Ask what American solar owners are paid for exported electricity and the honest answer starts with a refusal. There is no national figure, there is no federal scheme, and a page that gives you one has invented it.
Retail electricity regulation in the United States sits with state public utility commissions. Fifty states, plus territories, plus a large number of municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives that are not regulated by their state commission at all. What you are paid depends on which of those you live under.
That sounds like a reason to give up on the question. It is not, because the number of underlying arrangements is small even though the number of jurisdictions is large.
The three shapes
Nearly every residential export arrangement in the country is a version of one of these. Working out which one is yours is most of the job.
| Arrangement | What you are paid for export | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Full retail net metering | The same rate you pay to import, netted over a billing period | An exported unit and a consumed unit are worth the same, so self-consumption is not worth optimising and a battery earns little |
| Net billing at avoided cost | A wholesale or avoided-cost value, well below retail | A unit you use is worth several times a unit you export, so self-consumption and storage become the whole game |
| Buy-all sell-all | All generation sold at a set rate, all consumption bought at retail | Your consumption pattern stops mattering, because nothing is self-consumed by design |
Rooftop arrays are usually on one of the first two. The third appears mostly inside specific utility programmes rather than as a state-wide default.
The direction of travel over the last decade has been from the first toward the second, and California is the largest example of it. Plenty of states still run full retail net metering. Treating the Californian outcome as the American outcome is the exact error this page exists to prevent.
Four things that modify whichever shape covers you
- Rollover and true-up. Under net metering, surplus credit usually carries into the next month. What happens at the annual true-up varies: some utilities pay the balance out at a low rate, some let it expire. Credit that expires is worth nothing, and that changes the right array size.
- Time-of-use rates. If your import price varies by hour, netting against it means an exported unit at noon and an imported unit at seven in the evening are not the same unit, even under an arrangement described as full retail.
- Non-bypassable charges, fixed charges and minimum bills. This is the part of your bill that solar cannot reduce. A high fixed charge lengthens payback no matter how much the array generates.
- Grandfathering. Most states that changed their rules kept existing customers on the earlier terms for a stated legacy period, and the tariff that applies is usually the one in force when the system was interconnected rather than the one in force now.
How to find out which one covers you
Three steps, in this order. It is an afternoon rather than a research project.
- 1Start with DSIRE, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency. It has run since 1995 at the N.C. Clean Energy Technology Center, N.C. State University, and it is the authoritative public record of state policy. Its net metering map shows what each state currently requires.
- 2Then go to your own utility. State policy sets the floor; the detail that decides your bill is in your utility’s tariff sheet, a public document it is obliged to publish. Municipal utilities and rural cooperatives may not be bound by the state rule at all, which is why this step cannot be skipped.
- 3Then read your own bill. Find how export is described, whether credits roll over, what the true-up does, and which charges are fixed. Those four answers are your actual arrangement, whatever the state summary says.
A quote that does not name the tariff it modelled has not done the second step, and its payback number is decoration.
The worked example
California moved from full retail net metering to net billing in 2023 and published the arithmetic when it did. That makes it the clearest available illustration of what the shift between the first two rows of the table does to a household, and of why a battery changes the answer so much more under the second arrangement than the first.
It is set out in what California NEM 3.0 pays for exported solar. Read it as a case study of the mechanism rather than as a description of your own state, unless your own state is California.
What does not change between states
Everything physical. How much a 6 kW array produces in Denver, what a shaded cell costs, how fast a panel degrades, whether microinverters earn their premium on your roof, how long a battery lasts. None of that is regulated and none of it differs by jurisdiction.
So the sequence that works is to settle the physics first, because it is knowable and it is the same everywhere, then find your tariff, then put the two together. Our estimate tool does the first half for any US location and asks you to supply your own rates for the second, which is the honest division of labour given that we hold no US tariff data.
DSIRE, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency, has been operated since 1995 by the N.C. Clean Energy Technology Center at N.C. State University and maintains the state-by-state net metering record. Utility-specific terms come from each utility’s published tariff. Checked 2026. Source