10 Questions to Consider Before Buying Solar Panels

The federal government will subsidize 30% of the cost of your solar project — but only if you complete it by the end of 2025.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 made several important changes to how federal solar tax credits worked. For one, it extended the credits until 2034, allowing homeowners to fit installation into their long-term financial plans. It also raised the tax rebate to 30% of the total cost of installation until 2032, after which it would tail off to 26% and 22% the next two years. There was no cap to the installation cost, either — whether you paid $10,000 or $100,000 for your solar project, you’d get the full value of the credit.

But Congress has drastically curtailed the program under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. The act, passed by Congress and signed by President Trump, ends the residential tax credit “for any expenditures after the date” of December 31, 2025. Effectively, the entire residential solar subsidy is eliminated after that.

“Losing the 30% tax credit will result in systems costing about $9,000 more on average,” said Emily Walker, director of content and insights at EnergySage. As a result, “our best guidance right now is just to have an installation done by the end of this year.”

Walker also warned that a rush on installations could exacerbate existing shortages in solar equipment, a view echoed by Joe Lipari, vice president of projects at Brooklyn SolarWorks.

Uncertainty over tariffs has already created “a classic supply-and-demand problem,” Lipari said. “If there’s concerns about getting materials, then everyone gets what they think they can get, which puts great demand on them, so it’s harder to get those things.”

Lipari believes that established solar installers will adapt and survive if the solar tax credit goes away, “but there’s also a good segment that’s like, ‘let’s make a dollar where we can, and then on January 1st, it’s not our problem anymore — we’ll do something else.’” That could leave their customers without support or remedy if their systems encounter a problem.

We strongly recommend working with an established local installer, rather than a large national firm, whose business models, as detailed by Alana Semuels in Time, tend to prioritize sales over service. (In Semuels’s words, “National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar.”) Tellingly, the first of the “40 Questions to Ask an Installer” suggested by the nonprofit American Solar Energy Society are “What year was your company established?” and “Where are its offices?”