Every ranked list of solar lead sources you can find was written for a market that no longer exists. They rank Google Ads against Facebook against EnergySage on cost per lead, which was a reasonable way to argue when the homeowner on the other end got 30% of the system back from the federal government. That homeowner is gone.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, ended the Section 25D residential tax credit for any system placed in service after December 31, 2025. No phase-down, no transition. Cash and loan buyers in 2026 get nothing. Section 48E survives but is claimed by the system owner, which is why third-party ownership is now the financing story rather than a footnote.
So the useful question is not which solar lead source is cheapest. It is which ones still work when the reason people bought last year has been repealed. Sort by that and the standard top-ten list turns upside down.
The number that reranked every solar lead source
Residential solar customer acquisition cost is set to rise 40% to $0.84 per watt in 2026, after falling to a five-year low of $0.60 per watt in 2025. That figure comes from Wood Mackenzie's US distributed solar customer acquisition cost outlook, and the explanation matters more than the number.
The 2025 low was not efficiency. It was a demand rush. Homeowners raced to lock in the 30% credit before year end, which let installers trim sales and marketing budgets while the pipeline filled itself. Wood Mackenzie is blunt that this was an anomaly. In 2026 the residential market contracts, SEIA's Q2 2026 outlook puts the full-year contraction around 21%, and every installer still standing competes harder for a smaller pool.
By the numbers
Two numbers to hold together: acquisition cost up 40%, addressable market down roughly a fifth. The channels that were merely inefficient in 2025 are now the ones that end companies.
That is the backdrop for every lead source decision you make this year. A channel that was break-even at $0.60 per watt does not survive at $0.84 unless something about it changed in your favor.
What solar leads actually cost, by channel
Before ranking, the table stakes. These are 2026 solar-specific benchmarks, compiled by Service Hero from Enervio, Rocket Launch Media and SolarReviews data:
| Channel | Cost per lead | Exclusive or shared | Est. close rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referrals and word of mouth | $0 to $50 | Exclusive | 29 to 37% |
| Door knocking and canvassing | $20 to $50 | Exclusive | High intent, local |
| Facebook and Instagram lead ads | $20 to $100 | Exclusive | Lower intent |
| Shared marketplace leads | $25 to $100 | Shared, 5+ installers | 5 to 8% |
| Google Local Services Ads | $80 to $200 | Exclusive | High intent |
| SEO after ramp | $150 to $200, then down | Exclusive | 10 to 20% |
| Exclusive vendor leads | $100 to $250 | Exclusive | 3 to 5x shared |
| Google Ads | $100 to $300 | Exclusive | 5 to 15% lead CVR |
| Booked appointments | $150 to $500 | Exclusive | 30 to 40% no-show |
Run the funnel and the ranking inverts. A $65 shared lead closing at 6% is roughly $1,080 per signed contract. A $175 exclusive lead closing at 15% is about $1,170. Nearly identical, except one of them also burned your setters on five homeowners already fielding calls from four competitors. SolarReviews tells installers to aim for cost per close under $1,500 in competitive markets and $800 to $1,300 in emerging ones. That is the number on your wall, not cost per lead.
The dealer fee is the constraint nobody puts in the listicle
Here is what makes solar different from every other trade, and why generic home services lead advice misleads you.
Embedded solar loan dealer fees are reported at around 22% in 2026, adding roughly $5,700 to a typical loan balance. That fee funds the entire dealer, setter and closer commission stack. It is money the homeowner borrows and you never see.
Wood Mackenzie names this directly as the 2026 reckoning: without the 30% credit as a buffer, some installers can no longer afford to pass on the costs of high dealer fees, expensive lead purchases, and commission-heavy sales models while remaining competitive on price. Their conclusion is that the margin squeeze favors vertically integrated installers with in-house sales, because those companies do not depend on increasingly expensive purchased leads and can amortize acquisition across multiple products.
Read that as a budget rule. If your deal already carries a 22% dealer fee, you cannot also carry $1,100 of purchased lead cost and a full commission stack and price against a competitor who carries neither. Something has to come out, and the honest answer is usually the bought lead.
We build the exclusive channel installers are being pushed toward: a conversion page, a qualifying form and lead-to-sale tracking, fed by targeted outreach and Meta campaigns you own instead of rent.
Tier 1: sources that got worse the day the credit died
These still generate leads. They generate them at a cost per close that a post-25D margin cannot absorb.
