Rooftop Solar & Batteries · Australia · Updated 13 July 2026

Solar and battery uptake in new Australian homes: 2026 data

More than 4.4 million rooftop solar systems have been installed across Australia. Battery installations recorded under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme have passed 400,000 since batteries became eligible on 1 July 2025.

Uptake varies by location. In New South Wales and Victoria, regional areas have higher solar uptake than the capital city. In Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, the capital has higher uptake than the regions.

SECTION 01 · National trends and new-build data

How rooftop solar installations have changed over time

National installations fell 28.5% from a 2021 peak, before rising again in the first five months of 2026

At the national level, installations peaked at 377,458 in 2021, then declined for three of the next four years to a low of 269,865 in 2025. That was a decline of 28.5% from the peak and 15.4% below 2024.

Even at that low point, 2025 recorded more installations than every year between 2013 and 2018, though it still fell short of 2019's total of 284,031. The 2021 to 2025 decline followed installation totals in 2020 and 2021 that were higher than the years immediately before or after them.

From January to May 2026, 124,923 rooftop solar systems were installed, up 14.3% on the 109,312 installed over the same five months of 2025. This is a partial-year figure, not a forecast for the full year, but it is the first year-on-year increase since 2023.

How many new homes include rooftop solar or batteries as standard?

The gap reflects how the two datasets are structured, not an oversight in reporting. The two collections were not designed to be joined, and combining them into one figure would require assumptions that neither agency currently makes. The table below shows the scale of that pipeline.

Source: ABS Building Activity, Australia, March quarter 2026; ABS Building Approvals, Australia, May 2026.

Two factors help explain why no combined figure exists.

• Older housing stock evidence: An ABS case study for 2015–16 found homes purchased or built in the previous 10 years were more likely to have solar panels than older stock. This is consistent with higher solar uptake in newer homes, but the finding was never converted into a published national share, and it is now a decade old.
• A national accounts classification change: Rooftop solar is now recorded as its own asset class in national accounts, separate from the dwelling it sits on. The panel and the house it powers are no longer counted in the same inventory.

SECTION 02 · State and territory data

Which state has the most rooftop solar systems?

Queensland has the largest installed base of any state, with 1,194,390 systems installed to 31 May 2026.

Queensland is not the fastest-growing market. New South Wales added more systems than any other state in 2025, with 75,201 installations, and led again over the first five months of 2026, with 37,062 installations.

The state with the largest cumulative solar total and the state adding the most new solar each year are not the same. This shows the difference between total installed stock and recent installation activity.

Raw counts favour the largest states because they have more people and dwellings. The state selector below includes installs per 1,000 people, which gives a different picture of where rooftop solar has taken hold.

Source: Clean Energy Regulator, Table 5, small-scale installation postcode data, current to 31 May 2026; ABS national, state and territory population, December quarter 2025.

On a per-person basis, South Australia has the highest rooftop solar uptake in the country, ahead of Queensland and Western Australia. South Australia's population and total system count are both smaller than those states.

Queensland and Western Australia also rank higher per person than their raw totals suggest. New South Wales and Victoria, the two largest states by population, both sit below the national average once uptake is measured per person.

SECTION 03 · Battery data

How battery uptake has changed since the Cheaper Home Batteries Program began

A total of 401,185 batteries were recorded under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme from 1 July 2025 to 31 May 2026. That is more than twelve times the 31,305 batteries voluntarily reported with solar systems in all of 2024, the last full year before the change.

Part of that increase reflects a change in counting method, not only a change in demand:

• Before 1 July 2025: only batteries voluntarily reported alongside solar were counted.
• From 1 July 2025: batteries became eligible for certificates under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, and approved battery installations were recorded through the scheme, including retrofits.

The two series use different definitions and different coverage. They cannot be joined into one continuous trend line.

Concurrent battery installs, meaning batteries fitted at the same time as solar, rose from 693 in 2014 to 31,305 in 2024, up 16.1% on the year before. This was a growing market before the federal scheme began.

Once batteries became eligible for the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, installation volume increased by an order of magnitude: 204,799 installed from 1 July to 31 December 2025, and a further 196,386 in the first five months of 2026.

Are new batteries installed with solar or retrofitted to existing systems?

About 45% of batteries were installed concurrently with new or upgraded solar when the scheme launched in mid-2025. This rose to 48% by the March 2026 quarter.

This split helps separate batteries installed with new or upgraded solar from batteries retrofitted to existing solar systems. It does not identify newly built homes, so it should not be treated as a new-build battery share.

The concurrent share moved from 45% to 47% to 49%, then to 48%. It did not move in a straight line. Around 10% of battery installs in mid-2025 could not be automatically linked to a solar system, so a single quarter's retrofit and concurrent split should be treated as indicative, not exact.

New South Wales has the highest cumulative battery installs of any state. This differs from solar, where Queensland holds the largest installed base.

Source: Clean Energy Regulator, Table 8, Small generation unit solar batteries, current to 31 May 2026.

More than 284,000 validated batteries had been installed under the scheme by the March 2026 quarter, delivering 7.4 GWh of usable capacity. That included 2.5 GWh from around 82,000 batteries installed in the March quarter alone.

SECTION 04 · Drivers

What is driving battery uptake in new homes?

