Do Solar Panels Add Value to Your House?

Yes, on the available UK evidence, solar panels you own add value to your home, and the best study on the question puts the premium at 6.1 to 7.1 per cent of the sale price. That is the finding of peer-reviewed research published in 2024 that analysed around five million UK property listings. But the same body of evidence carries two warnings that installer marketing pages tend to leave out: the data comes from the Feed-in Tariff years, and panels held on a roof lease can make a house harder to sell rather than easier.

This page separates what has actually been measured from what gets asserted. Every figure here is traced to the study, government release or trade body that produced it, with the date, because the gap between those sources and the numbers circulating online is wide.

What the research actually found

The strongest UK evidence is a 2024 paper in the journal Energy Economics, which found a selling price premium of 6.1 to 7.1 per cent for houses with solar panels. Elias Asproudis, Cigdem Gedikli, Oleksandr Talavera and Okan Yilmaz used a causal machine learning method on around five million Zoopla listings, matched against Land Registry Price Paid records. On an average selling price of £230,536 in their sample, the premium worked out at £14,062 to £16,368.

Two details matter more than the headline. First, the authors also ran the more conventional methods as a check, and the lowest estimate any of them produced was 3.5 per cent. So the honest range is wider than the headline figure suggests. Second, the paper reports a declining trend in the premium over time, while concluding that a positive premium persists across the years studied.

The other number you will see quoted is around £1,800, from The Value of Solar Property, published by the trade body Solar Energy UK in October 2021 and based on statistical analysis of more than five million property transactions. It is worth knowing where that figure comes from before leaning on it. Solar Energy UK represents the solar industry, and its own framing at the time was that £1,800 amounted to nearly half the up-front cost of an installation. That was a reasonable claim against 2021 prices. Against the Energy Saving Trust's current benchmark of around £7,600 for a typical system, £1,800 is closer to a quarter.

Sources: Asproudis, Gedikli, Talavera and Yilmaz, "Returns to solar panels in the housing market: A meta learner approach", Energy Economics vol. 137 (2024); Solar Energy UK, October 2021; An Investigation of the Effect of EPC Ratings on House Prices, report for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, June 2013.

Why the EPC rating is the mechanism

Solar panels lift a home's EPC score because the rating is a cost metric, and generating your own electricity lowers the modelled bill. The government's own description is blunt about this. In its technical annex on what EPCs measure, published as part of the consultation on reforming the energy performance of buildings regime, it says of the Energy Efficiency Rating: "Despite its name, the EER is a form of energy cost metric, based on the modelled estimated fuel bill of the property." The same annex confirms the certificate accounts for microgeneration such as solar photovoltaics.

That matters because the EPC is the one energy number every buyer sees. You must have an EPC when you sell, it rates the property from A to G, and it is valid for ten years, according to gov.uk. It goes on the listing. It is the only part of your solar investment a buyer encounters before they walk through the door.

How much a band improvement is worth is where the evidence gets old. The most-cited UK figure comes from research carried out for the Department of Energy and Climate Change and published in June 2013, which analysed 325,950 English property transactions between 1995 and 2011. It found that against a band G baseline, homes in bands A or B sold for 14 per cent more on average across England, with band C at 10 per cent and band D at 8 per cent. Regional variation was enormous: 38 per cent in the North East, 12 per cent in London.

Treat those percentages as direction rather than arithmetic. The government's own notes at the time flagged that the report had not undergone full peer review, that there was no information on home improvements made between two sales, and that results were not statistically significant in some regions. The sale data also stops in 2011, before the Feed-in Tariff had taken hold and long before current energy prices.

The catch: the evidence comes from the Feed-in Tariff era

Every major UK study of solar and house prices draws on transactions from a period when panels came with a government-backed income attached, and that income is no longer available to new installations. The Asproudis paper uses listings from 2012 to 2018. The Feed-in Tariff opened in April 2010 and closed to new applicants on 1 April 2019.

That is a real limitation, and it is our reading of the evidence rather than a finding the papers state. A buyer in 2016 purchasing a house with panels was often buying an index-linked payment stream running for twenty years. A buyer today is purchasing a system whose value is the electricity it offsets plus whatever the Smart Export Guarantee pays for exports. SEG rates are set by each supplier rather than by government, and the Energy Saving Trust puts the typical figure at around 12p per unit. Those are not the same asset, and the declining premium the paper observed over its own study window is at least consistent with that reading.

The counterweight is that electricity got a great deal more expensive after the study period ended. Under the Ofgem price cap for 1 July to 30 September 2026, electricity costs 26.11p per kWh on a direct debit tariff, so every unit a buyer does not have to import is worth more than it was in 2018. Whether that offsets the loss of Feed-in Tariff income has not been measured. Anyone telling you it definitely has, or definitely has not, is guessing. Our guide to SEG versus the Feed-in Tariff sets out exactly what changed between the two schemes.

