The solar tax credit is gone. Now what?

Is the solar tax credit gone?

For a new residential install, yes. The 30% federal credit homeowners claimed for themselves, the residential one under §25D, has expired for new installs. It was not trimmed, phased down, or paused pending paperwork. If a quote in front of you still subtracts 30% at the bottom line, that quote is describing a world that no longer exists.

Here is the boundary on this page, stated once and kept: we are not going to tell you what you can or cannot claim on your return. Not whether anything applies to your situation, not how a system already under way is treated, not whether some arrangement gets you there another way. Those are questions about your taxes, and they belong to your CPA and to theIRS's own page. Solar salespeople handing out confident tax answers is a real problem in this industry. We would rather be useless to you here than wrong.

What does losing the credit actually change?

It removes the single strongest argument for buying a system outright instead of taking any third-party option, whether that is a lease, a PPA or a subscription. If you had cash and were staying put, you bought, you claimed the credit, and you came out ahead on lifetime cost. We told customers that, because it was true. The gap narrowed. It did not close.

Everything else about ownership survived intact. You own an asset. You hold a cost floor in year twenty. Nobody can raise your rate. Those were never tax advantages and they did not leave with the credit. What left was roughly a third of the purchase price coming back to you, which is the part that made the arithmetic lopsided rather than close.

Does this make a subscription a better deal than it was?

No. Same paper, same terms, same escalator, same everything as last year. A change in your tax position is not an improvement in our product, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If the pitch you are hearing this month is "the credit is gone, so you may as well go third-party," that is someone using the news as a closing tool.

It is also not a reason to hurry. A deadline that has already passed cannot be missed. Anyone attaching urgency to an expiry that is already behind us is selling the urgency, not the panels.

What changed, structure by structure

Read the middle column first. On the two third-party structures you were never the taxpayer claiming that credit, which is exactly why nothing about them improved when it expired, and why anyone presenting the expiry as good news for a lease or a subscription is telling you a story about their own product, not about your money.

Is there still a 30% solar tax credit in 2026?

You will hear that there is, and the sentence is doing something dishonest. There are separate provisions in the tax code for a homeowner claiming a credit on their own return and for a business that owns equipment. They are not the same provision, they are not claimed by the same taxpayer, and the fact that both get called "the solar tax credit" in a sales conversation does not merge them.

We are not going to walk you through the business side, because doing that would be answering a tax question, and it is not ours to answer. What we will give you is the test: ask whose return the credit lands on. If the answer is anyone other than you, it is not the thing you lost, and it is not money arriving in your hands. Theform homeowners used to claim the residential creditsettles most of this confusion faster than any conversation will.

What should you do with a solar quote that assumed the credit?

Send it back and ask for it redone without the credit, with both versions side by side, in writing. Then watch what happens. If the new bottom line arrives without comment, fine. That is a company doing its job. If you get vagueness, or "it does not really matter," or a fresh reason the total came out the same anyway, you have learned something more useful than anything about the panels.

On a financed purchase there is a second document to ask for. Many $0-down solar loans are written in two stages: a low introductory payment for roughly the first twelve to eighteen months, calculated on the assumption that a large lump sum lands against the principal inside that window. If it never arrives, the loan re-amortises and the payment steps up for the rest of the term. Ask the lender for both amortisation schedules, the one with the paydown and the one without. The gap between them is the part of this that will actually reach your bank account.

Should you still buy solar outright?

For some people, yes, and this is the part of the page that argues against what we sell. If you are confident you are staying in the home twenty-plus years, you can pay cash or carry a loan comfortably, and your roof and shade support real production, ownership still gives you an asset, a long-run cost floor, and a rate nobody else can raise.

What changed is that the case now has to stand on those things by itself, without a third of the system price coming back. Run that arithmetic honestly against what your utility charges, because theEIA publishes the average residential price for your state. And if it wins, buy. We would rather lose that deal than talk someone out of the structure that genuinely suits them.

Who should be most careful over the next few months?

Anyone being told that a particular structure "still gets you the credit." Any version of that sentence is a claim about your tax return, and the person making it is usually the person who gets paid if you believe it. Take it to your CPA before it changes a single decision, and be suspicious of urgency attached to it.

Be equally careful with anything written before this changed. A blog post, a comparison chart, or a savings calculator that opens with "get 30% back" is not lying on purpose; it is stale, and stale numbers on a twenty-year decision are their own kind of expensive. Check the date on the page, then check the claim against thestatuteor the IRS.

So what is the honest reason to subscribe now?

The same reasons as before the credit expired, none of which were tax reasons: $0 at signing, no lien recorded against your house, the provider owning and insuring and maintaining the equipment, and a maximum exposure of 36 months inside a 10-year agreement rather than a twenty-year obligation your buyer has to be talked into. Typical savings run around 40% of the current electric bill. That is an estimate, not a promise, and a small grid-connection charge from your utility remains.

And the escalator, since you should hear it from us rather than from a competitor: the price rises a fixed 1.9% a year. The paper runs ten years and you can cancel any time after month 36 with no fee, which means anyone describing this as a three-year contract flat, or a ten-year contract flat, is telling you half of it. Make them show you the cancellation clause in writing, including what the provider may do if you cancel inside the first three years. If none of that beats owning for your situation, own.

Get the numbers with the credit taken out of them

Run your bill through the estimator. It takes about a minute, and a real person follows up with figures for your actual roof, escalator included and no expired credit propping them up. If you want the mechanics before the numbers, start withhow the whole model works, or readwhat actually gets recorded against your house, which is the question the tax noise has been drowning out all year.