If you financed solar panels, the payment on your statement may not be the payment you signed up for. A lot of solar loans are built to jump somewhere between month 12 and month 18. The money that was supposed to absorb that jump was the 30% federal tax credit, and for anything switched on in 2026, that credit doesn’t exist.
Here’s how the lender builds these loans. The installer shows you a monthly number that sits under your current power bill. The lender is assuming you will drop a lump sum, usually around 30% of what you borrowed, onto the principal inside the first year and a half. Lenders call it re-amortization. Make the payment and the low number holds for the rest of the term. Miss it and the lender spreads what’s left across the remaining years, and the payment goes up and stays up.
EnergySage runs the math on a $20,000 loan at 6% over 20 years. Apply the $6,000 lump and you’re at roughly $100 a month. Carry the full balance instead and you’re at about $143. Same panels, same roof, about $43 a month more for the next eighteen years. Homeowners who hit that mark without the lump sum report increases in the 30% to 40% range.
Now the part the quote sheet doesn’t say out loud. That $6,000 wasn’t supposed to come from your savings account. It was the Section 25D credit. The IRS sentence is one line long: “The credit is not available for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025.”
So a payment schedule built around a 25D refund is built around a check the government stopped writing. If your system went live in 2026 and your loan still carries a re-amortization assumption, the installer quoted you a payment nobody expected you to keep. They picked that number to win a comparison against your utility bill.
Pull your loan documents this week. Search them for “re-amortization,” “buydown,” or any scheduled payment change, and find the deadline. Then call the servicer and ask two questions in this order: what is my payment if I pay nothing extra, and what is the last date to make the lump sum? Write both answers down. If the answer to the first question is a number you can’t carry, you want to know that now, not on the statement where it shows up.
If you installed in 2025, you may still have the credit in hand. Confirm you actually claimed it on Form 5695, and confirm the money reached the loan, not your checking account. Unused amounts from an eligible 2025 install still carry forward.
If you’re shopping for solar right now, make it simple. Ask for the monthly payment that assumes no prepayment at all, and treat that as the real price. Run it against your actual utility spend in our solar calculator before you sign anything, and read how the financing structures compare in our solar financing guide.
The panels will produce what they produce. The loan is the part somebody gets to design.
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