Does solar increase home value?
If you own the panels, yes — and the reason matters. A buyer is not paying for the hardware, they are paying for the electricity it will still make. That makes the premium a wasting asset: worth most on a young system and nothing on one at the end of its life. If you lease the panels or have a PPA, the answer is no, and the contract can actively cost you buyers.
The number every payback calculator quietly assumes
Every solar payback figure you will read, including ours, runs 25 years and assumes you are still in the house in year 25. Most people are not. Moving cuts the savings short and hands you a resale premium instead — and whether that trade leaves you ahead is a completely different question, with a different answer in almost every state.
What if you move before year 25?
Drag the year you expect to sell. Cash purchase, sized to your bill, on the same model and assumptions as the rest of the site.
| Bill savings you actually collect | -$3,594 |
| Resale premium at year 1060% of the system's life still unused, discounted to today | $3,801 |
| Net, if you move in year 10 | $207 |
| For comparison: never moving, full 25 years | $5,175 |
Selling in year 10 still leaves you ahead. In California a cash purchase breaks even for a mover from year 10 onwards, against year 11 for someone who never moves.
What the research actually found
Two studies do most of the work in this field. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory examined about 22,000 home sales across eight states and found a premium of roughly $4 per installed watt in California and near $3 per watt elsewhere. Zillow, separately, put it at 4.1% of home value.
Both are quoted constantly and both are old. The LBNL sample runs to 2013; the Zillow analysis is from 2019. Neither observed a market without the 30% federal credit, and installed prices have fallen substantially since.
Why we do not use the $3/W figure directly
Installed cost in that era ran about $4–5 per watt, so a $3–4 premium means a fresh array recovered most, not all, of what it cost. Applying that same dollar figure to today's $3.00/W would imply full recovery on day one — the model would then say you can buy solar, sell the house a year later and come out ahead, which is not true. We model the ratio the studies imply instead: about 70% of installed cost for a new system, 80% in California, declining in line with remaining system life. This is the weakest data on the site and we would rather say so than dress it up.
Leased panels and PPAs: the part nobody warns you about
A leased system is not yours. It does not belong to the property, it does not appear in the appraisal, and the bank will not lend against it. That alone means zero added value — which is why we model third-party systems at no premium at all rather than guessing at a number.
The bigger problem is the sale itself. Your buyer has to qualify with the leasing company on their credit and agree to assume the remaining term. If they will not or cannot, the deal stalls. Worse, mortgage lenders generally count the lease payment in the buyer's debt ratios, so the contract can push a borrower out of qualifying for the house entirely. The National Association of Realtors' 2025 sustainability work found 73% of agents were unsure whether local appraisers could even value solar properly.
The usual escape is to buy the contract out before listing, or to discount the house by the buyout. Either way you pay for it. If you expect to move inside the contract term, that cost belongs in the decision from the start — see lease versus PPA and what third-party ownership actually means.
An argument in the other direction, which we have not modelled
There is a case that the premium should be higher now than the studies measured, and it is worth stating because we have not built it in. A buyer choosing between a house with panels and one without is really comparing against the cost of installing their own. That alternative just got about 30% more expensive, because §25D expired and a new installation no longer carries a federal credit. The existing array is unchanged; its substitute got dearer.
We have not adjusted for this because it is reasoning, not measurement — there is no post-expiry sales data yet. But it is the direction of the error, and it means our figures are more likely too low than too high.
Where the resale premium changes the answer, by state
Both columns below are discounted at the same rate, so they compare like with like. The premium arrives years before the bill savings accumulate, and the result is one-sided: in 31 states a seller breaks even earlier than someone who never moves, and in 0 is it the other way round. Moving does not cost you the investment — it changes how you collect on it.
What the premium cannot do is rescue a state where the underlying economics fail. In 16 states no sale year inside 25 years breaks even, because the savings never get far enough ahead of the cost for a declining premium to close the gap. Selling sooner does not help there; it just settles the loss earlier.
| State | Break-even if you stay | Break-even if you sell | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hawaii | Year 5 | Year 1 | 4 years earlier |
| New York | Year 8 | Year 2 | 6 years earlier |
| Massachusetts | Year 9 | Year 4 | 5 years earlier |
| New Jersey | Year 9 | Year 5 | 4 years earlier |
| Illinois | Year 11 | Year 6 | 5 years earlier |
| Rhode Island | Year 10 | Year 6 | 4 years earlier |
| Maine | Year 10 | Year 6 | 4 years earlier |
| New Mexico | Year 15 | Year 8 | 7 years earlier |
| Maryland | Year 14 | Year 9 | 5 years earlier |
| Pennsylvania | Year 15 | Year 9 | 6 years earlier |
| New Hampshire | Year 14 | Year 9 | 5 years earlier |
| California | Year 17 | Year 10 | 7 years earlier |
| Colorado | Year 16 | Year 11 | 5 years earlier |
| Connecticut | Year 17 | Year 12 | 5 years earlier |
| South Carolina | Year 18 | Year 12 | 6 years earlier |
| Delaware | Year 17 | Year 12 | 5 years earlier |
| Wisconsin | Year 17 | Year 12 | 5 years earlier |
| Vermont | Year 18 | Year 15 | 3 years earlier |
| Kansas | Year 18 | Year 16 | 2 years earlier |
| Florida | Year 19 | Year 17 | 2 years earlier |
| Minnesota | Year 19 | Year 17 | 2 years earlier |
| Virginia | Year 19 | Year 17 | 2 years earlier |
| Missouri | Year 19 | Year 17 | 2 years earlier |
| Wyoming | Year 19 | Year 17 | 2 years earlier |
| Arizona | Year 20 | Year 18 | 2 years earlier |
| Oklahoma | Year 20 | Year 18 | 2 years earlier |
| Iowa | Year 21 | Year 19 | 2 years earlier |
| North Carolina | Year 22 | Year 20 | 2 years earlier |
| Montana | Year 23 | Year 21 | 2 years earlier |
| Michigan | Year 23 | Year 22 | 1 year earlier |
| Arkansas | Year 24 | Year 23 | 1 year earlier |
| Nevada | Year 25 | Year 25 | No change |
| West Virginia | Year 25 | Year 25 | No change |
| Nebraska | Year 25 | Year 25 | No change |
| Texas | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Georgia | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Ohio | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Indiana | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Utah | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Washington | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Oregon | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| North Dakota | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Idaho | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| South Dakota | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Alaska | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Alabama | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Mississippi | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Tennessee | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Kentucky | Never | Never | No sale year works |
| Louisiana | Never | Never | No sale year works |
What to take from this
- Own the system if resale matters to you. It is the single biggest determinant of whether the panels add anything at all.
- Moving earlier is not the penalty people assume. On a like-for-like basis the resale premium reaches you sooner than the bill savings would have, so a mover generally breaks even before someone who stays. Expecting to move is not a reason against buying.
- But the premium cannot rescue a bad state. Where the economics fail, no sale year works either — you paid the full cost and collected a fraction of the savings, and selling sooner only settles the loss earlier.
- Keep the paperwork. Appraisers routinely undervalue solar because they have nothing to work from. Production records, warranties and the original invoice do real work at sale.
- Do not add the premium to a payback figure. They are alternatives, not additions: the premium exists because the future savings transfer to the buyer instead of to you.
Full assumptions on the methodology page; state sunlight and rate provenance on the data sources page.
Written and maintained by guarledes . Last reviewed 2026-08-15.