Updated: August 2026
Is solar worth it in Pakistan in 2026? For most homes with real daytime electricity use, yes. A right-sized 5kW system still pays for itself in roughly four to five years at today’s tariffs, then runs largely for free on hardware warrantied for 25 years. But that headline hides a wide spread. The same 5kW system on a house that uses most of its power after sunset takes six or seven years to break even, and a system that is too big for the house can drag past eight. Since the rules changed in February 2026, the honest answer stopped being a simple yes. It now depends almost entirely on how much of your solar you use while the sun is up.
This is not a sales page. We do not sell panels, inverters or installation. We help people read their electricity bills, so this is a bill-first look at whether the numbers work for your house, including the cases where they do not. We will use current 2026 system prices, the current slab tariffs, and the new net billing export rate to work out payback for real household profiles, then give you a break-even table you can find your own house in.
The short answer, by household type
| Your situation | Is solar worth it? (August 2026) |
|---|---|
| 500+ units/month, heavy daytime use (AC, pump, work-from-home) | Yes. Payback around 3.5–4.5 years. |
| 300–500 units/month, mixed day and night use | Usually. Payback around 4.5–6 years. |
| House empty all day, most load at night | Marginal. Payback 6–8 years unless you add a battery. |
| Under 300 units/month | Often no. Bills are already small; payback drifts past 7 years. |
| Small roof, or a system bigger than your usage | No. Oversizing sells power at Rs 11 that was worth Rs 36+ to you. |
The rest of this guide shows where those numbers come from, so you can plug in your own bill.
What changed in 2026, and why payback got longer
Until 9 February 2026, rooftop solar in Pakistan ran on net metering. A bidirectional meter counted the units you pushed to the grid and the units you pulled back, and at billing time they cancelled one-for-one. Export 300 units by day, import 300 at night, and your energy charge was zero. Any leftover surplus was bought from you at a healthy rate, around Rs 25–27 per unit by 2025.
On that date NEPRA notified the Prosumer Regulations 2026 and moved every new solar connection to net billing. The meter still records both flows, but they are now priced separately. Your imports are billed at your normal slab tariff. Your exports are bought at the National Average Energy Purchase Price (NAEPP), which press reports and Profit’s coverage of the notification place at roughly Rs 8.13 to Rs 11 per unit, with some 2026 industry guides quoting as high as Rs 13. Treat “around Rs 11” as your planning figure and confirm the exact rate with your DISCO before you sign, because NEPRA revises it.
That single change is why payback stretched. Under net metering an exported unit was worth a full imported unit, so oversizing your roof was free storage. Under net billing you sell at about Rs 11 and buy back at Rs 33 to Rs 47 per unit before tax. It now takes three to four exported units to pay for one imported unit. The full mechanics, grandfathering rules for old agreements, and the application process are in our net metering 2026 guide; if you want the two systems compared line by line, see net billing vs net metering. For this article the only thing that matters is the consequence: self-consumption is now the whole game.
If your solar agreement was signed before 9 February 2026, none of this applies to you. You keep the old one-to-one offset and the old buyback rate until your existing net-metering agreement expires, so your payback math is the far kinder pre-2026 version. Everything below is for new buyers under net billing.
What a solar system costs in Pakistan right now
Payback is just system price divided by yearly saving, so the price side matters as much as the saving. Prices fell hard through 2025 as panel supply flooded in, and as of August 2026 A-grade panels sell for roughly Rs 27 to Rs 43 per watt on their own — budget A-grade sits near the bottom of that band, while premium N-type bifacial panels from the big names run Rs 40 and up. A complete installed system costs more once you add the inverter, mounting structure, wiring, protections and labour.
| System size | Typical installed cost (Aug 2026) | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| 3kW | Rs 450,000 – 550,000 | Homes using ~250–400 units/month |
| 5kW | Rs 700,000 – 900,000 | Homes using ~450–650 units/month |
| 10kW | Rs 1,500,000 – 2,000,000 | Large homes using ~800–1,200 units/month |
These are on-grid ranges without battery storage. Add a battery bank and you are looking at another Rs 300,000 to Rs 500,000 for a typical home, which changes the maths in a way we cover under hybrid vs on-grid. Prices swing with the dollar and the season, so get two or three written quotes and ask each installer to itemise panels, inverter, structure and net billing connection separately. The mid-range figures above are what we use in the worked examples, and because we pair them with cautious output assumptions and count only the base energy saving, the payback numbers lean conservative rather than optimistic.
One number to keep in mind before you buy: don’t size by your roof, size by your usage. Our guide to matching system size to monthly units walks through the sizing, but the short version is that a system bigger than your daytime load just exports the surplus at Rs 11, which is the fastest way to a bad payback.
The core assumptions behind the math
To keep every example honest and comparable, we hold these fixed:
- Generation: about 120 units per kW per month, averaged across the year. A well-installed system in central Punjab or Sindh often does a little better; this is a safe planning figure. A 5kW system therefore makes roughly 600 units a month, a 10kW system about 1,200.
