UK Solar Export Payments Hit £100m

Solar export payments to UK households have crossed a new milestone: Octopus Energy says its customers alone earned almost £100m between them over the past year for spare solar power sent back to the grid. If you have panels and haven't checked your export tariff in a while, the numbers are worth a look.

What households are actually earning

Octopus Energy reports that more than 400,000 UK households on its export tariffs collectively earned £99.2m over the past 12 months, working out to an average of £244 per home. Between them, those households fed 825 GWh of power back into the grid — roughly the equivalent of a year's output from a gas power plant. Rebecca Dibb-Simkin, Octopus's Chief Product and Marketing Officer, said: "Over 400,000 UK households on Octopus tariffs are already generating their own clean energy, and that number just keeps climbing."

Why the payout has jumped

Part of the story is simply more panels on more roofs feeding more exports back to a grid that increasingly wants that power. Octopus also reported a surge of 73,000 solar enquiries across May, June and July as a summer heatwave pushed both generation and demand higher. That kind of weather swing is exactly why exporting matters commercially as well as environmentally: sunny, high-demand days are when export rates and grid usefulness both peak, and they're also the days a well-sized system produces the most surplus to sell rather than use.

Rates have actually come down, not up

It's worth being clear-eyed about the trend, because the £100m headline can read as if export rates are rising — they're not, for Octopus customers at least. Outgoing Octopus, the supplier's flagship export tariff, dropped from 15p/kWh to 12p/kWh from 1 March 2026, its first rate cut since 2022. Octopus attributes the change to wholesale energy costs settling down since 2024. The £244 average therefore reflects a full year that included both the higher and lower rate — and underlines that the earnings opportunity is really about export volume (more panels, more households, more sunshine) rather than an ever-rising price per kWh.

What a typical household earns from exporting

The £244 average spans everything from small 2-4kW roofs to larger arrays with batteries, so it's a rough guide rather than a promise. A well-oriented south-facing system will typically export somewhere between a third and a half of what it generates once daytime household use is accounted for; the rest is either used directly or, on a growing number of systems, stored in a battery for the evening instead of being sold to the grid at all. That trade-off — sell now at 12p/kWh or store and avoid buying back at 25-30p/kWh later — is increasingly why battery-equipped homes see lower export volumes but a bigger overall bill saving than export income alone suggests.

Is your export tariff paying you enough?

Not every export tariff pays the same, and the gap between the best and worst can be worth hundreds of pounds a year on an average system. If you're comparing options, our Octopus tariff comparison for solar owners breaks down where Outgoing sits against Flux and other time-of-use options, and our Smart Export Guarantee rate comparison covers what every major supplier is currently paying, not just Octopus. If you haven't installed yet, our Octopus Energy solar panels review covers pricing and what's bundled with their installs.

Making sure you get paid at all

Export payments only flow if your system is registered correctly. You need an MCS-certified installation, a signed export tariff (Smart Export Guarantee or a supplier's own deal like Outgoing), and — for most modern tariffs — a smart meter capable of half-hourly export readings, since flat-rate deemed export payments are far less common now than they were under the old Feed-in Tariff. If your export payments look lower than these figures suggest they should be, it's worth checking your meter is actually recording exports and that you're on your supplier's current best rate rather than a legacy default. It's also worth reviewing your tariff annually rather than leaving it on autopilot — suppliers change export rates without much fanfare, as the March 2026 Outgoing Octopus cut showed, and a rate that was competitive last year isn't guaranteed to still be the best one on the market today.

The bigger picture

£100m from one supplier's customer base is a useful reminder that rooftop solar in the UK has moved well past the enthusiast stage — it's now a meaningful, measurable contributor to the grid, with real money flowing back to homeowners for it. As more households install panels and batteries, and as smart, time-of-use export tariffs become the norm rather than the exception, that number is likely to keep climbing, even without rates themselves rising. For anyone still weighing up whether solar pays for itself, export income is only one part of the equation alongside direct bill savings — but it's the part that's easiest to point to as hard, independently reported cash rather than an estimate.