Fairfax County Solar Incentives 2026: What Is Left After the Tax Credit

Section 25D, the 30 percent Residential Clean Energy Credit, ended for expenditures made after December 31, 2025. The IRS page for the credit carries the cutoff. If you paid for and placed a system in service in 2025, you claim it on your 2025 return. If you are signing a contract in 2026, there is no federal residential credit on the table, and any proposal that still shows a 30 percent line is out of date.

We price without it. The $2.40–$2.85/W cash band on our solar pages is the installed number for modules, racking, inverter, and interconnection labor, and nothing in it assumes a credit that no longer exists. That matters when you compare proposals, because a competitor who quotes a "net of credit" price in 2026 is showing you a number you cannot reach.

The commercial credit, Section 48E, is a different program. A leasing company or power purchase agreement provider that owns the array on your roof is a business, so it can claim the commercial credit on the equipment through 2027 and price some of that into your monthly payment. That is the pitch behind most 2026 lease and PPA offers.

We sell cash and loan installs, and here is the reason in one sentence: with a lease, the company owns the array, the SRECs, the tax benefit, and the escalator clause, and you own a 20 to 25 year contract that follows the house. With a cash or financed purchase you own the equipment, every SREC, the net metering credits, and the property tax exemption, and the payback math below is yours. If a lease still fits your situation, read the FTC guidance on solar contracts before you sign, and check who owns the panels when you sell the home.

Dominion asked the State Corporation Commission to replace annual net metering with half-hour netting and an export credit rate, to take ownership of customer renewable energy certificates, and to add application fees. The Commission's final order in case PUR-2025-00079, entered April 30, 2026, kept the program that matters to a Fairfax homeowner.

Four points from the order. Excess kilowatt-hours you send to the grid are still credited one to one against kilowatt-hours you buy, netted over a twelve-month period. The SRECs your array earns stay yours, and the order says plainly that the company does not own the RECs created by customer generators. New net metering customers pay an administrative charge of $1 per month. Any excess that is still on the account at the end of the twelve-month period is cashed out at $0.05829 per kilowatt-hour, which is the avoided cost rate, so a system sized to your usage keeps its value inside the retail credit. Customers who interconnected before the order took effect keep their existing terms.

The practical rule is unchanged: size the array to the bill, not past it. Dominion limits residential systems to 150 percent of expected annual consumption, and the year-end cash-out rate is a fraction of the retail rate, so the last few panels past your usage are the least valuable ones on the roof.

A solar renewable energy certificate is created every time your array produces 1,000 kilowatt-hours. Virginia utilities have to retire a growing number of them under the Virginia Clean Economy Act, so they buy them from homeowners through brokers and exchanges. A 10 kW array producing about 12,500 kWh a year earns 12 SRECs a year. You register the system once, the meter reports production, and the broker pays you as the certificates sell.

Prices move. The Flett Exchange Virginia board showed 2026 vintages near $22.50 in September 2026, and the Virginia market has traded between $20 and $50 since the program began. At those prices a 10 kW array earns about $240 to $600 a year, and $270 at the September 2026 print. Treat SRECs as a bonus on top of the bill savings, not as the reason to buy. The SCC order confirmed the certificates belong to you, which is one more reason to own the array rather than lease it.

Fairfax County Land Development Services waives the permit fee for residential solar. The residential solar permit is still a real permit with plan review and inspection, and we pull it, but the county does not charge for it. The county's Going Solar page is the official statement of the waiver.

The Department of Tax Administration exempts certified solar energy equipment from real estate tax for five years. The application is the Solar Energy Equipment, Facilities or Devices Certification for Real or Personal Property Tax Exemption form, and the steps are simple. Submit the completed form with the permit application at the Permit Application Center, 12055 Government Center Parkway. After the installation passes inspection, Land Development Services forwards the certification to the Department of Tax Administration. The Department calculates the exemption value from the installed cost and sends a confirmation letter. There is no fee to apply. We include the form in the permit package for every Fairfax County install so the exemption starts with the first assessment after the inspection.

The City of Fairfax is an independent city with its own permit office and its own tax exemption. Inside the city the solar energy equipment exemption runs ten years instead of five. The city's tax exemption page carries the term and the application. If your mailing address says Fairfax, the parcel record settles which one applies, and we confirm it before the permit is filed so the right form goes in with the right office.

Both exemptions rest on Virginia Code 58.1-3661, the state law that lets localities exempt certified solar energy equipment from property tax, and it covers residential systems up to 25 kilowatts. Every rooftop array we install in Fairfax is inside that limit.

Virginia does not publish a residential sales-tax exemption for solar equipment; the county permit fee waiver, the property tax exemption, and net metering are the confirmed incentives.

Dominion serves most of Fairfax County, but NOVEC, the Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative, serves large parts of Centreville, Chantilly, Clifton, Fairfax Station, western Burke, and parts of Lorton and Springfield. NOVEC runs its own net metering program under the same state statute, with its own interconnection application and its own terms for excess generation. The SCC order on Dominion does not govern NOVEC. We confirm the serving utility from your bill on the first call, file the interconnection with the right utility, and size the array to that utility's rules. A NOVEC address still gets the Fairfax County permit fee waiver and the property tax exemption, because those are county programs, not utility programs.

Dominion's Virtual Power Plant is a battery program, not a solar program, and it is worth knowing about before you decide whether to add a battery to the array. Dominion filed the pilot on December 1, 2025, launches it in 2026 subject to approval, and runs it through July 1, 2028. Enrolled home batteries let Dominion draw on stored energy during peak demand events, and Dominion says most customers join at no cost and can earn credits or payments for taking part. The listed batteries we design around are the kind the program is built for. If backup power is on your list, the pilot turns the battery from a pure resilience purchase into one with a small annual return, and the array charges it for free on every sunny day.

Here is the math for a 10 kW array at our published band, with the assumptions in the open so you can swap in your own bill. A Northern Virginia roof produces about 1,250 kWh per kW per year, so a 10 kW array produces about 12,500 kWh. At the Virginia average residential rate of about 17 cents per kWh published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), that production is worth $2,153 a year on the bill, credited one to one under net metering as long as the array is sized to your usage.

Simple payback without SRECs: $24,000–$28,500 divided by $2,153 a year is 11.1 to 13.2 years. With SRECs at the September 2026 price, add $270 a year and the range tightens to 9.9 to 11.8 years. At the top of the historical SREC range, $600 a year, the payback is 8.7 to 10.4 years. Equipment warranties on the modules run 25 years, so the array keeps producing for a decade or more past the simple payback point on these numbers.

Two things move the result more than anything else. Your rate: the number on your bill is the number to use, and Dominion's base rates rose on January 1, 2026 with a second step on January 1, 2027, which shortens the payback. Your roof: shade, orientation, and a north-facing slope cut production, which is why the site visit runs a shade analysis before we write a number. A panel upgrade, a battery, or an EV charger is itemized separately on the proposal and has its own value, so it does not belong in this payback line.

Every program above links to its official page in the Sources block at the end of this guide, and each figure was checked on 2026-09-05. Rates, SREC prices, and utility programs change; the page you are reading carries the date it was last reviewed, and the written proposal carries the numbers for your address on the day you sign. The typical 8 to 12 kW rooftop band on our solar pages is $19,000–$34,000 at $2.40–$2.85/W, cash.