Is the price on your solar quote normal?
Every other calculator here takes your price and tells you what it works out to. None of them could tell you whether the price itself was reasonable. This one can, because New York publishes the contract price of every system it connects to the grid. Enter the two numbers at the top of your quote and see where it sits against 12,984 systems installed in the last 24 months.
In Consolidated Edison the median household paid $4.93/W, and the middle half paid between $3.78 and $6.70. That is 4,505 systems registered in the last 24 months.
At the median a system this size would be $40,426. Yours is $8,926 less than that.
A price above the median is not proof of anything on its own. A steep or shaded roof, a panel or inverter upgrade, a main service panel replacement or a battery all move this number for real reasons. What it tells you is what to ask about.
Why nobody could answer this before
The number the industry quotes is Berkeley Lab’s Tracking the Sun, a national report published once a year. It is a fine report and it cannot answer your question, because a national average has nothing to say about the two companies bidding on your roof this month.
New York solves it by accident. The state requires a system to be registered before the utility will switch it on, and the register records the contract price and the system size on every row. These are not estimates. They are what 12,984 households signed for, through July 2026.
What the register shows
Statewide the median owner-purchased system came to $3.82 a watt, with the middle half of the market between $3.19 and $5.02.
Where you live inside the state matters more than you would think
The statewide figure is the least useful cut of it. Territory by territory the median runs from $4.93 a watt on the dearest network to $3.41 on the cheapest. On an 8 kW system that is a gap of about $12,160 for the same amount of electricity, between two households a couple of hours apart.
What this does not tell you
It is a comparison, not a verdict, and a quote above the median is not evidence of anything by itself. A steep or shaded roof costs more to work on. A main service panel that has to be replaced first costs more. Premium modules, a microinverter on every panel, a battery, a ground mount, a re-roof underneath: all of them move this number for honest reasons, and none of them are recorded on the register.
What a gap gives you is a question to ask. If your quote is a dollar a watt above the territory median, the installer should be able to say what the extra dollar buys. A good one will. That answer is worth more than the number on this page.
Leases and power purchase agreements are excluded throughout. Both appear on the registers with a cost attached, but it is the developer’s cost basis rather than a price any household was quoted, and comparing your quote against it would be comparing two different things. If you are weighing one of those, the buy versus lease calculator is the page you want.
Where the numbers come from
One public register, rebuilt in full rather than sampled: NYSERDA’s solar register, refreshed monthly. It holds 189,000 rows; 12,984 of them are owner-purchased residential systems from the last 24 months, which is what the figures above are drawn from.
Systems under 2 kW or over 30 kW are dropped, as are prices under $5,000 or over $200,000 and any implied price outside $1 to $12 a watt. Those are filing errors rather than sales. The headline figure is the median rather than the mean, because a handful of very expensive systems drag a mean somewhere no actual buyer is. Full method on the methodology page.
California keeps the same register and publishes it under terms that permit personal review only, not republication, so it is not used here. For the other forty-eight states no such register exists at all. If either changes, this page grows; until then it answers for New York and says so.
Written and maintained by guarledes . Last reviewed 2026-08-22.