 2030 alone, and the same number missing from the used market in 2033 and 2034. The buyer who loses is the one with £10,000 to spend, who was never going to buy new. Belgium's problem is a used market that households are not ready for. A weakened mandate gives the UK the opposite problem later: households that want the cars, and fewer of them to buy.

There is a fair counter-argument, and it is Belgium's too: that a fleet-led market puts the residual-value risk on leasing companies, and a glut of returning cars raises lease costs for everyone. The answer to that is to build private demand for the returning cars. France showed one way to do it, and EV Belgium is now asking its own government for the same. The air-quality and investment arguments from the earlier stops stand here as well: road transport produces around 80% of the nitrogen oxides at the roadside, and the battery plants at Sunderland and in Somerset are sized for an electric market at home, fleet and private alike.

Our prediction

UK used electric car prices turn negative year on year on Auto Trader's index before the end of 2027, as the 2023-24 salary sacrifice and lease cohort returns and supply growth overtakes demand, unless something pulls private demand forward: a used-car grant, a cut in VAT on public charging, or a mandate kept at 80% that keeps carmakers discounting to households. If prices are still rising at the end of 2027, the UK will have done what Belgium has not, and we will say so here.

Next stop: the Netherlands, Tuesday 13 October

The objection we hear most to a higher target is that too many UK households have nowhere to charge. The Netherlands has fewer driveways than the UK and was 53% electric in September. Next we look at how it solved kerbside charging with lamp-post logic rather than rapid hubs.

Sources: FEBIAC annual reviews (2024, 2025), quarterly and half-year analyses (Q3 2025, Q1 and H1 2026) and the September 2026 release, with TRAXIO for the used market (Belgium); EV Belgium press release, 2 October 2026; Belgian Federal Public Service Finance and ONSS/RSZ (company-car deductibility, benefit-in-kind and CO2 contribution rules for 2026); Flemish Parliament and VRT (the 2024 premium and its closure); SMMT (UK registrations); BVRLA Leasing Outlook, October 2026 (Q2 2026 lease fleet); Auto Trader Retail Price Index, September 2026; HMRC company car tax rates to 2029-30; Department for Transport, ZEV mandate review consultation (2026); Defra (roadside nitrogen oxides). Belgian shares are BEV-only as published by FEBIAC. Sterling conversions use exchange rates at the start of October 2026.

Questions and answers