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 also 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.

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. Combining them into one figure would require assumptions that neither agency currently makes. The table below shows the scale of that pipeline.

Two factors help explain why no combined figure exists.

• Older housing stock evidence: An ABS case study for the 2015–16 financial year found that homes purchased or built in the previous 10 years were more likely to have solar panels than older housing 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, which makes a combined new-build figure less likely to appear without a dedicated data-linkage project.

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.

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. That means 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.

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.

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.