SRECs in 2026: what each market pays and who can still earn one

What the certificate is, and why the state decides its value

A certificate is created for each megawatt-hour, which is 1,000 kilowatt-hours, that a registered system generates. A state that requires its electricity suppliers to buy a share of their power from solar forces those suppliers to hold enough certificates to cover the share. Each supplier either buys the certificates from system owners or pays a fixed penalty per missing certificate, called an alternative compliance payment or ACP. The penalty is the practical ceiling: no supplier pays more than the fine for the same obligation.

That mechanism explains the whole spread. A state with a high percentage target and a stiff ACP, such as DC, produces certificates that sell in the hundreds of dollars. A state with a small solar share and a low penalty produces certificates that sell for a few dollars. A state that never created a requirement has no market at all, which is why most states do not appear in this guide.

Two other designs get lumped under the same name. A fixed-rate program, such as New Jersey's current one, still issues a certificate-like credit but pays a rate that a regulator sets, so it does not rise or fall with the market. A contract program, such as Illinois Shines, buys the certificates the system will produce over its contract, mostly up front. The owner receives different cash flows from each design, and the table in the next section only prices the first kind.

How a certificate gets from your roof to a buyer

In the PJM region, which covers New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, DC and Virginia, certificates are created in a tracking database called GATS. The broker's explainer says the database mints them once a month, on the last business day, one month behind the generation: power made in February becomes certificates on the last business day of March. The system's output reaches the database from the owner's monitoring system or inverter reports, either submitted by the owner or, for a managed account, by the broker.

Utilities, load-serving entities and retail suppliers are the buyers, because they carry the legal obligation. Most small owners sell through an aggregator rather than directly, which pools many roofs and negotiates with the buyers. That is also where the quote and the check part ways: the quoted price is the aggregator's bid, and the owner pays whatever the aggregator's fee schedule says, which this guide could not read from the broker's page and which therefore sits outside every income figure here.

Two features of a certificate matter for timing. A New Jersey certificate stays valid for five compliance years, the year it was generated plus the following four, then expires, and the broker's other specification pages list five years for Maryland and DC and three for Pennsylvania. A vintage is the energy year of generation, and prices differ by vintage, so selling the year's certificates as they mint rather than holding them is a choice about price risk. The broker advises selling consistently in both its DC and New Jersey commentary; that is a seller's view, and the 5-year life only limits how long the option to wait stays open.

Market quotes against the legal ceiling

The table lists the price quoted for the newest certificate vintage in each market, set against the statutory penalty for the same year. The quotes are a broker's published sell-now prices, not what a particular owner nets after fees. The ceilings come from the legislature's own text, except where the broker's specification page is the only source read for this guide.

Read the quote-to-ceiling column as a measure of how badly buyers need certificates. Washington, DC, Maryland and New Jersey sit near 90 percent of the penalty, which means suppliers have little spare supply and prefer to buy. Virginia sits at about a third of its ceiling, which says buyers are not scrambling to fill the requirement. Ohio's lone row is a 2024 vintage, and the broker shows no newer one, so Ohio is best treated as a market with nothing current to sell into.

Why published SREC prices disagree

Published SREC figures run from $85 to $230 for New Jersey, from $5 to $60 for Pennsylvania and from $250 to $450 for DC. The differences have four ordinary causes, and none of them requires anyone to be wrong about their own date.

The first is age. A figure written in 2024 or 2025 describes a different year's vintage, and these markets move by tens of dollars within a year; New Jersey's older-system certificates quoted $175 for the 2026 vintage in August 2025 and now quote $180. The second is the program: $85 for New Jersey is the old fixed rate for new systems, now $77, while $165 to $180 is the market price for the older certificate class that new systems cannot earn. The third is the unit, since a quote per kilowatt-hour, per MWh and per certificate describe the same money at different scales. The fourth is the vintage itself: a certificate for 2027 production trades at a discount to one for 2026 because buyers do not need it until later.

So a number only means something with its market, program, vintage and date attached. Every figure on this page carries those four, and a page that lacks them is describing a range, not a price.

