Home battery incentives after the federal credit: what each program pays and whether it is open

What the federal government still offers a homeowner

The IRS page for the Residential Clean Energy Credit, last reviewed July 4, 2026, states that the credit "is not available for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025." That ended the 30 percent credit that used to cover batteries of at least 3 kWh. A homeowner who buys a battery in 2026 for cash or a loan has no federal credit to claim.

A different route exists for equipment owned by a company that leases it or sells its output. Trade press describes that company claiming a business credit under section 48E, subject to deadlines and sourcing rules, and the position is unsettled enough that this site treats it as a question for the lease contract. The reading of the statute, the court question and the effect on a lease price are in the lease and 48E guide, and a battery bought outright gets none of it.

Four kinds of battery money, and why the kind matters

Programs differ less in size than in structure, and the structure decides how much risk the owner carries. An upfront rebate pays when the battery is energized or approved. An enrollment payment plus a performance payment, as in Connecticut, splits the money into a small start and a long tail that depends on the battery being used. A dispatch payment, as in the Massachusetts and Arizona programs in the virtual power plant guide, pays per kilowatt for allowing the utility to draw on the battery in summer events, with no relation to the purchase price. And a tax credit or exemption reduces tax owed after the fact.

Three questions follow from that. Is the money paid before or after you commit? What must the battery do in return, and for how long? And is there money left? The table answers the third question first because it changes fastest.

The programs and their status

The table lists the programs read for this guide. It is a sample, not a census: it omits municipal utilities, cooperatives and programs not read, and a program missing from it has not been judged absent.

California: the budget most pages still advertise is closed

Older SGIP rate figures still circulate for steps that have since closed. The program's own tracker, which updates nightly, is the thing to read, and on October 23, 2026 it showed the small residential storage budget at step 7, Closed at every ratepayer administrator, with available balances between $59,438 and $1,211,662 that sit unused because the step is shut. The equity resiliency budget and the large-scale storage budget were also closed.

The only SGIP money still moving on that date was for low-income households. The CPUC says it authorized $280 million for the Residential Solar and Storage Equity budget and that reservations opened June 2, 2025 for any low-income residential customer. The tracker shows the ratepayer-funded equity budget closed, the AB 209 budgets on waitlists, and a single municipal-utility block open with $1,000,000 available. A waitlist is not a rebate: it is a place in line for money that other applicants may return. A household that qualifies as low-income should ask an approved SGIP developer which column applies to its utility, not read the rate from a blog.

The CPUC page also records a December 19, 2025 resolution on new residential storage sizing rules, which is the kind of change that alters what a future round would pay. Treat any California number older than the tracker's date as history.

Illinois: a statute, with a price on the battery's time

Illinois is the one state in this sample where the incentive is written into statute at a per-kilowatt-hour rate and runs for years. Section 16-107.6 of the Public Utilities Act directs large electric utilities to offer a rebate for distributed generation and distributed storage. For customers who would have been eligible for net metering before January 1, 2025, storage is separately compensated at a base payment of $300 per kilowatt-hour of nameplate capacity until December 31, 2029, and a stand-alone system gets $250 per kilowatt-hour afterward. Customers not eligible for net metering get $250. The utility must issue the rebate no later than 60 days after the project is energized.

The price of that money is the owner's afternoons. A battery rebated after the June 2026 amendments must take part in a scheduled dispatch program that the Illinois Commerce Commission was to establish by June 30, 2026. The statute describes a five-year enrollment and a commitment to dispatch each weekday in June, July, August and September, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for a battery behind a customer's meter, with a payment of not less than $10 per kilowatt of average dispatch each program year. For projects whose interconnection agreement is signed after June 1, 2026, compensation is limited to 25,000 kWh of nameplate capacity and 5 kWh for every kilowatt of participating power, so a 13.5 kWh battery needs at least 2.7 kW of participating power.

Two cautions apply. The statute directs utilities to file tariffs, and this guide did not read any utility's approved tariff or confirm that it is open for applications, so the first call should be to the utility's interconnection desk. And vehicle storage systems are excluded by name.

What taking the generation rebate does to your export credits

The same section contains a trade-off that matters to anyone with solar. When a customer's rebate application is approved, the statute says the customer is no longer entitled to delivery service credits for excess electricity generated by the facility, and becomes subject to the net metering provisions of subsection (n) of section 16-107.5, unless the owner receives a rebate only for an energy storage device and not for the generation device. In plain terms, a household that takes the solar rebate and the battery rebate together changes its export treatment, while a household that applies for the battery rebate alone does not.

That makes the order of applications a financial decision, not a formality. The size of the difference depends on the export credits at stake, which the net metering explainer shows how to estimate, and the safest reading of the statute is the one the utility's tariff states, so ask which of the two choices the household is making before the form is signed.

Add-ons and who pays for the rebate

The statute stacks three further items on the base rebate. A customer in an equity investment eligible community, as the Illinois Power Agency Act defines it, can receive an additional payment in an amount the utility's tariff sets, for a system with an interconnection agreement dated after the 2026 amendment. The generation side of a rebated system must have a smart inverter installed and operating. And an electric utility with 3,000,000 or more retail customers, which in practice means the largest one, must offer a further rebate to a customer whose solar and storage together provide frequency regulation to the regional grid operator: the cost of the interconnection facilities, plus the software, telecommunications hardware and telemetry needed to communicate with it, and the wholesale demand charges incurred afterward.

The money comes from other customers. The statute lets the utility recover the full cost of the rebates and of running the program from its retail customers, deferring the cost as a regulatory asset amortized over 15 years with a return on the unamortized balance. That is the reason the program has a state-set budget, a dispatch commitment and caps on eligible capacity, and it is the reason to expect the rules to be revisited: the Commission may adjust rebate levels for new customers and make other changes to the program in a manner consistent with the state's clean energy goals and the public interest.

