Permit or Not · All projects · Install an EV charger · Michigan

Do I need a permit to install an EV charger in Michigan?

Usually needs a permit

Plugging a car into an existing outlet needs nothing. Adding the 240 volt circuit a Level 2 charger runs on is electrical work, and it is permitted in essentially every jurisdiction.

How Michigan decides

Code adoption
Statewide adoption
Edition on file
2015 IRC
Local amendments
Permitted
Verified county offices
22 of Michigan’s counties

Michigan adopts a building code statewide, so there is a single baseline every local building department starts from. That makes the typical rule below a better guide here than it is in a home-rule state — but adoption is the floor, not the whole answer: local amendments are still permitted, and a city that has tightened a threshold is not obliged to advertise it.

The edition on file for Michigan is the 2015 IRC. Editions matter less than people expect for the exemption thresholds and more than people expect for how the work has to be built — and a jurisdiction that has not caught up to the state's edition is common rather than remarkable.

On file for Michigan: Statewide.

Adoption data from Code Adoption by State (Code Check), retrieved 2026-08-09, checked for Michigan on 2026-08-09. That source gives the edition and whether adoption binds statewide. It does not give per-project thresholds, and neither do we — the thresholds on this page are the model code's. Code Adoption by State →

What changes the answer

These thresholds come from the model code. Michigan lets its cities and counties amend the code they adopt, and an amended threshold is usually where people get caught.

Not in the IRC R105.2 exemptions once new branch-circuit wiring is involved. Electric vehicle supply equipment is covered by NEC Article 625, with the load calculation under Article 220 and the load-management provisions at 625.42.

Why it matters

This is the largest continuous load most houses will ever add, and it runs for hours at a time — which is exactly the condition that finds an undersized conductor or a loose termination. The load calculation is not paperwork: a 60 amp charger added to a service that is already near capacity is how a panel ends up overloaded in a way that only shows up on the coldest evening of the year.

Confirm the requirement with the Michigan city or county building department that would issue the permit before you start.

Michigan county building departments we have verified

Permits in Michigan are issued by city and county building departments, not by the state. These 22 county permit pages have each been opened and checked, including a check that the page belongs to a county in Michigan — one in ten links in our first pass was a building department in another state entirely, so every entry here names the wording that identified it.

County offices. If your address sits inside a city or town, the city issues the permit and the county page will send you back out again. Checked 2026-08-25. We can resolve a ZIP to a proven county page for 352 Michigan ZIP codes; outside those, the checker falls back to a search rather than a guess.

This is the typical rule, not your answer

Nothing here is a permit decision, and it is not legal or engineering advice. No page can settle this for your address — permitting in Michigan is run by individual city and county building departments, and the one that covers your property is the only one whose answer binds anyone. Put a ZIP in and we will name the office that decides, and show you the county permit page where we have proven one.

More on install an ev charger

The full install an ev charger guide covers why the thresholds sit where they do, what catches people, and the narrower versions of this question — extending rather than building, repairing rather than replacing, and the cases that sit right on a limit.

Install an EV charger in other states