Where Sunburst installs solar in Virginia

What decides payback in Virginia

Virginia’s case rests almost entirely on net metering. There is no Virginia state income tax credit to subtract, and the 30% federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026. What remains, and what matters, is that exported power is credited at the retail rate one-for-one, so a kilowatt-hour you send to the grid is worth the same as one you buy back.

That is a genuinely different economic structure from Georgia, where exports earn roughly half of retail. Under one-for-one crediting the grid functions much more like a bank than a wholesale buyer, which means array sizing can follow annual consumption rather than daytime load, and the pressure to pair with storage for economic rather than resilience reasons is lower.

The word to hold onto is "survived". One-for-one retail net metering came through a contested proceeding at the State Corporation Commission in April 2026, and the fact that it was contested at all is the relevant context for anyone weighing a twenty-five year asset. We would rather you size a system that makes sense on today’s terms than one that only works if those terms hold indefinitely.

On property tax, residential solar of 25 kW or less is exempt from state and local property tax under §58.1-3661 as amended by SB 686, and many localities have adopted further exemptions by ordinance. Virginia has no general solar sales-tax exemption for residential systems, which is a real line item and one that quotes sometimes quietly omit.

Investor-owned utilities and cooperatives

Virginia’s electricity map splits between investor-owned utilities regulated by the State Corporation Commission and member-owned electric cooperatives, and their net-metering programmes are not identical. The coastal Virginia markets where most of our work sits and the Northern Virginia markets further up the list can therefore sit on meaningfully different terms.

Because of that split, the first thing we confirm on a Virginia enquiry is the provider and the specific programme, not the rate. Programme caps, system-size limits and standby charges are the details that change a model, and they are not uniform across the state.

This page groups every Virginia market by its provider for that reason. If you are comparing two quotes, check that both are modelling the same export terms before comparing the totals, because that assumption is doing more work than any equipment specification on either page.

What coastal Virginia adds to the design

A good part of our Virginia work sits in Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk, and coastal installs carry constraints that inland ones do not. Attachment and racking specification is the first: wind loading on the coast is a structural calculation, not a default, and the mounting hardware and fixing pattern that suit a Midlands roof are not automatically the right answer on a barrier-adjacent one.

Salt air is the second. Proximity to salt water affects material selection for racking and fixings, and it is worth being explicit about what is being installed rather than accepting a generic bill of materials. It is also a reason to read a warranty carefully: exclusions relating to corrosive environments are not unusual, and they matter more here than they would two hours inland.

Roof type is the third. A good deal of coastal Virginia housing stock differs from what we see around Charleston, and penetration detailing changes with it. None of this makes a coastal install harder to do well; it makes it easier to do badly with a design copied from somewhere else.

Permits, interconnection and HOAs in Virginia

Permitting sits with the local city or county, and the coastal and Northern Virginia jurisdictions we work in each have their own process. Interconnection runs through your utility under its net-metering programme. Both are ours to handle, and the individual city pages linked below name the authority for that market.

Virginia’s HOA position is the clearest of our three states. Under SB 504 an association may impose only reasonable restrictions on rooftop solar, and the statute gives that word a definition with numbers in it: a restriction is unreasonable if it raises project cost by more than 5% or cuts generation by more than 10%.

Having a numeric test is unusually helpful, because it turns an argument about aesthetics into an arithmetic question. If an association asks for a panel layout that costs more than 5% extra or gives up more than 10% of production, that request has a name in Virginia law. We document the comparison as part of the design rather than leaving a homeowner to argue it unaided.

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 Virginia

State income tax credit

Virginia 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

Residential solar of 25 kW or less is exempt from state and local property tax under §58.1-3661 as amended by SB 686, and many localities have adopted further exemptions by ordinance.

Sales tax

Virginia has no general solar sales-tax exemption for residential systems; confirm your own position with a tax professional.

Homeowner associations

Under SB 504 a Virginia association may impose only reasonable restrictions on rooftop solar, and a restriction is unreasonable if it raises project cost by more than 5% or cuts generation by more than 10%.

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