What solar panels cost in the UK

Most cost pages on the internet quote a range someone made up, or a range collected from installers who want your enquiry. There is a better source, and almost nobody uses it.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes Solar photovoltaic (PV) cost data, an official statistics series derived from the MCS Installation Database. It reports what installations actually cost, per kW, by size band, by region, by month, split between domestic and non-domestic and between new build and retrofit.

Every price on this site comes from that series. Where we cannot source a figure, we say so rather than estimate it.

The headline numbers

Source: Solar photovoltaic (PV) cost data, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, release 2025-26, published 28 May 2026. OGL v3.0. Derived by the department from the MCS Installation Database — prices paid, not prices advertised.

Read the median rather than the mean. The mean sits above it because the distribution has a long upper tail — a minority of expensive installations pull the average up, and you are more likely to be in the middle than in the tail.

In whole-system terms, at the 2025/26 median for the 0–4 kW band:

Rounded to the nearest hundred. Larger systems fall in the 4–10 kW band, where the cost per kW is lower — see cost per kW for why bigger is cheaper per unit and what that does to the arithmetic, and the size pages for what each capacity costs, generates and suits.

Where you are matters less than you would think

Source: Solar photovoltaic (PV) cost data, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, release 2025-26, published 28 May 2026. OGL v3.0. Derived by the department from the MCS Installation Database — prices paid, not prices advertised.

The spread between the cheapest and dearest region is real but modest — and note that it does not follow the sunshine. Wales and Scotland are at the cheaper end; London is the most expensive, by some distance, which is what anyone who has had any trade work done in London would expect.

New build is cheaper, and now we can prove it

We said on the new builds cluster that installing during construction is the cheapest solar there is. The statistics bear it out:

Source: Solar photovoltaic (PV) cost data, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, release 2025-26, published 28 May 2026. OGL v3.0. Derived by the department from the MCS Installation Database — prices paid, not prices advertised.

That gap is the scaffolding, the roof access, the single visit and the volume. It is also the reason the Future Homes Standard requirement is cheaper to meet at build than any equivalent retrofit programme would be.

What this section will and will not do

It will publish what installations cost, from the official series, updated when the series is.

It will not put a number on payback without saying exactly what assumptions produce it. Payback depends on what you pay per kW, what you generate, how much of it you use rather than export, and what electricity costs over twenty years. The first two we can source. The third is self-consumption, which varies by household more than anything else. The fourth nobody knows.

That is why our calculator reports generation and value split between what you use and what you export, and does not print a single payback figure — and why our payback page shows a grid of assumptions rather than a number. A payback figure without its assumptions is a marketing device, not a calculation.