Florida solar rebates and incentives: 2024 guide

Florida is a fantastic place for rooftop solar. Most days are sunny, the solar policies are generally favorable—and most homes can comfortably handle all their heating, cooling, cooking, and driving with electricity. The only limit on how much money solar panels can save you is the size of your roof.

Florida’s best incentive is a robust net-metering policy, which awards homeowners with full cash credit for any solar they send to the grid. It doesn’t lower the cost of installation, but it does help make your solar power more valuable and speed up your payback period. And of course, there’s the federal solar tax credit, too, which brings down the cost of installation significantly.

The single biggest solar incentive in Florida is actually a federal tax credit.

Residential Clean Energy Credit

The Residential Clean Energy Credit, formerly known as the federal investment tax credit (ITC), can reduce your solar panel system's cost by 30%. Your entire system, including all the equipment, labor, permitting, and sales tax, qualifies for the ITC.

When you file your taxes, you can claim this incentive as a credit towards your federal tax bill. Just keep in mind that to qualify for the ITC, you need to purchase your system either with cash or a solar loan–if you lease your system, you won't be eligible. 

You also need a high enough tax bill, though you can roll over any remaining credit year-to-year until the end of 2034 when the ITC expires. The only time you might be eligible for a direct payment for the ITC is if you're a tax-exempt entity, like a nonprofit organization.

Local incentives 

A handful of cities and towns around Florida offer grants, rebates, or low-interest loans to homeowners that install solar panels, including Boynton Beach, Dunedin, and Tallahassee.

In addition to the great rebates and incentives above, Florida also offers tax exemptions for solar panel systems. The solar sales tax exemption ensures that you won't have to pay a sales tax on your system, while the solar property tax exemption means you don't need to pay a higher property tax for adding solar panels to your house.

If you connect your solar panel system to the grid, you can benefit from net metering—which is really the ultimate incentive for rooftop solar, even more than big rebates and tax credits. 

Under net metering, the sun doesn’t need to shine all the time to get massive value from your solar panels. Your electric utility company essentially works like a bank account for all the energy your panels produce in a given month.

When the sun shines, your home’s electrical system first takes as much power as it needs from the solar panels. If the panels make any excess energy, it gets sent back onto the grid, and your utility company gives you full credit for all of it on your energy bill. 

When the sun isn’t shining and you need grid electricity to power your home, the utility company just starts drawing against your credits. You won’t pay for electricity until those credits run out.

A few nuances to keep in mind:

• Solar metering in Florida is credited in kWh, rather than dollars. Any monthly fixed costs (like meter connection fees) may need to be paid in cash—kWh credits won’t apply.

• Credits roll over from month to month, but reset at the end of a 12-month period. Any excess credits will be converted to cash at a reduced rate per kWh, and paid out to you. The rate is typically 3 to 5 cents per kWh, depending on the utility. Different utilities also have different “true up” dates, when the counter resets.

Florida doesn't offer any state-specific battery incentives. Several cities and municipal electric utility companies (including Jacksonville, Orlando, and Lakeland) previously offered rebates for solar batteries, but as of early 2024 they all appear to have expired.

Solar batteries don’t make much financial sense for Florida homeowners anyway, because the net metering policy is so consumer friendly that you don’t really benefit from hoarding your solar power. None of the utility companies in Florida offer a virtual power plant program for homeowners, either.

However, if you’re interested in a battery as a backup power source for your home, all batteries above 3 kWh in size are eligible for the 30% federal tax credit.