Net metering by state, and what it is actually worth

The four regimes

Full retail net metering — 30 of 50 states

Florida, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, North Carolina, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Virginia, South Carolina, New Mexico, Maine, Delaware, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Wyoming still credit an exported kilowatt-hour at the same price they charge for one. Your meter effectively runs backwards. This is the most favourable treatment available and it is what almost every online solar calculator silently assumes for everybody.

It is also the arrangement utilities lobby hardest to end, and the trend only runs one way. A 25-year model resting on full retail net metering is making a policy forecast, not just a financial one.

Partial credit — 7 states

New Hampshire, Vermont, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Idaho, and Michigan pay a defined fraction of retail. Nevada's 75% is locked for 20 years from installation, which is a genuine guarantee; most are set by regulators and can move.

Avoided cost or wholesale-linked — 13 states

Georgia, South Dakota, Mississippi, Utah, Hawaii, Alaska, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, California, Indiana, and Ohio pay something closer to what the utility would have paid a power plant. The label “net metering” often survives in these states even though the economics have been gutted — Ohio credits only the generation component of your tariff, Indiana closed net metering to new customers in 2022, and California's NEM 3.0 pays avoided-cost rates against the second-highest retail price in the country.

In this group, self-consumption stops being an optimisation and becomes the whole strategy. Shifting laundry, dishwashing, EV charging and heat pump run-time into daylight converts a cheap exported kilowatt-hour into an expensive avoided one. A battery does the same thing with hardware, and this is the only group where one can pay for itself — see the battery calculator.

Retail credit with a charge on top — 1 state

Connecticut belongs in its own category, and it is the one to watch. Exports are credited at full retail, which reads well in a summary, but a separate charge is levied on everything the array generates — $0.040/kWh in Connecticut . A comparison that only looks at the export percentage will read this as a top-tier state. We model the charge directly, which is why Connecticut sits lower in our ranking than its electricity price alone would suggest.

What to ask before you sign

• What rate does this quote assume for exported power? If it valued every kilowatt-hour at retail and your state does not, the savings figure is wrong by the amount in the table above.
• Is the rate locked, and for how long? Nevada locks 20 years, North Carolina's bridge rate locks 15 but closes to new applicants at the end of 2026. Most states lock nothing.
• Is there a charge on generation, not just a credit on export? Connecticut's is 4.02 cents per kilowatt-hour for 2026 enrollees.
• What share of my output will I actually use on site? We assume 35% without storage. If a quote assumes more, ask what it is based on.

Sunlight and rate figures come from NREL PVWatts v8 and EIA; every state record carries its own provenance on the data sources page, and the modelling assumptions are on the methodology page.