There is no single ratio, and anybody offering one is guessing. The number depends on two things: how many charge points one team can install and commission in a day, and how many working days your programme actually has. Everything else is detail.
The reason this question is hard to answer from the internet is that almost nobody publishes the first number. Search it and you get certification requirements, national workforce projections and job adverts. What you do not get is anything you can plan a team against.
What actually decides the number?
Two figures, and you can get both from your own programme.
Installs per team per day. This varies more than anything else in the calculation. A single AC unit on an existing supply in a car park with the cabling already in is a different job from a rapid unit needing new civils and a transformer. The same crew might do several of the first and part of one of the second.
Working days available. Not calendar days. Programmes lose more time to connection dates, site access and weather than to the installation itself.
Divide your charge point count by installs per team per day, then divide by the working days available. That gives teams, not people. Multiply by crew size for headcount.
The answer is usually smaller than operators expect and arrives later than they want.
Why is the honest answer a range?
Because the install rate is set by the site, not by the technician. An operator delivering 3,000 public points a month across a country, which is roughly the Belgian run rate through the first half of 2026, is not running one number. It is running a mix of easy urban AC and hard rapid sites, and the average is meaningless applied to any individual site.
The useful version is a range per site type. Work out the rate for each of the three or four kinds of site in your programme, and apply each to its own share of the build.
Why is this the wrong question to start with?
Because the constraint is almost never the count. It is whether the people exist at all in the market you are building in, and whether they arrive in time.
The evidence on that is much clearer than the ratios. In Belgium, charge point installation is officially classified by the Flemish public employment service as a knelpuntberoep, a shortage occupation. That is a government designation, not an inference. One Flemish installation specialist has been running near-identical installer and service technician postings across at least ten separate regions simultaneously, several open since December 2025 and still being edited nine months later.
In Germany, a single hardware manufacturer has run nine separate field service technician postings across German cities at once.
So the practical planning question is not “how many do we need” but “how many can we actually get, and by when”. A rollout planned around a headcount that the market cannot supply is a rollout that slips.
What does that mean for the programme?
Three things worth building into the plan.
Commit installation capacity earlier than the work requires. The lead time is on the people, not the task. If you are hiring directly, assume you are competing with businesses that have already failed to fill the same role repeatedly.
Do not assume the trades are available because the sector is growing. You are not competing with other charging businesses for qualified electricians. You are competing with solar and heat pumps for the same people, and increasingly the binding constraint is the qualification rather than the experience.
Plan commissioning separately. It is a different skill from installation and it is the step that slips, because it sits between the installer, the operator and the network operator and belongs to none of them by default.
How long does it take to hire them?
Four to six weeks for a straightforward installation hire in the European markets we work in, and our own average across all roles is 22 days.
The installer layer is where that rule bends. When a role has been advertised repeatedly across multiple regions or through several intermediaries, it has not been filled, and the cause is usually the market rather than the brief. That is the opposite of the normal diagnosis and it is worth knowing before you rewrite a job spec that was fine.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a standard technicians-per-charge-point ratio? No, and treat any published one with suspicion. The install rate is set by site type, ground conditions and whether the supply already exists.
Should we hire or subcontract? Both work. Subcontracting buys speed and loses control of quality and scheduling; hiring buys the reverse and takes longer to stand up.
Do they need EV-specific qualifications? Requirements vary by country. In most European markets the base requirement is a qualified electrician with additional charging-specific certification, and that certification is increasingly the bottleneck.
If you are sizing a rollout team and want to know what is actually available in your market rather than what the ratio says, book a discovery call.
Sources
- VDAB knelpuntberoepen list, 2026
- EV Belgium public charge point figures, 9 July 2026
- Net Zero Evolution live vacancy analysis across the Belgian and German charging markets, reviewed September 2026