The New Solar Pitch Wants 70% Up Front. You Don't Own the Panels for Six Years.

If you are collecting solar quotes this fall, a new kind of offer is coming to your kitchen table. Pay about 70% of the system price today, take roughly 30% off, and let somebody else own your roof hardware for six years.

The discount is real. The year-six handoff is where the money hides.

Why this product exists at all

The homeowner credit is dead. The IRS says it in one line: “The credit is not available for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025.” Buy panels outright in 2026 and Washington sends you nothing. We walked through what is left back in April.

The credit that survived belongs to whoever owns the equipment as a business. So the industry restructured around that fact. Solar.com describes the prepaid version: you prepay roughly 70% of system value, a third-party developer installs and owns the system through an initial six-year hold, and your discount is “equivalent to the value of the tax credit,” typically 20% to 30% off system cost. Ohm Analytics expects prepaid products to reach about 10% of the residential market by late 2026.

It is not a scam. It is the only way most of a 30% credit still reaches a residential roof. It is also the version with no monthly payment, so there is no escalator quietly climbing 2.99% a year. One less trap, one new one.

Here’s the catch

The pitch says $0 ownership transfer at year six. EnergySage went and read the contracts. Companies market that $0 transfer, but the documents typically say the transfer happens at fair market value, and “most contracts don’t explicitly guarantee that outcome.” Solar.com’s own description has the homeowner buying out “at market value” in year five.

Fair market value is not a price. It is a promise to name a price later, by somebody who already has your money.

Run round numbers. A $25,000 system, prepaid at 70%, costs you $17,500 today. Feels like $7,500 saved. If the year-six valuation lands at $4,000, your real cost is $21,500 and half the discount just walked off. At $8,000, you saved nothing and rented your own roof for six years.

Two more line items nobody circles with a pen. EnergySage says monthly administrative fees apply if you decline ownership at year six. And for all six years the system is third-party owned, which is one of the buckets Fannie Mae tells appraisers to value at zero.

What to do before you prepay

Ask for the year-six buyout in writing, as a dollar figure or a written formula. If the rep will not put it on paper, that is your answer.

Ask what the fee is if you decline ownership at year six, and how long it runs.

Ask who claims the credit and what discount that bought you. Solar.com’s range is 20% to 30%. Come in under that and you are funding somebody’s margin, not your own payback.

Ask which panels and inverters you are allowed to have. Because the owner claims the commercial credit, equipment choice is limited by the foreign-entity restrictions attached to it.

Then put the cash price and the prepay price side by side, with the buyout added on, in our solar payback calculator.

Verdict: your call, but only in writing. A deal where the last number is set six years from now by the other side is not a price. It is a placeholder.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.