Where Sunburst installs solar in Georgia

What decides payback in Georgia

Start with what Georgia does not have. There is no state income tax credit for residential solar, and the 30% federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026. Any Georgia proposal that subtracts either one from your net cost is describing a world that no longer exists, and that is the first thing to check on a competitor quote.

What remains is the export credit, and in Georgia the gap between what you pay for power and what you are paid for power is wide. A Georgia Power customer exporting to the grid earns roughly 7.2 cents per kilowatt-hour under the avoided-cost structure, while buying back at a retail rate near 13 cents. Every kilowatt-hour you generate and use yourself is therefore worth close to double a kilowatt-hour you export.

That single fact reshapes what a sensible Georgia system looks like. Oversizing an array to bank credits works badly when credits are worth a little over half of retail. Sizing closer to your daytime load, shifting what you can into daylight hours, and taking battery storage seriously all matter more in Georgia than they do one state east. A Georgia system designed as though it were a South Carolina system is simply the wrong system.

Property-tax treatment is the part we will not pretend to be sure about. Reputable sources variously describe a $25,000 exemption, a full exemption, and no statewide exemption at all. We would rather send you to the Georgia Department of Revenue and your county assessor than print a confident figure that turns out to be wrong at the moment it matters. The same caution applies to sales tax.

Territorial service and why your address decides your provider

Georgia is unusual. The 1973 Territorial Service Act assigns electric service territory by geography, so for most homes there is one provider and no choice about it. Georgia Power serves a large share of the metro areas we work in; elsewhere an electric membership corporation or a municipal utility holds the territory, and each sets its own rate structure and export terms.

This is why the market list on this page is grouped by provider. Two Georgia homes twenty miles apart with identical roofs can have materially different economics purely because of which utility holds the territory, and there is no version of a good quote that skips confirming which one yours is.

It also means comparison shopping in Georgia is about the installer and the design, not the utility. You cannot switch provider to improve your export rate. What you can change is how much of your own generation you consume, which is a design decision made before anything is ordered.

Permits, interconnection and HOAs in Georgia

Permitting is handled by the local city or county, and the metro Atlanta jurisdictions we work in each run their own process and timeline. Interconnection runs separately through your utility. We handle both, and the individual city pages linked below name the authority for that specific market.

Georgia’s HB 389 is genuinely useful but narrower than it is often reported. It prevents an association prohibiting rooftop solar or charging permit fees for it, but only for association rules created, renewed or modified on or after 1 January 2026. An older covenant may not be covered at all. If your neighbourhood’s covenants predate that and have not been touched since, the protection may not reach you, and it is worth reading the actual document before assuming.

That is an uncomfortable thing for an installer to tell a prospective customer, and it is exactly the kind of detail that gets left out of a sales conversation. We would rather you find out from us at the design stage than from your association after the panels are on the roof.

What the process actually looks like

The first conversation is a bill review, not a site visit. We need twelve months of usage to size anything honestly, because a system sized off a summer peak is oversized for the year and a system sized off a mild month underperforms every August. If you can send a recent statement, most of the guesswork disappears before anyone comes out.

The survey covers roof age and structure, shading across the year rather than on the day we visit, your main panel and service capacity, and where the equipment can physically go. Roof age is the one that most often changes the plan: putting an array on a roof with a few years left means paying to remove and reinstall it later, and it is usually cheaper to re-roof first.

Permitting and interconnection run in parallel and are ours to handle. The permit is local and the interconnection application goes to your utility; the utility side is generally the slower of the two and the one with the least predictable timeline, because it depends on their queue rather than on anything we control.

Installation itself is typically one to three days for a residential system. Then the system sits complete but switched off until the utility grants permission to operate. That gap frustrates people, so we say it plainly up front: the panels on your roof are not earning anything until that approval lands.

How to check an installer before you sign

Ask who is actually on the roof. A large share of residential solar in the Southeast is sold by one company and installed by a subcontractor the homeowner never meets, which matters on the day something needs fixing. Our crews are our own, and the person who surveys your roof works for the same company as the person who warranties the penetrations.

Ask for the production estimate in kilowatt-hours, not in dollars saved. A dollar figure hides two assumptions: what your utility will pay you and how fast rates rise, and both are doing more work than the equipment. A production figure can be checked against your own bill.

Ask what happens if the answer is no. An installer who has never told a homeowner their roof is too shaded, too old, or too small to be worth it is either extraordinarily lucky in their leads or is not telling anyone. We put that in writing before anything is ordered, and we would rather lose the sale than sell a system that does not pay.

Finally, check that the company is licensed and insured in the state where the work happens, and that the warranty is written against a business with a physical address you could drive to. We operate out of a Daniel Island office, and the roof-penetration warranty is ours, not a manufacturer pass-through.

The rules that apply everywhere in Georgia

State income tax credit

Georgia has no state income tax credit for residential solar, and the federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026.

Property tax

Georgia property-tax treatment of solar is genuinely unsettled: reputable sources describe a $25,000 exemption, a full exemption and no statewide exemption. Confirm with the Georgia Department of Revenue and your county assessor rather than relying on any figure printed online.

Sales tax

Georgia sales-tax treatment of solar equipment is not settled in the sources we can verify; confirm with the Georgia Department of Revenue.

Homeowner associations

Georgia’s HB 389 prevents an association prohibiting rooftop solar or charging permit fees for it, but only for association rules created, renewed or modified on or after 1 January 2026. An older covenant may not be covered.

Rates, caps and statutes change. These are the figures we hold as current, with the underlying sources named on our Georgia incentives page. Confirm your own position with a tax professional before budgeting around any of them.