Three forces appear in official data, and all three overlap:

• A 30% discount on the upfront cost of eligible small-scale battery systems through the federal subsidy scheme.
• A 75% fall in rooftop solar installation costs per kilowatt since the 2010 to 2011 financial year.
• New state building rules that support all-electric, solar-ready design.

No official dataset isolates why a new-build household specifically chooses a battery. These factors apply across the wider housing market, not only to newly built homes.

A federal subsidy that grew mid-rollout

The Cheaper Home Batteries Program discounts the upfront cost of eligible small-scale battery systems by around 30%, funded through certificates rather than added to electricity bills.

Funding for the program expanded from an original $2.3 billion estimate to around $7.2 billion over four years in December 2025. The program's target is more than 2 million Australians installing a battery by 2030, adding roughly 40 gigawatt hours of storage.

The economics of using solar on-site have changed

The cost of installing a kilowatt of rooftop solar fell 75% between the 2010–11 and 2024–25 financial years. Household solar generation grew 20 times over the same period.

Retail electricity prices roughly doubled since 2009–10, to $0.29 per kWh in 2024–25. The average feed-in tariff paid for exported solar roughly halved over the same period, to $0.06 per kWh. Under these prices, self-consuming rooftop solar can be worth more relative to exporting it than it was a decade ago.

Source: ABS, Household solar electricity generation in the Australian national accounts, 2025.

New building rules support all-electric and solar-ready homes

More than 7,000 BASIX Energy 100 certificates had been issued in New South Wales as of December 2025. This is the maximum BASIX energy score, and NSW Planning says it can only be achieved by all-electric homes powered by rooftop solar.

Victoria has run a separate requirement since 1 January 2024: new homes needing a planning permit must be all-electric, with no new gas connections. More than 20,000 battery systems have since been installed across the state through its own state-level rebate scheme, in addition to the federal program.

Neither state's rule requires a battery. These rules support home designs that are all-electric or solar-generating, but they do not prove that batteries are becoming standard in new builds.

Source: NSW Planning Portal; Sustainability Victoria; Business Queensland; ABCB NCC 2022 adoption dates; DCCEEW Cheaper Home Batteries Program.

SECTION 05 · Building rules

Do new homes in Australia need solar panels or batteries?

Six of Australia's eight states and territories have adopted the national 7-star, whole-of-home standard. Tasmania and the Northern Territory have not.

No jurisdiction requires a new home to have solar panels or a battery. Most jurisdictions require a minimum energy-efficiency standard, and solar is one way a home can meet it. A 7-star rating does not mean solar is compulsory.

The national benchmark is NCC 2022, assessed through NatHERS. It sets two separate requirements:

• Thermal rating: new houses need a minimum 7-star rating; new apartment buildings need an average of 7 stars with no single unit below 6.
• Whole-of-home score: new houses need a score of 60 out of 100; new apartments need 50. This factors in major fixed appliances plus any solar or battery on site.

A well-insulated home can still fail the whole-of-home test if its appliances and hot water system are inefficient. A home with solar panels can still fail if the building shell is poor. Both ratings must be met, and neither one specifically requires solar.

Source: NSW Planning Portal; NatHERS; Sustainability Victoria; Business Queensland (QDC 4.1); ABCB NCC 2022 adoption dates; Housing Industry Association.

SECTION 06 · Capital city versus regional

How does rooftop solar adoption differ between capital cities and regional areas?

Rooftop solar adoption differs between capital cities and regional areas by state. There is no single national pattern.

• Western Australia shows the widest gap in this dataset: regional areas trail Greater Perth by 18.4 percentage points, at 35.1% of dwellings compared with 53.5%.
• New South Wales shows the opposite pattern. Regional areas lead Greater Sydney by 10.6 percentage points, at 44.8% of dwellings compared with 34.2%.

No official, current ranking of capital cities against their own regions exists for this measure. The figures below are calculations based on Australian PV Institute local government area data, grouped into capital-city and rest-of-state areas using the ABS Greater Capital City Statistical Area structure.

The remaining states and territories divide the same way:

• Victoria: regional areas lead Greater Melbourne, 35.0% versus 29.8% of dwellings.
• Northern Territory: Greater Darwin leads regional NT, 38.7% versus 17.6%.
• Queensland and South Australia: the capital city leads the region by a smaller margin.
• Tasmania: the capital and the regions are within a percentage point of each other.

Outer-suburban new-estate construction may be one factor in some capital-city results, but the data does not directly link rooftop solar installations to newly built homes or housing estates.

SECTION 07 · The bigger picture

How much rooftop solar and battery storage does Australia have?

More than 4.4 million rooftop solar systems have been installed across Australia, while ABS describes rooftop solar as reaching more than 4 million homes, or roughly one in three.

Household solar generation has grown 20-fold since the 2010 to 2011 financial year and now accounts for around 8% of the country's total electricity generation. Households collectively saved just over $3 billion on electricity costs in 2024–25, equivalent to about $125 per person.

More than 400,000 batteries have been recorded under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme since batteries became eligible on 1 July 2025. This remains a smaller installed base than rooftop solar.

Source: AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics, Q1 2026; CER Quarterly Carbon Market Report, March quarter 2026.

Official data shows the scale of rooftop solar and battery installations, but not the share fitted to newly built homes. Until installation and dwelling datasets are linked, new-build solar and battery adoption can only be discussed through clearly labelled proxy measures.

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