Are solar panels worth it in 2026? Here is the actual maths

The short answer

Yes, for most UK homes. Solar costs around £1,000 per kWp installed, and a kilowatt hour you generate and use yourself is worth whatever you would otherwise have paid for it, which under the Ofgem price cap for October to December 2026 is 26.32p on direct debit. A kilowatt hour you export instead is worth your export rate, anywhere from a standard 4p up to 20p on the best bundled solar and battery tariffs. That gap between what a self-used unit is worth and what an exported one earns is the whole of the arithmetic, and it is worth doing honestly rather than taking someone's word for it.

What a system actually costs

Clearline's own installed pricing runs at £1,000 per kWp of solar, which is the figure the packages on this site and the calculator are built around. A modest 10-panel array on the LONGi Hi-MO X10 530W panel is 5.3 kWp, so around £5,300 installed. A larger 14-panel roof is 7.4 kWp, around £7,400. Adding storage is a second, separate line: a Tesla Powerwall 3 is £6,350 installed for 13.5 kWh, and a Duracell Dura16 is £4,450 installed with solar for 14.4 kWh usable. None of that is a deposit or a headline teaser rate. It is the installed price, and it is the number the payback arithmetic below runs on.

The self-consumption problem, and why it decides everything

A roof full of panels only pays back quickly if you are home to use what they make. Solar generation peaks around the middle of the day. Most households are out at work or school through exactly that window, which is the single biggest reason panel count alone does not answer whether solar is worth it for a given house.

This is also why battery storage changes the answer for a lot of homes, not by generating more electricity but by letting you use more of what you already generate. A battery charges from the midday surplus and discharges it back in the evening, converting units that would otherwise have been exported at 4p to 20p into units used at home worth 26.32p. Our how a home battery works guide covers the mechanism, and is a battery worth it without solar covers the other end of that question.

Export rates, and why they are not all the same electricity

The Smart Export Guarantee obliges every licensed supplier to pay something for electricity you send back to the grid, but it does not fix a rate, and the spread between tariffs is large. As published on our own tariffs page, a standard open Smart Export Guarantee rate sits around 4p per kWh, Octopus Outgoing pays a fixed 12p, and OVO's SEG Install Exclusive tariff pays up to 20p for solar paired with a battery, or 15p for solar alone. Choosing the tariff is a genuinely separate decision from choosing the kit, and it moves the payback maths as much as panel count does.

Import rate from the Ofgem price cap, checked 3 September 2026. Export rates from Clearline's own tariffs page, checked against supplier terms and subject to change with 30 days notice.

Regional generation is not the same everywhere

A kilowatt peak of solar does not produce the same number of kilowatt hours a year everywhere in the UK. The south coast sees meaningfully more annual sun hours than the Scottish Highlands, and pitch, orientation and shading move the figure further on top of that. Clearline models generation per county from satellite irradiance data rather than a single national average, which is why every county page on this site carries its own calculator. That is also the honest way to answer whether solar is worth it for your specific house, because a national payback figure flattens exactly the variable that matters most for your roof.

What tends to make the answer better, and what tends to make it worse

• Home during the day. Retired households, home workers and anyone with daytime EV charging use far more of their own generation than a house empty from 8 until 6.
• South, east or west facing roof with little shade. North-facing roofs still generate, covered in our direct sunlight guide, but they generate less over a year.
• A battery on a genuinely cheap off-peak tariff. Off-peak rates from around 8p per kWh let a battery top up overnight and displace expensive daytime import even on a dull generation day.
• High baseline electricity use. A home already using 4,000 kWh or more a year, especially with an EV or a heat pump, has more expensive import to displace, which improves the return.
• An empty house through the day with no battery and no off-peak strategy. This is the profile where most of the generation gets exported at the lowest available rate, and it is the case worth modelling carefully before committing to a large array.

The part that is not just about the bill

There is a second return that a pure payback calculation leaves out. A 2024 academic study by Swansea University and the University of Birmingham, using close to 1.5 million UK property listings, found homes with solar panels sold for a 6.1% to 7.1% premium, around £14,062 to £16,368 on average, though estate agents report the effect is inconsistent and more about a home's saleability than its formal valuation. We cover that evidence properly, including the more cautious industry estimates, in do solar panels increase home value.

Worked example: a typical semi

Take a 10-panel, 5.3 kWp array at £5,300 installed, on a house that manages to self-consume around 30% of what it generates without a battery, exporting the rest at a 12p fixed rate. Every unit self-used is worth 26.32p; every unit exported is worth 12p. Add a battery and that self-consumption share typically rises substantially, because the battery banks the midday surplus for the evening peak instead of letting it flow straight out to the grid. The exact crossover point, in years, depends on your annual generation, which is a function of your postcode, roof and shading. Rather than publish one national number that fits nobody's roof, put your own postcode into the solar calculator and get the figure for your house.

What worth it does not mean

Worth it does not mean identical for every roof, and it does not mean the fastest possible payback beats every other consideration. A shaded, small, north-facing roof on a house that is empty all day is a genuinely weaker case than a large south-facing roof on a home with daytime occupancy, and both deserve an honest model rather than a universal yes. What the numbers above do show is that the underlying economics, current import prices against current installed costs and export rates, favour solar for the median UK home in 2026, and that the specific answer for any one house is a short calculation away rather than a guess.