EV owners don’t pay gas taxes. So next year they’ll pay double or more to register their cars.

Starting next year, Minnesota electric vehicle owners will have to pay at least double to register their EVs. Blame the change on their freedom from gas taxes.

A provision in the transportation bill that passed earlier this month raises the EV registration surcharge from $75 to at least $150. Drivers of plug-in-hybrids will also have to pay a minimum of $75 to register their vehicles.

The new fees, which go into effect in January, will scale up with more expensive vehicles — meaning some drivers could see their annual registration costs hit $200 or more.

For years, Minnesota lawmakers have debated how to fill a growing gap in roadway funds as more fuel efficient cars and trucks, as well as more electric vehicles, leads to less revenue from the state’s gas tax.

“Electric vehicle drivers are going to be paying over the next four years somewhere around $40 million,” said Rep. Jon Koznick, the Republican co-chair of the House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee. “That does help offset declining gas tax revenues.”

Rep. Erin Koegel, Koznick’s DFL counterpart on the Transportation Committee, said the new fee structure is far from perfect, but she’s glad lawmakers included a sliding scale rather than a flat fee of $200, as originally proposed.

Lawmakers said that EV drivers will see reduced registration fees in July 2027, when a public charging station tax takes effect. Under that scheme, owners of certain fast chargers will have to pay 5 cents for every kilowatt hour. Minnesota’s transportation bill also created a work group to study electricity as a fuel source and recommend a kilowatt hour tax similar to the gas tax.

Republicans and DFLers each hold 67 seats in the House, which left little room for disagreement during the budget negotiations. “This is kind of the best that we could get with the circumstances of divided government and all that,” Koegel said.

Not everyone was happy with the compromise.

“We’re actually going against the state’s electrification goals by doing this,” said Carolyn Berninger, who works on public policy issues for Drive Electric Minnesota, a coalition of clean energy advocacy groups. “It’s going to make some prospective EV buyers pretty nervous. Electric vehicles already cost more upfront than a comparable gas car.”

Berninger said she’s especially concerned with the timing of the new fees, which come as Congress considers phasing out federal tax incentives for electric vehicle purchases in this year’s budget bill. The bill, backed by President Donald Trump, also includes a new $250 annual fee for electric vehicle drivers. That provision is similarly meant to address declining revenue from gas taxes.

Jukka Kukkonen, an electrical engineering instructor at the University of St. Thomas and founder of the Minnesota-based EV consulting firm Shift2Electric, said EV drivers were already paying their fair share in taxes with the $75 annual fee.

If someone driving a Toyota Prius hybrid, which gets 45 miles to the gallon, paid the gas tax, their average annual cost would be less than $100, he said.

How much Minnesotans pay in gas taxes each year on average is a matter of debate.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimates that the average gasoline car gets roughly 25 miles per gallon, while trucks and SUVs get about 17 miles per gallon. Minnesotans drove an average of 13,957 miles in 2022, according to the most recent data made public by the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. When put together with Minnesota’s gas tax rate, which stands at 31.8 cents per gallon, an average driver in the state pays anywhere from $177 to $246 a year in gas taxes.

Others, including DFL Rep. Steve Elkins, have calculated a smaller figure — closer to $132 annually — saying that Minnesotans only drive an average of 11,500 miles per year.