Shared marketplaces
EnergySage and SolarReviews are the largest quote-comparison marketplaces in residential solar. Several installers quote the same project by design, which is the product working as intended, not a defect.
Installer sentiment in r/solar is genuinely split and worth reading before you sign. One installer's verdict: "Race to the bottom and the customers that it brings in are the most difficult to work with." Another put the structural objection in six words: "All it does is commoditize solar even further."
The defense is real too. A Florida installer in the same thread argued that clients shop around regardless, that the platform gets bids in front of homeowners without heavy marketing spend, and that they adjust overhead to a lower margin rather than pretending the competition is not there. That is a coherent strategy if you are a low-overhead in-house crew. It is a trap if you are carrying a 22% dealer fee and a commission stack.
The 2026 change is that shared leads were tolerable when a 30% credit made the payback math sell itself. Now the same lead requires a longer, more skeptical sale, at the same price, against the same five competitors.
Urgency-based paid social
Every solar Facebook campaign of the last three years leaned on a deadline. The deadline arrived. Creative built on "claim your 30% credit before it expires" is not tunable into 2026, and the campaigns that still run it are paying $20 to $100 per lead to teach homeowners about an incentive they can no longer get.
Untargeted door knocking
Canvassing is not dead, but blanket canvassing is the most 25D-dependent channel there is, because it depends on interrupting someone with an offer good enough to overcome the interruption. Solar CAC by channel puts door to door at $1,500 to $3,000 per customer. Without the credit, the pitch that justified the knock is weaker and the cost is unchanged.
Tier 2: sources tied to a trigger that still exists
Solar has no failure trigger. A roof leaks, a furnace dies, a panel does not. Nothing about an unsolared house gets worse over time, which is why solar demand has to be attached to an economic event instead of a breakdown. Four of those events survived 2025 intact.
Utility rate increases and net metering deadlines
Policy is now the trigger the tax credit used to be. California is the clearest case: NEM 3.0 cut export credits by roughly 75% starting April 2023, the NEM 2.0 grandfathering window closed April 15, 2026, and a state Court of Appeals upheld NEM 3.0 in March 2026. Every jurisdiction has some version of this calendar. Rate cases, time-of-use restructures and net metering sunsets are published, dated and searchable, and they create the same "act before the window closes" urgency that 25D used to supply for free.
Batteries and outages
This is the one segment genuinely growing. SEIA recorded a record 45% storage attach rate on residential solar in Q1 2026, up from 38% a year earlier. In California, storage has moved from optional to functionally required for the economics to work at all.
A battery lead is not a solar lead wearing a hat. The buying reason is outage resilience and rate arbitrage, neither of which the federal credit repeal touched.
Roofers, builders and electricians
Re-roofing is the cheapest qualified solar trigger in existence, because someone is already on the roof establishing that it has 25 years left. A roofer who refers you is handing over a homeowner who has just been forced to think about their roof as an asset.
On new construction, one installer in r/solar pulled six months of permits across ten cities to map demand. The most useful reply pushed back on the method: "once a permit has been pulled the planning and budgeting is done. There's no room to get in a sale." Their conclusion was the actionable part: "it's still worth my time to work with architects and builders to become their sub." Permit lists tell you where demand went. Builder relationships get you in before the budget closes.
Commercial adjacency
The sharpest version of this came from a commercial operator describing pairing LED lighting retrofits with commercial solar. They work as a utility Trade Ally, get grants covering a large share of the lighting project, and once the customer sees the bill drop they ask whether they would like to eliminate the rest of it. In their words: "It's like getting paid twice for the same lead."
That is the general pattern worth stealing. Lead with a smaller, faster, incentive-backed job, then sell solar to a customer who has already seen you perform.
Tier 3: the sources that never cared about the tax credit
These are the ones to build first in 2026, and they are missing from nearly every ranked list because they do not have a vendor selling them to you.
Your own install base
Wood Mackenzie describes the strategic shift underway as installers abandoning the one-time, solar-only sale for customer lifetime value models: multi-product ecosystems that generate referrals, storage upsells and repeat purchases at significantly lower acquisition cost than cold lead generation.
Translated into this month's work: pull every system you installed before storage attach became standard. You have the address, the roof plan, the inverter model and the actual production history. That is a better qualified list than anything you can buy, and the reason to call is a battery, not a tax credit. Add EV chargers, panel upgrades and service plans to the same list. This is the only channel where your cost per lead genuinely approaches zero, and it is the one most installers have never worked.
