The €0.52 Ruling: What the EWE Go vs DCS Verdict Means for Roaming Prices

On 6 October 2026, the Munich I Regional Court handed down a verdict the European charging industry had been waiting for since February: charging station operator EWE Go may not charge roaming provider DCS higher prices than it charges its own end customers. It is the first judicial clarification of the anti-discrimination rule in the EU’s AFIR regulation — and it could cool down years of chaotic roaming pricing.

The ruling is not yet final (Case No. 33 O 2062/25), and EWE Go says it is still evaluating. But the reasoning is now on the record, and every CPO legal department in Europe is reading it.

1. The numbers at the same charging point

The lawsuit, filed by Digital Charging Solutions — the company behind the charging solutions of BMW and Mercedes-Benz — centered on what EWE Go charged different customers for the same electricity, at the same station, on the reference date of 1 January 2025:

On top of that, a blocking fee of €0.10/minute (net) applied only to roaming providers — not to ad-hoc payers or EWE Go’s own app users.

The court prohibited EWE Go from continuing to invoice DCS at the €0.837/kWh Offer2All rate. Fundamentally, the court said, EWE Go may only charge DCS the €0.52/kWh it charges its own direct customers. The €0.317/kWh surcharge — roughly 60% — and EWE Go’s justifications for it (administrative costs, customer service efforts, entrepreneurial risk, contractual loyalty models) did not survive scrutiny.

2. How roaming pricing actually works

To see why this matters, follow the money at a public charger:

The MSP’s wholesale cost is the floor under every roaming tariff a fleet driver sees on a charging card. When the wholesale price is inflated, the retail roaming price is inflated with it — and the driver, or the fleet paying the bill, has no way to see the markup chain.

3. What the AFIR rule actually says

DCS invoked Article 5, Paragraph 3 of the AFIR (the EU’s alternative fuels infrastructure regulation): operators of publicly accessible charging points “shall not discriminate between end users and mobility service providers or between different mobility service providers through the prices they charge. Differentiation in price levels may occur, but only if it is proportionate and objectively justified.”

The key word is discriminate. Until now, many in the industry read the rule narrowly — as a ban on discriminating between the (already high) ad-hoc price and the B2B price. The Munich court read it the way the text is written: the comparison includes the operator’s own end-customer price. That is the part DCS calls the first judicial clarification of its kind in the EU.

4. What it means for fleets

For fleet operators, roaming tariffs are a line item that has been hard to control: the same kilowatt-hour costs a different amount depending on whose charging card the driver holds, and the wholesale mechanics behind it were invisible. Three practical takeaways:

1. Roaming prices should move toward operator prices. DCS expects that, if the ruling becomes final and sets precedent, roaming providers can offer better prices — converging toward what CPOs charge their own customers.

2. The ad-hoc surcharge is now in question too. The industry logic that supported premium ad-hoc pricing sits on the same legal foundation the court just cracked.

3. Damages set a price on the past. The court ordered EWE Go to compensate DCS for losses since the AFIR took effect on 13 April 2024 — potentially several million euros. The exact figure is undetermined, and like the ruling itself, not final. But the signal to other CPOs is priced in millions, not thousands.

None of this is final yet — EWE Go is reviewing the reasoning and the proceedings continue. But the direction of travel is now judicially documented, not just debated at conferences.

5. The honest caveat

A first-instance ruling is not the law of the land. Appeals, other courts, and other member states’ interpretations can still diverge. What the Munich verdict does, even before finality, is change the negotiating posture: MSPs now litigate from a written judicial reading, not from an industry hope. For fleets negotiating charging-card contracts this quarter, that reading belongs in the conversation — ask your provider how their wholesale terms reflect it.

At Amprisen, we build the other half of the fleet charging equation: portable OCPP 1.6J chargers (7/11/22 kW) with 4G connectivity, a built-in MID-certified meter, tamper-protected firmware, and signed meter values over OCPP — CE and CB certified. Where public roaming stays expensive, metered charging at your own sites is the cost you control.