New Jersey runs three programs, and a new owner is in the third

New Jersey's board of public utilities has used three successive designs. Systems registered under the original program earn market-priced SRECs, the $165 to $180 figures in the table. A transition program, which paid a fixed transition credit, closed to new registrations on August 27, 2021. The current design, called the Successor Solar Incentive program, opened on August 28, 2021, and its residential track pays a fixed value per certificate, a SREC-II, set by the board rather than by trading.

On May 21, 2026, the board's triennial review order directed a cut in the residential value from $85 to $77 per SREC-II, applying to registrations received on or after July 27, 2026. The incentive term is 15 years per the staff review, and the order also raised the residential capacity block for the 2027 energy year from 250 MW to 300 MW, with registrations accepted first-come, first-served from June 1, 2026 until the block fills or June 1, 2027. The value is fixed for each registration date, so a system registered on July 26 locks in $85 and one registered on July 27 locks in $77.

What the 15-year fixed rate means in dollars

On the 9.6 MWh a year used for the examples below, $77 comes to $739.20 a year, or $11,088 across 15 years if the system holds its output. The same system registered a day earlier at $85 would earn $816 a year, a difference of $76.80 annually that never changes. Because the rate does not move with the market, the order's cut matters only to the household deciding when to sign, and it is a reason to read the registration date in the contract before the installation date.

The legacy market and its direction

The older certificates still trade, and on October 23, 2026 the broker quoted $180.00 for the 2025 and 2026 vintages. Two pressures are visible in the broker's own commentary. A board notice on August 12, 2026 advanced a rule that would lower the Class I renewable requirement, a different certificate, to 35 percent for 2026 and 2027, and the broker reports that prices for 2028 to 2030 delivery of New Jersey certificates fell $10 after a September 3, 2026 lawsuit by West Virginia's attorney general against Pennsylvania's out-of-state exclusion. Both are market commentary from a firm that sells the product, and neither changes what a new system earns, which is the fixed rate.

Maryland, DC and Pennsylvania: the markets where a new owner still sells a certificate

These three are the places in this guide where a homeowner who installs now sells a market-priced certificate. Each has the same shape and a very different size.

Washington, DC

The District's solar requirement is 5.0 percent of retail sales in 2026 and 5.65 percent in 2027, rising to 15 percent by 2041 under D.C. Code 34-1432. The penalty is 44 cents per kilowatt-hour of shortfall in 2026, 42 cents in 2027 and 40 cents in 2028, which is the $440, $420 and $400 per MWh ceiling. Calendar-2026 certificates settled at $387.50 on October 21, 2026, the highest price of the year, 88.1 percent of the ceiling.

The price depends on politics as much as supply. The broker reports that the mayor told the council that DC certificates are the highest-priced in the country and proposed cutting the solar target back to 10 percent and lowering the penalty. The enacted fiscal 2027 budget did not amend the standard, and the broker reads a further fight over the fiscal 2028 budget as likely. The broker also reports that DC now has more certified solar than the requirement calls for, which argues for prices drifting further below the ceiling. A DC owner is therefore selling into the most valuable market and the most contested one.

Maryland

Maryland's penalty for missing solar certificates is set in cents per kilowatt-hour by year in Public Utilities section 7-705: 5.5 cents in 2025, 4.5 cents in 2026, 3.5 cents in 2027, 3.25 cents in 2028, 2.5 cents in 2029 and 2.25 cents from 2030. That is a ceiling that falls from $55 to $22.50 per MWh in five years, which is why the market sits at $40 and cannot rise much. The broker also lists a separate Maryland-certified certificate at $58.50 for 2026, a class not found in the statute text and not sourced beyond the broker, so it is left out of the income arithmetic.

Pennsylvania

The state utility commission's annual report on the alternative energy standard says the 2025 solar requirement was 0.5 percent of retail sales, that Act 40 of 2017 barred out-of-state solar from satisfying it, and that the weighted average price of the 682,693 solar credits retired was $33.20. The broker's current quote of $20.50 is lower than that retired average, and the commission's own report says the solar market is oversupplied and expected to keep pushing prices down. Pennsylvania is therefore a market worth knowing about and a weak line in a payback.