Orphaned systems
Over 100 US solar companies have filed bankruptcy or shut down since 2023, per Solar Insure's running list, which includes SunPower, Titan Solar Power, Sunnova, PosiGen, ADT Solar, Vision Solar, Lumio and Purelight Power. Freedom Forever, the second largest residential installer in the country, filed Chapter 11 on April 15, 2026, after installing roughly 2 GW across 35 states and Puerto Rico.
The mechanic that creates the opportunity: equipment warranties from manufacturers survive a bankruptcy, workmanship and roof penetration warranties issued by the dead installer can be delayed or discharged. So there is now a large population of homeowners with a live system, valid panels, and nobody obligated to climb the ladder.
They are not being served. A homeowner in r/solar described exactly this: their installer went out of business six months after the job, three panels failed shortly after, and they contacted two official installers listed for their area plus a third company. None returned the call or followed through. Their update: "Two years later...still no support."
That is a lead source with documented demand, no competition, and an obvious upsell path. Service call, then monitoring or service plan, then the battery retrofit the original installer never sold them. It also builds the recurring revenue that a contracting market rewards.
Referrals, and the specific thing that earns them
Referrals close at 29 to 37% and cost between nothing and $50. Everyone knows this and almost nobody engineers it, because "do good work and ask" is not a process.
Here is the process, from a homeowner in r/solar describing how they picked an installer. They collected ten estimates, seven through EnergySage. They chose a local company that was on the higher side on price, for one reason: it was the only one to offer a site visit before the final estimate. Their stated pain point was the industry norm of signing a contract first, then getting the site visit, then getting the real number. They called that bait and switch unprofessional.
The result: "Since our install, I've referred them 14 times."
Fourteen referrals from one customer, won by inspecting the roof before quoting rather than by being cheapest. In a market where marketplaces commoditize you on price, a pre-quote site visit is a differentiator that costs a truck roll and converts a shopper into a channel. If you do one thing from this article, make the free pre-quote inspection your standard and say so in every listing, ad and quote you send.
Most installers lose Tier 3 leads to follow-up, not to competitors. We build the page, the qualifying form and the tracking so your install base and referrals stop leaking into a spreadsheet.
Ranking the sources for a post-25D market
| Source | Tier | Cost per close | 25D exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Install base battery retrofit | 3 | Near zero | None |
| Referrals from site-visit policy | 3 | $0 to $50 | None |
| Orphaned system service work | 3 | Outreach cost only | None |
| Roofer and builder partnerships | 2 | $500 to $1,000 | Low |
| Commercial adjacency | 2 | Low, job funds itself | Low |
| Rate case and NEM deadline campaigns | 2 | Moderate | Low |
| Google LSA and Business Profile | 2 | $80 to $200 per lead | Medium |
| SEO and answer engine visibility | 2 | Falls over time | Medium |
| Exclusive vendor leads | 1 | About $1,170 | High |
| Google Ads | 1 | $100 to $300 per lead | High |
| Shared marketplaces | 1 | About $1,080 | High |
| Blanket door knocking | 1 | $1,500 to $3,000 | High |
A 30-day plan
- Week 1: work the list you already own. Export every install without storage. Sort by utility rate and outage history. That is your call list, and it costs nothing.
- Week 1: set the site visit rule. No final quote without an inspection first. Put it in your Google Business Profile description, your ads and your quote template.
- Week 2: claim the orphans. Build a page for each defunct installer operating in your territory. Homeowners search the company name plus "out of business" the week they need help.
- Week 2: measure cost per close, not per lead. If you cannot produce that number by channel, that is the actual problem. Speed to lead is usually where the leak starts.
- Week 3: sign two trade partners. One roofer, one electrician or builder. A referral fee is cheaper than any lead you can buy.
- Week 3: fix the owned channel. Local Services Ads and a complete Google Business Profile are exclusive by construction.
- Week 4: cut one Tier 1 channel. Take the one with the worst cost per close and move the budget to Tier 2 and 3. If you are unsure which, read the exclusive versus shared math; the structure is identical in solar.
How many sources should you run
Three or four, selected so no two fail for the same reason.
The 2026 failure mode is not running too few channels. It is running four channels that all depend on selling a new cash or loan system to a homeowner who came looking for a federal tax credit. Google Ads, Facebook, a marketplace and a canvassing crew look like diversification on an org chart. They are one bet wearing four costumes, and 25D already settled it.
Pair one paid channel that you can turn up when the schedule thins with at least two that no act of Congress can repeal. Your install base and your referral engine qualify. Nothing you rent does.