Roughly 4.1 million US homeowners currently receive net metering credits on their electricity bills, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) — and the average household offsets $600 to $1,200 per year in electricity costs through the program. If you have rooftop solar and your panels produce more electricity than your home consumes at any given moment, that surplus flows out to the grid. Net metering is the billing mechanism that decides what you get paid — or credited — for it. The answer varies enormously depending on where you live, which utility serves you, and what rate structure your state has adopted.
Most homeowners are surprised to learn they rarely receive a cash check from their utility. Instead, net metering works like a bank account for kilowatt-hours: excess electricity earns credits at a set rate, those credits roll forward and offset future consumption when your panels underperform (at night, in winter, on cloudy days), and any remaining balance is either paid out at a reduced rate or simply forfeited at the end of the year. Understanding how that credit rate is calculated — and how it differs from what you pay to buy electricity — is the key to projecting your real financial return.
The program is not available everywhere, and its value is shrinking in several states as utilities push for policy changes. As of 2026, 41 states plus Washington D.C. have mandatory net metering rules, but the compensation rates, carryover rules, and system size caps differ so widely that two neighbors in different utility territories can end up with drastically different returns on the same solar investment.
