EV Charging Bay Marking: What Australian Businesses Need to Know

Start with the bay itself

AS/NZS 2890.1 is the baseline standard for off-street car park design. A standard 90-degree bay is 2.4 metres wide by 5.4 metres long, with line markings between 80 and 100mm. That standard is referenced in the National Construction Code and adopted by councils as a condition of development approval, so it’s the benchmark your car park gets measured against.

The standards around EV bays specifically are still developing and different editions and council guidelines say slightly different things. For anything where compliance is genuinely on the line – a development application, a council audit, a new build – a traffic engineer or your council’s assessment team is the right call for confirming exactly what applies to your site.

What’s worth understanding regardless is the practical side. A charger isn’t flat paint on the ground. It has a physical footprint and it usually sits at the head or side of the bay. Mark an EV bay at minimum standard width, then install the unit and the space actually available to the driver can end up tighter than the painted line suggest. The cable has to go somewhere too – if it ends up running across the adjacent bay, you’ve introduced a trip hazard that wasn’t there before. 

Building is a bit of a extra width solves most of this before it starts. Somewhere in the range of 2.5m at 2.6m is what’s commonly recommended of EV bays and on most sites the difference in cost is negligible compared to the hassle of discovering the problem after the charger is bolted down.

Colour, symbols and signage

There’s no single mandated colour for EV bays in private car parks in Australia, which surprises people. What there is instead is convention – and convention is doing real work here, because the whole point is that a driver recognises the bay instantly without having to interpret it.

Green has become the most widely used colour, both internationally and increasingly here. Full green infill across the bay surface is common in shopping centres and commercial car parks and it shows up in various council development guidelines even though the design standard doesn’t require it. 

Blue also gets used, often where it works better against the existing site – matching a client’s branding, or reading more clearly against a particular surface. Both work. The thing that matters more than the colour itself is consistency: pick one and apply it across every EV bay on the site, so drivers aren’t decoding a different scheme in each corner of the car park.

Whatever colour you use, the bay should carry stencilled text – “EV Charging Only” or similar – and ideally the standard EV symbol. Colour tells a driver something is different about the bay. Text and symbol tell them what. 

One practical note on green specifically: it fades faster than most line marking colours. Green pavement paints are particularly prone to UV degradation, so material quality matters more here than it does for a standard white edge line. If you’re paying for coloured infill, it’s worth paying for a product that holds its colour rather than one that looks tired inside a year.

And don’t skip upright signage. The moment a vehicle parks in the bay, the ground marking is invisible to everyone approaching  it. Signage at the bay or on the adjacent wall is what a driver sees from twenty metres away, and that’s the point at which the decide whether to pull in. 

On drivers parking in EV bays

The frustration you’ll hear from most EV drivers is arriving at a charger to find a petrol or diesel car sitting in the bay.

Marking helps. An unmarked or weakly marked bay gives a driver no particular reason not to use it; a bay that’s obviously and deliberately set apart gives them one. It’s not a complete fix – if the problem is persistent on a busy site, physical measures like bollards do more than paint can – but clear marking is the cheap, obvious first step and it handles most of the casual cases.

What the NCC actually requires

This is where the regulatory push is coming from and its worth being specific rather than vague about it.

NCC 2022 didn’t mandate installing chargers. It requires the infastructure to support installing them later. The following edition goes further, mandating charging equipment for a minimum number of spaces across most commercial building classes. Under NCC 2025, car parks in Class 2, 3, 5, 6, 7b, 8 and 9 buildings need electrical distribution boards dedicated solely to EV charging, labelled as such and connected to a charging control system. The relevant clause is J9D4 and the proportions vary by building class – around 10% of spaces for offices and retail, 20% for hotels, warehouses, factories and public buildings.

Two things to take from that.

Adoption isn’t uniform – each state territory runs its own process and some apply the code with localy variations or a delayed start date, so it’s worth confirming with the relevant authority rather than assuming.

And more relevant to the marking side: these requirements are about electrical capacity. The NCC will get chargers into your car park. It won’t tell you anything about how to mark the bays around them, which is a large part of why marking ends up as an afterthought.

Accessible EV bays

This one gets overlooked regularly and it’s worth raising early.

If you’re providing EV charging as a facility, the question of whether a driver with a disability can use it needs answering. AS/NZS 2890.6 governs accessible parking and the interaction with charging equipment raises issues the design standards don’t fully resolve – the charging unit can’t obstruct the access aisle and the cable needs to be manageable for someone with limited mobility.

That’s a layout question more than a marking one, but it’s far easier to resolve on a plan than after the equipment is installed.

Getting the sequence right

If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: decide bay dimensions and positions before the electrical design is finalised, not after.

Give yourself width beyond the minimum. Pick a colour convention and hold it across the site. Pair ground marking with upright signage. Think about accessible provision early. None of that is expensive at  the planning stage and all of it is annoying to retrofit.

Working with us

We’ve marked EV charging bay on commercial sites across the Central Coast and Newcastle, including for Brian Hilton Motor Group in Gosford. We’ll assess your car park layout, talk through the options and put down marking that’s clear, durable and suited to your site.

Planning an EV installation? Get in touch for a site assessment.