- Export rate: Rs 11 per unit for exported (surplus) units, the middle of the current NAEPP range.
- Import tariff: the unprotected residential slabs in force in August 2026 under SRO 279(I)/2026, applied to the whole month’s imports. Unprotected consumers get no previous-slab benefit, so your entire month is billed at the single slab your total import lands in.
- Taxes excluded on both sides. We compare base energy charges only. Because taxes and surcharges scale with the bill, the real cash saving is bigger than shown, which again makes these estimates conservative.
The August 2026 unprotected slabs we use for imports:
| Monthly units | Base rate (Rs/unit) |
|---|---|
| 1–100 | 22.44 |
| 101–200 | 28.91 |
| 201–300 | 33.10 |
| 301–400 | 36.46 |
| 401–500 | 38.95 |
| 501–600 | 40.22 |
| 601–700 | 41.85 |
| Above 700 | 47.20 |
Worked example: 5kW on a 500-unit home
This is the most common home installation in Pakistan. The house uses 500 units a month, and we compare two versions of the same house that differ only in when they use power.
Version A: heavy daytime use. A stay-at-home family, inverter AC running through the afternoon, water pump and washing on solar hours. Of the 600 units the panels make, the house consumes 250 directly and exports 350. It still imports 250 units in the evening and at night.
| Without solar | With 5kW, daytime use | |
|---|---|---|
| Units imported | 500 | 250 |
| Energy charge | 500 × 38.95 = Rs 19,475 | 250 × 33.10 = Rs 8,275 |
| Export credit | — | 350 × 11 = Rs 3,850 |
| Net energy cost | Rs 19,475 | Rs 4,425 |
Monthly saving: Rs 15,050. Yearly: about Rs 180,600. On a Rs 800,000 system that is a payback of about 4.4 years. Notice the slab working for you twice: cutting imports from 500 to 250 units drops every imported unit from the Rs 38.95 slab down to Rs 33.10.
Version B: house empty by day. Same 500-unit house, same 5kW system, but everyone is out at work and school until evening, and the AC runs at night. The panels still make 600 units, but only 100 get used as they are generated. The house exports 500 units and imports 400.
| Without solar | With 5kW, night use | |
|---|---|---|
| Units imported | 500 | 400 |
| Energy charge | 500 × 38.95 = Rs 19,475 | 400 × 36.46 = Rs 14,584 |
| Export credit | — | 500 × 11 = Rs 5,500 |
| Net energy cost | Rs 19,475 | Rs 9,084 |
Monthly saving: Rs 10,391. Yearly: about Rs 124,692. Payback on the same Rs 800,000 system: about 6.4 years. Identical hardware, identical bill, identical sunshine. The only difference is that Version B pushes 500 units to the grid for Rs 5,500 that Version A kept and turned into Rs 11,000-plus of avoided imports. That gap of nearly two years of payback is the price of using power at the wrong time.
The lesson is blunt: under net billing, a 5kW system is a good investment for a house that lives during the day and a mediocre one for a house that lives at night. Same panels, different answer.
Worked example: 10kW on a large home
Bigger homes with central cooling can justify 10kW, and the top slab makes the case stronger. Take a house using 1,000 units a month with genuine daytime demand, self-consuming 540 of its 1,200 generated units and exporting 660. It imports 460 units.
| Without solar | With 10kW, daytime use | |
|---|---|---|
| Units imported | 1,000 | 460 |
| Energy charge | 1,000 × 47.20 = Rs 47,200 | 460 × 38.95 = Rs 17,917 |
| Export credit | — | 660 × 11 = Rs 7,260 |
| Net energy cost | Rs 47,200 | Rs 10,657 |
Monthly saving: Rs 36,543. Yearly: about Rs 438,516. Payback on a Rs 1,600,000 system: about 3.6 years, the best case in this guide. The reason is the top slab. Without solar this house pays Rs 47.20 for every one of its 1,000 units. Solar knocks it down to the Rs 38.95 slab and erases more than half the units, so each avoided unit is worth a lot.
Now break the same system. Put that 10kW on a house that only uses 400 units a month, out all day. It self-consumes maybe 200 units, imports 200, and dumps 1,000 units onto the grid at Rs 11. The Rs 11,000 export credit looks nice until you realise those units were making Rs 36-plus each for the daytime house above. The bill it replaces was only Rs 14,584 to begin with, so the yearly saving collapses to a fraction of the big-house figure and payback stretches past eight years, with a chunk of your “return” sitting as export credit the DISCO may never pay you in cash. A 10kW system on a small user is the clearest example of solar that is not worth it.
