Solar incentives across South Carolina

What changed in South Carolina, and why older advice is wrong

Three things moved in sequence, and together they reset the arithmetic. One-for-one net metering closed to new applicants on 1 June 2021. Full-retail grandfathering for customers who applied before 16 May 2019 ran out on 31 December 2025. And the federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026.

The practical result is that payback in South Carolina is longer than the figures still published on national comparison sites, which mostly have not been updated. If you are working from an article that applies a 30% federal credit, the net cost it shows you is wrong by thousands of dollars. It is the first thing to check on anything you read, including a quote.

What did not change is the 25% South Carolina state credit on Form TC-38, capped at $3,500 in any one tax year and at 50% of your state liability, with a ten-year carry-forward. Because of that annual cap, most residential systems are claimed across two or three returns rather than recovered at once. Confirm your own eligibility with a tax professional.

None of this makes solar a bad decision here. It makes it a decision that has to be worked rather than assumed, and one where which utility bills you now matters more than it ever has.

The three statewide incentives, and what each is actually worth

South Carolina’s 25% state income tax credit is claimed on Form TC-38. It is capped at $3,500 in any one tax year and at 50% of your annual state liability, with a ten-year carry-forward. The cap is the part that changes how it feels: a system large enough to generate a credit above $3,500 delivers it across two or three returns rather than in one, so it is a stream rather than a discount.

Qualifying residential systems of 20 kW or less are exempt from South Carolina property tax, so adding an array does not raise your assessment. Solar equipment is exempt from state sales tax. Neither of these is claimed; both are simply reflected in what you pay and what you owe.

The 30% federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026. It is not a delay or a reduction. Any incentive page or quote still listing it is out of date, and it is worth treating everything else on that page with the same suspicion.

Utility programmes are where the real variation sits

Santee Cooper runs a genuine upfront rebate, which is the most valuable kind of incentive because the money arrives at installation rather than across two decades. It is also waitlisted, and a waitlisted rebate is not a rebate you can budget against. We confirm whether it is currently available and funded before it appears anywhere in your numbers.

Duke ran PowerPair, which closed in Progress territory and has been at or near capacity in Carolinas. Programmes funded in rounds behave like this, and the practical advice is simply not to build a financial decision on one until it is confirmed open for you specifically.

Dominion offers no upfront rebate at all, which makes its higher retail rate the thing carrying the case there. Cooperatives set their own terms entirely, and we will not print a cooperative figure we have not confirmed.

This is why each page below leads with your utility rather than the state credit. The state credit is the part that is the same everywhere, and therefore the part that tells you least about whether your own system is worth building.

How to use these pages

Start with your town rather than the state. Every page below is grouped by the utility that serves it, because that is the variable doing the most work, and a statewide average is a number that applies to nobody in particular.

Then check the assumption behind any figure you are comparing. Two quotes for a similar system can differ enormously on their twenty-five year totals purely because of what each assumed about export credits and rate escalation, and neither assumption is usually stated on the front page.

If your town is not listed, it is worth asking rather than assuming we do not cover it. We install statewide from a Daniel Island office, and the page list reflects where we have enough verified local detail to publish something useful rather than the limit of where we work.

What we need to give you a real number

Twelve months of electricity usage. Not one bill, twelve. A system sized from a summer peak is oversized for the year and one sized from a mild month disappoints every August, and neither error is visible until the system is on the roof. Twelve months also shows us the shape of your consumption across the day, which is what determines how much of your own production you will actually use rather than export.

Confirmation of who serves your meter, read off the bill rather than inferred from your address. In the Charleston metro especially, territory boundaries run between streets, and modelling the wrong provider produces a confident answer to the wrong question.

Some idea of your roof: its age, its covering, and whether anything has grown up around it since you moved in. Roof age is the detail that most often changes our recommendation, because installing over a roof with a few years left means paying to remove and reinstall the array later.

And your own horizon. A household planning to move within a few years is making a resale decision rather than a payback decision, and those are different questions with genuinely different answers. Telling us early saves everyone a survey.

With those four things we can give you figures rather than a projection built on averages. Without them, anyone quoting you a payback period is guessing with a straight face.

Common questions

What solar incentives does South Carolina offer?

A 25% state income tax credit on Form TC-38 capped at $3,500 per tax year and at 50% of your state liability with a ten-year carry-forward, property-tax exemption on qualifying systems of 20 kW or less, and sales-tax exemption on equipment. The 30% federal credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026.

How does the $3,500 cap work?

It limits how much of the 25% credit you can claim in any one tax year. A system generating a credit above that delivers it across two or three returns using the ten-year carry-forward, so it behaves like a stream rather than an immediate discount.

Is the Santee Cooper rebate available?

It is a genuine upfront rebate but it is waitlisted, and a waitlisted rebate is not something to budget against. We confirm whether it is currently open and funded before it goes into your numbers.

What happened to Duke PowerPair?

It closed in Progress territory and has been at or near capacity in Carolinas. Programmes funded in rounds behave this way, so it is worth confirming a programme is open for you specifically before relying on it.

Does Dominion offer a solar rebate?

No upfront rebate. What carries the case in Dominion territory is the higher retail rate, near 14.4c per kWh, rather than a programme payment.