Solar lead prices in 2026 look almost identical to 2025. Shared leads still run $25 to $100. Exclusive still runs $100 to $250. If you only watched cost per lead, you would conclude nothing much happened this year.
Something very much happened. Wood Mackenzie puts residential customer acquisition cost at $0.84 per watt in 2026, against $0.60 in 2025. On a typical 7 kW system that is roughly $5,880 to acquire one customer, a 40% increase in a year when the price of a lead barely moved.
That gap is the whole story, and it is why cost per lead has quietly become the least useful number on your dashboard.
The short answer
| Product | Price range | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| Shared marketplace lead | $25 to $100 | A form fill sold to three to five installers |
| Marketplace platforms (EnergySage, Service Direct) | ~$110 | A form fill with a comparison shopper attached |
| Exclusive lead | $100 to $250 | A form fill sold only to you |
| Booked appointment | $150 to $800 | A calendar slot, sometimes with a homeowner who forgot |
| Google Ads (blended) | ~$104 | Your own lead, at a price you control |
| Google Local Services Ads | ~$53 | Your own lead, capped by service area |
| Blended across channels | ~$206 | The number most installers quote |
Cost per click on Google Ads runs $8 to $22 nationally and reaches $50 to $100 in California, Texas and Florida, where the bidding is heaviest.
Every one of those numbers is real, and not one of them tells you whether you made money.
The number that actually changed
The 25D residential clean energy credit expired on December 31, 2025. For a homeowner, that removed roughly 30% of the effective savings on a quote they were already hesitating over.
Nothing about that changes what a lead costs. It changes what a lead does. The same form fill, from the same channel, at the same price, now belongs to a homeowner looking at a materially worse deal. Contact rates hold up reasonably. Appointment rates soften. Close rates take the hit.
By the numbers
Wood Mackenzie: residential solar customer acquisition cost rose to $0.84 per watt in 2026 from $0.60 in 2025. Wood Mackenzie also forecasts residential solar volume down 21% in 2026. Fewer buyers, each one more expensive to win.
This is why installers report that marketing "stopped working" while their cost per lead reports look unchanged. The reports are measuring the input. The damage is on the output.
Run the price to the end and the ranking flips
A cost per lead only means something with a close rate attached. Here is the full funnel on published 2026 figures.
Contact rates run 50% to 70%. Appointment set rates run 25% to 40% for shared leads and 40% to 60% for exclusive. Consultation to signed contract runs 15% to 25%. Compound those and shared marketplace leads close at roughly 5% to 8% overall.
| Shared lead | Exclusive lead | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per lead | $60 | $200 |
| Appointment set rate | 30% | 50% |
| Close rate from appointment | 20% | 20% |
| Overall close rate | 6% | 10% |
| Cost per signed contract | $1,000 | $2,000 |
On these inputs the cheap lead wins, which is the opposite of what the exclusive vendor's pitch implies. Change the appointment rate by ten points in either direction and the ranking flips again. That sensitivity is the actual finding: the answer depends entirely on your set rate, which is a fact about your office, not about the lead.
We ran the same comparison across the full published ranges in exclusive vs shared solar leads, where the two products land within about $90 of each other per closed install.
If you are not sure what your set rate or cost per close actually is, that is the first thing worth fixing. We build the tracking before we recommend a channel, because a channel recommendation without those two numbers is a guess.
What one customer really costs
Cost per lead is an input price. Cost per acquired customer is the number your business runs on.
| Channel | Cost per acquired customer |
|---|---|
| Referrals | $300 to $600 |
| Partnerships | $500 to $1,000 |
| Digital leads | $800 to $1,500 |
| Shared marketplace, everything counted | ~$1,400 |
| Door to door | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Blended residential benchmark | $3,000 to $7,000 |
SolarReviews advises targeting a cost per close under $1,500 in competitive markets and $800 to $1,300 in emerging ones.
Set that against the $5,880 blended acquisition figure and the tension is obvious. A large share of installers are paying two to four times their own target, and the gap is not caused by lead price. It is caused by conversion.
The costs that never reach the spreadsheet
The published benchmarks measure media spend. These do not, and they are frequently larger.
Speed to lead. A shared lead sold to four installers is a race. The homeowner takes the first credible call. If you answer in an hour, you paid full price for a lead that was effectively resold before you dialed.
Design and proposal time. Solar proposals cost real labour: roof imagery, shading analysis, production modelling, financing options. A 6% close rate means roughly 16 proposals per signed job. That is a salaried cost sitting inside every lead price, and none of the benchmarks include it.
Sales team churn. Falling close rates push commission-only reps out, and replacing a rep costs more than a month of lead spend.
Financing friction. Dealer fees on solar loans move the effective price of the system without appearing anywhere in your marketing budget, and they got harder to absorb when the credit disappeared.
Add them up and the honest cost of a purchased-lead customer is materially above the $1,400 headline for the shared channel.
What you can change, and what you cannot
Cannot change: the expiry of 25D, a 21% smaller residential market, competitor bidding in California, Texas and Florida, and the fact that homeowners now comparison shop harder on a worse deal.
Can change, in rough order of payback:
- Speed to lead. The single highest-leverage variable on shared leads. Minutes, not hours.
- Set rate. The worked example above swings by 100% on ten points of appointment rate. This is coachable and it is free.
- Channel mix. Referrals at $300 to $600 are a fraction of every purchased channel. They are slow to build, which is exactly why you fund them while purchased volume still carries the schedule.
- Qualification before the click. Google Ads at $8 to $22 per click punishes vague targeting more than any other channel.
- What you sell. Battery retrofits and orphaned-system service calls are not tax-credit dependent, which is why they held up when new installs did not.
We covered where the non-credit-dependent demand actually lives in best lead sources for solar companies, and the build-your-own alternative in solar lead generation without buying leads.
Watch out
Be careful comparing your numbers to any benchmark published before January 2026. Pre-2026 solar close rates were measured in a market with a 30% federal credit attached. They describe a world that no longer exists, and a vendor quoting them at you is either careless or counting on you not noticing.
What to track instead
Replace cost per lead with these four. All are computable from a CRM that stamps a source on every job.
- Cost per closed install, by source. The only number that ranks channels honestly.
- Set rate, by source. The variable you control that moves cost per close the most.
- Speed to first contact, by source. Measured in minutes. Correlates with close rate more tightly than lead price does.
- Proposal to close ratio. Tells you whether the problem is lead quality or the pitch. If proposals are up and closes are flat, the leads are fine and the offer is not.
If you cannot produce those four by source today, that is the actual project, and it comes before any channel decision. Getting a source stamped on every job is a system question before it is a marketing one, which we cover in CRM vs field service software for solar.
The honest summary
Solar leads cost $25 to $250 depending on which of four products you are buying, and roughly $206 blended. That range is stable and it is also close to meaningless on its own.
The number that moved in 2026 is acquisition cost, up 40% to $0.84 per watt, because the tax credit that closed deals expired and the market shrank 21% behind it. No lead vendor can sell you a way out of that. The installers absorbing it best are the ones who improved set rate and speed to lead, shifted mix toward referrals and their own install base, and stopped optimizing a metric that stopped predicting anything.