Solar payback by state — all 51 records

Why 17 states have a page and the rest have a row

This site used to publish a separate article for all 51 records. They were generated from one template, so the 34 states without hand-written analysis said the same six things in the same order with different numbers substituted in. Measured against each other, those pages were 84 to 94 per cent word-identical, and two of them were 97 per cent identical to each other. That is not a comparison tool; it is the same page printed fifty-one times.

So they were retired. A state keeps a page here when someone has read that state's statute, commission order or tariff and written about what it does to the arithmetic — with the source printed on the page so you can check the work. Today that is 17 states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah. The retired URLs redirect here, where the underlying data for all 51 is still published in full. More states get written up as the research is done rather than as the template is re-run.

What the modeled payback column means

One representative system, identical for every state, so the column compares states rather than quotes: 7 kW DC at $3.20/W installed ($22,400), production estimated from NREL NSRDB irradiance at a 78 per cent performance ratio, 0.5% a year of panel degradation, and a 25-year horizon. No federal credit is applied — Section 25D expired for expenditures after 31 December 2025 — and no state incentive is applied either, which is why the incentive column matters and why the written state pages exist.

The main column applies 3% a year of electricity price escalation. The next column switches that off. Publishing both is deliberate: the gap between them is the single largest assumption on this site, and a payback figure that quietly depends on prices rising for twenty-five years should say so next to the number that does not.

The largest assumption the table cannot show is that every kilowatt-hour produced is worth the full retail rate. In most states it is not: exports are credited at a commission-set rate, at avoided cost, or at whatever a retail provider offers. That is exactly what the written state pages are about, and it is why a state's position in this table is a starting point rather than an answer.

Where the data comes from

• Electricity rates: Calendar year 2024 annual average, from U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Annual, Table 2.10 - Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State (residential, cents per kilowatthour). Retrieved 2026-08-23.
• Sunlight: NREL National Solar Radiation Database state-level annual average daily global horizontal irradiance.
• Incentives on record: summarised from DSIRE and, for the 17 states with a written page, re-checked against the primary source cited on that page.