Connecticut: the money moved from the front to the back

The state regulator's year-five decision of December 17, 2025 replaced the old structure, an upfront incentive plus passive dispatch, for everyone who enrolls on or after April 1, 2026. New residential participants get an enrollment incentive of $30 per kWh, or $130 per kWh if the home is on a grid-edge circuit, and then performance incentives of $300 to $550 per kW-year for 10 years, with higher rates for underserved and low-income customers. Passive dispatch is gone: every new battery participates in active dispatch events that the utility calls during summer and winter peaks, with summer seasons of 30 to 60 events and up to 10 in winter.

A grid-edge circuit is defined as one in the top 10 percent for outages per customer, or for the longest outages, during major storms since July 1, 2012, and the program publishes maps. The income for a 13.5 kWh battery therefore starts at $405 off the grid edge and $1,755 on it, a small fraction of what an upfront incentive would have been. The rest depends on how many kilowatts the battery actually discharges in events. That is the reverse of a rebate: the owner is paid for work done after buying, and a battery that cannot discharge when called earns less.

New York, Maryland and Oregon: three ways to be too late

New York's residential incentive is paid on a block structure. NYSERDA's April 2026 manual describes fixed-rate blocks, each with a funding amount and a dollar-per-kWh rate set in advance, with the incentive calculated on up to 25 kWh of installed capacity, measured in AC. The block that was open when a complete application arrives sets the rate, so the rate depends on timing, and the current rate is on NYSERDA's dashboard. The manual also requires enrollment in a utility's battery program where one is available, and lists National Grid's ConnectedSolutions battery program and NYSEG and RG&E's storage program as required for applications submitted on or after April 1, 2026. A contractor that installs before NYSERDA approves does so at its own financial risk, in the manual's words.

Maryland replaced its energy storage income tax credit, which the Maryland Energy Administration says expired at the end of 2024, with a grant. The fiscal 2026 announcement, effective July 24, 2025, set aside $2,000,000 from a regional greenhouse gas fund, set a closing time of 3:00 p.m. on June 5, 2026 or earlier if the money ran out, and awarded the grants first come, first served in two steps. An application must be submitted and a reservation certificate issued before the battery is installed. For a residential property the grant is the lesser of 30 percent of installed cost or $5,000, and a third party that owns the system on a home can be the applicant. An application missing information goes on standby for 14 calendar days and is ranked by the date the gap is filled, not the date it was first filed, and when the budget runs low an applicant can be offered a partial grant. By the October 23 reading that window had passed, and a fiscal 2027 round was not found.

Oregon's rebate shows how fast small pots go. The program reopened on June 15, 2026 with $1.1 million left over from earlier rounds, and the state agency's page says applications were enough to fully reserve it; it is not accepting more. Homeowners are eligible for up to $2,500 for storage, rebates go to approved contractors who pass them on, and storage-only additions to existing solar became eligible following SB 827 (2025) and recent administrative rulemaking. The common thread is sequence: in all three states the reservation or approval comes before the installation, and a battery installed first can be ineligible.

One 13.5 kWh battery against each program

To compare programs on a single scale, the arithmetic below uses a 13.5 kWh battery and the storage price line implied by the Department of Energy's benchmark, which puts an 8 kW system at $2.95 per watt without storage and $4.59 per watt with a 13.5 kWh battery in 2024 dollars. On 8,000 watts that is $13,120 for the storage, per the batteries hub. It is a national modelled benchmark and a comparison line, not a quote.

Even the best case in the table closes under a third of the storage line, so the program decides the order of your questions, not whether the battery pays. New York is missing because its rate is block-dependent, and a contractor can give the current block. Connecticut's number looks small because most of its value arrives later and depends on dispatch, which this arithmetic cannot fix. The Illinois line has a price attached: 5 summers of committing 4 to 6 p.m. on weekdays.

An incentive is only meaningful against the price it reduces. For the line items behind that price, and why a small battery costs more per kWh than a large one, see what a home battery costs installed.

Where each program publishes its status

Each program publishes status in a different place, and knowing where saves a wasted application. The SGIP tracker has one table per budget category and one column per program administrator. The row that matters is Step Status. The row beneath it, Available Funds, is misleading on a closed step: the tracker does not say the balance can be reserved. A closed step takes no applications, so a balance on it is not an available rebate.

NYSERDA's status lives on its MWh block dashboard, not in the manual, and what to look for is the rate for the block your region and market segment is in. Maryland's announcement is dated and carries a closing time, so the first check is the date. Oregon's page puts the status in its first lines: whether it is accepting reservation applications. Illinois's rebate is a statute, so the question there is whether your utility's tariff exists and which date its interconnection agreement counts from, since limits attach to agreements signed after June 1, 2026. Connecticut's is a program framework with an effective date, April 1, 2026, which decides which of two incentive structures a new enrollee falls under.

A useful habit is to write the date on whatever you read. Every figure in the table above has one, and a rate without a date, such as a sales sheet's "up to $1,000 per kWh", is a rate that may have belonged to a budget that has since closed. The sales sheet may still be right. The point is that it cannot be checked until it is dated.

Testing a quote against these programs

A quote that says an incentive "may be available" has not told you the program name, the status or the rate. Ask for the program's name, then look up its own tracker or manual, and treat the answer as perishable. The quote's storage line can be tested against the benchmark gap above, and the added-battery path for a system already on the roof is in the retrofit guide.

If the program requires the battery to be dispatched, the owner is choosing between two uses of the same energy. A battery committed to a summer afternoon cannot also be saving the evening for a backup role, and the outage guide explains why the reserve level matters. Write down the program's dispatch hours before you size the battery for outages.