When solar makes a house harder to sell

The single biggest risk to a sale is a lease of your roof space, the arrangement behind most "free solar" deals from the Feed-in Tariff years. If a provider installed panels at no cost, it almost certainly kept ownership of them and took a lease of your rooftop or airspace in return, collecting the Feed-in Tariff while you got the free electricity.

The Law Society's explanatory notes to the TA6 property information form, sixth edition, state the problem in one sentence: "Even if the seller's mortgage lender has accepted the lease arrangements, a buyer's lender might not do the same." Your own lender's approval does not transfer with the house.

The lending side confirms it. UK Finance's Mortgage Lenders' Handbook guidance on solar panels notes that most lenders' mortgage conditions require the lender's consent to any lease, including a lease of roof space, with requirements set out at clause 5.20 for England and Wales. The accompanying UK Finance and BSA guidance is explicit about what happens at the point of sale: where a buyer seeks a mortgage on a property with an existing panel lease, the lender will review it, and if it does not meet their requirements "they may request that the lease is varied, or may choose not to lend on the property."

The rules are not uniform across the UK. For Northern Ireland the relevant clause is 5.14, and UK Finance states plainly that a lease of roof space is not acceptable to lenders there; a lease of rights is required instead. For Scotland, UK Finance says there is at present no guidance at all, which means Scottish sellers in this position should expect their solicitor to treat each lender case by case.

One more thing worth knowing if you are considering signing such a lease today rather than selling under one: the UK Finance and BSA guidance warns that proceeding without your lender's consent, where consent is required, may breach your mortgage terms and conditions, and that even if the lease is registered the lender may not be bound by it without that consent.

If you own your panels outright, most of this does not apply

Panels bought and paid for are a fixture of the house, they transfer with it, and no third party has an interest in your roof. There is no lease for a buyer's lender to object to, because there is no lease. This is the normal position for anyone buying solar today, since the free-installation model was built on Feed-in Tariff income that new systems cannot claim.

What a buyer will reasonably want to know is the age of the system and what is coming. The Energy Saving Trust puts panel life at 25 years or more, but says the inverter needs replacing after around 12 years. Most inverters carry a minimum five-year warranty, often extendable up to 15, and the Trust warns that a 15-year warranty can cost almost as much as a replacement inverter. A ten-year-old array is worth less to a buyer than a two-year-old one for that reason alone, and a well-informed buyer will price it in.

If your system includes battery storage, the same logic applies with a shorter clock, since batteries have a working life measured in years rather than decades. Have the documentation ready either way.

The paperwork a buyer's solicitor will ask for

Question 5.6 of the TA6 property information form covers solar power systems, and it asks whether the system is owned or leased, when it was installed, and for details of any agreements. The Law Society's guidance tells sellers to contact their solar supplier to get this information, and where free electricity or Feed-in Tariff payments are involved, to attach a copy of the energy bill and any supplier agreements to the form.

Get these together before you market the house rather than after an offer:

• The MCS certificate. Proof the system was installed to the recognised standard by a certified installer using certified products. Note that MCS itself states a certificate is not a mandatory or legal requirement for an installation, so an older or self-built system may not have one.
• Any lease or supplier agreement, in full, if a provider owns the panels.
• Feed-in Tariff or Smart Export Guarantee correspondence, showing what is being paid and by whom.
• The DNO notification, confirming the connection was registered with your network operator. Our guide to G98 and G99 grid connections explains what this document is.
• Inverter and panel warranties, plus the installation date.
• Any planning or listed building consent, if your property needed it. See the permitted development rules for each UK nation.

If you cannot find the MCS certificate, go to your original installer first. MCS will only generate a copy where that installer is no longer certified or no longer trading, it can only issue copies to the current system owner or their legal representative, and it charges £30 plus VAT, which is £36 in total, with the certificate provided within 10 working days of payment.

So should you fit solar to add value?

Fit solar because the electricity pays, and treat any resale premium as a bonus you cannot bank on. The measured premium of 6.1 to 7.1 per cent sits against a typical system cost of around £7,600 on the Energy Saving Trust's July 2026 figures, so on a £300,000 house the research-implied uplift would more than cover the install. That sounds decisive until you remember the estimate has a floor of 3.5 per cent in the same paper, was measured on Feed-in Tariff era sales, and describes an average across five million listings rather than a promise about your house in your street.

The returns you can actually model are the ones on the bill. The Energy Saving Trust's July 2026 payback figures put a typical system at roughly 9 years in London, 9 in Aberystwyth, 10 in Manchester and 11 in Stirling, with export payments included, covering England, Scotland and Wales. Those numbers do not depend on a buyer agreeing with you about what panels are worth. Our guide to whether solar panels are worth it in the UK works through that case, and the full solar panel cost guide covers what you would actually pay.

If you are fitting panels partly with an eye on selling, two practical points follow from the evidence. Own the system outright, so no lease can complicate the conveyancing. And use an MCS-certified installer, because the certificate is the document that makes the installation legible to a buyer's solicitor and to the Smart Export Guarantee alike.