Massachusetts: SMART pays per kilowatt-hour for 20 years, and joining is optional

Massachusetts runs the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target, or SMART, alongside the open Class I certificate market. MassCEC says an owner who joins assigns the system's certificates to the utility for the term and receives a flat payment instead; the alternative is selling the certificates to electricity suppliers directly, and MassCEC says there is no definitive answer as to which pays more, only that SMART's intended benefit is predictable payments. Under the third version of the program, systems of 25 kW or less get a flat residential rate, set at $0.03 per kilowatt-hour for 2026, with $0.06 for qualifying low-income customers. The rate is locked in for 20 years once the system qualifies, and payments can arrive as checks or as bill credits.

The rate resets each program year, so the lock matters. On 9,600 kWh a year, $0.03 pays $288 and $0.06 pays $576. The center also notes that the utilities' payment mechanism still needed approval from the Department of Public Utilities, which it expected to resolve in 2026, so the first checks can lag an operating system. The mechanics and exclusions are on this site's Massachusetts SMART page.

Illinois Shines: the certificates are bought up front

Illinois pays through a contract with an approved vendor, who sells the system's certificates to a utility. For the program year that began June 1, 2026, the price sheet lists distributed generation of up to 10 kW AC at $70.37 per certificate in Group A and $80.77 in Group B, and from over 10 to 25 kW AC at $60.92 and $79.21. The sheet also adds a $20 per certificate adder for customer-owned small systems that will not claim the federal residential credit, which exists specifically because that credit is gone, and it requires the vendor to attest that the owner is not receiving it.

Small distributed generation projects approved on or after June 1, 2026 are paid 50 percent at energization, with the rest spread evenly over the following six years; before that date the whole amount arrived at energization. The program's payment is the expected certificate count over the contract term multiplied by the price, and the program sheet names the term as 15 or 20 years, so the lump sum scales with production over a long period. For a 9.6 MWh system over 15 years that is 144 certificates, which at $70.37 is $10,133 and at $90.37 with the adder is $13,013, before the program's own verified production figure, which will not be flat. The program's page on this site, Illinois Shines, covers the application path.

What one 8 kW system earns in each market

The inputs are an 8 kW DC system at the $2.95 per watt benchmark comparison line (the U.S. Department of Energy's Q1 2025 residential benchmark, modeled market price for an 8 kW system, 2024 dollars), which is $23,600, producing 1,200 kWh per kW a year, or 9,600 kWh. That production factor is an example inside the 1,100 to 1,700 range this site uses; a PVWatts run for your roof replaces it. Prices are the ones in the sections above, held flat, which markets rarely do.

The size of the gap is the finding. DC's single year of income is larger than ten years of Pennsylvania's, and a New Jersey owner who registered in July 2026 collects about a fifth of what DC does for the same panels. None of that tracks the quality of the solar resource, which is why the sunniest states mostly do not appear in the table.

Where certificate income fits in a payback, and where it does not

The break-even test on the worth-it page asks what price per watt a system must beat to pay back from bill savings alone. Certificate income is a separate cash flow, and it helps most when it is large, fixed and long. By that test the New Jersey fixed rate and Massachusetts SMART are the most dependable lines, because a regulator guarantees the rate for the term. DC's income is the largest and the least certain. Maryland's falls by statute each year. Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio contribute too little to move a decision.

A quote that includes certificate income in its savings line should say which row of the table it is using, the vintage, the price and the term. An installer that prints a flat annual dollar figure for twenty years in a market whose ceiling is falling is stating something the statute does not support. The red flags that follow from this belong on the quote checklist.

Where certificates are not the right question

Most states have no solar certificate market for a household, and the usual replacement is the export credit for power sent to the grid, which is covered in the net metering explainer and the export compensation hub. States that do pay for output beyond the bill usually do so through a utility rebate, a state tax credit or a property tax exemption, and the state tax credit side is tabulated in the state credits guide. The right first step is to find which of these your state uses, not to look up an SREC price.