Break-even table: find your house
Here is the spread across common profiles, all at the assumptions above. Read down the “daytime use” column first, because it moves payback more than anything else.
| Household | System | Units/month | Daytime use | Est. payback | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small daytime load | 3kW | 350 | High | ~4.1 years | Worth it |
| Typical family, home by day | 5kW | 500 | High | ~4.4 years | Worth it |
| Same family, out all day | 5kW | 500 | Low (night) | ~6.4 years | Marginal |
| Low user, oversized system | 5kW | 300 | Low | ~6.9 years | Not worth it |
| Large home, heavy AC | 10kW | 1,000 | High | ~3.6 years | Strong |
| Mid home, mixed use | 10kW | 700 | Moderate | ~5.2 years | OK, slightly big |
| Small user, big system | 10kW | 400 | Low | 8+ years | Not worth it |
Two rows tell the whole story. The typical family that stays home pays back in 4.4 years; the identical family that leaves for the day waits 6.4. Nothing about the equipment changed. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
When solar IS worth it in 2026
The cases where the numbers work share a few traits:
- You use a lot of power between 10am and 4pm. An inverter AC pulls roughly 1.1 to 1.5 units an hour; run one or two through the afternoon and you are self-consuming a big share of what the panels make. Water pumps, irons, washing machines and work-from-home loads all count.
- Your bill is genuinely high, above 500 units a month. Solar saves you the most where you are paying the most, in the Rs 40 and Rs 47 top slabs. Erasing a Rs 47.20 unit is worth four times more than erasing a Rs 22.44 one.
- You have a three-phase connection and enough roof. Net billing needs three-phase and a sanctioned load at least as large as the system, which most heavy users already have.
- You are sizing to your usage, not filling the roof. A system that matches your daytime demand keeps its output cheap and its payback short.
For these homes solar remains one of the better rupee-for-rupee decisions available, and with tariffs trending up each year, it doubles as an inflation hedge. Pairing it with the free bill-cutting moves in our reduce your electricity bill guide shortens the payback further, because a smaller bill needs a smaller system.
When solar is NOT worth it
Be honest with yourself if any of these fit:
- You use under 300 units a month. Your bill is already small, often on protected or low slabs, and the yearly saving is too thin to justify Rs 500,000-plus of hardware. Payback runs past seven years.
- Your house is empty every day and lives at night. Without a battery you export cheap and buy back dear, so most of your generation earns Rs 11 instead of offsetting a Rs 40 unit. Either add storage or reconsider.
- Your roof or budget forces a system bigger than your usage. Oversizing is now a penalty, not a buffer. Every surplus unit is a Rs 11 sale of something that was worth far more to you.
- You are on a rented property or a single-phase connection. No three-phase, no straightforward net billing, and a system you cannot take with you rarely pays back before you move.
- You are planning to move within a few years. Payback runs four years and up. Solar adds some resale value, but rarely the full install cost, so a short horizon usually loses money.
If your load is mostly in the evening but you still want the savings, a battery changes the picture by letting you store daytime units for night use instead of selling them at Rs 11. Whether that extra Rs 300,000 to Rs 500,000 pays for itself is its own calculation, laid out in hybrid vs on-grid solar.
How to shorten your payback
Whatever your starting point, three moves pull the break-even date closer:
- Move heavy loads into daylight. The single biggest lever. Run the washing machine, dishwasher, iron, water pump and pool or motor loads between late morning and mid-afternoon. Pre-cool the house on solar before the evening peak-hour rates kick in. Every unit you self-consume is worth three to four exported units.
- Right-size, do not oversize. Match kilowatts to your daytime demand using your last twelve bills, not your roof area. Our system sizing guide shows how to read your monthly units into a target size.
- Cut the bill first, then size the system. Insulation, LED lighting and inverter appliances shrink the load, which shrinks the system you need, which shrinks the cheque you write. The non-solar savings in our reduce your bill guide compound with solar rather than competing with it.
The bottom line
Solar in Pakistan in 2026 is still worth it for the household it was always best for: a heavy daytime user with a real bill and a system sized to match. For that home the payback is roughly three to five years and the case is easy. Net billing did not kill rooftop solar; it just ended the era where you could fill the roof and let the grid store everything for free. Now the return lives in self-consumption, and the further your usage sits from daylight, the longer you wait. Run your own bill through the tables above before you sign anything, and if a salesperson quotes a two-year payback in 2026, ask them which export rate they used.
FAQs
What is the average solar payback period in Pakistan in 2026?
For a right-sized system on a home with real daytime use, payback is roughly four to five years at August 2026 tariffs and the current Rs 11 export rate. Homes that use most of their power at night, or that install a system bigger than their usage, wait six to eight years or more. The pre-2026 net metering era saw paybacks nearer two to three years, so new buyers should not rely on old figures.
Is solar a good investment in Pakistan after net billing started?
For heavy daytime users, yes. On hardware warrantied for 25 years, a four to five year payback still beats most alternatives a household has, and it hedges against rising tariffs. The investment turns weak for low users, night-heavy homes, and anyone tempted to oversize, because exported units now earn only about Rs 11 against import rates of Rs 33 to Rs 47.
How did net billing change solar ROI compared to net metering?
Under net metering, exported units cancelled imported units one-for-one, so a well-sized system could zero out the energy charge and pay back in under three years. Under net billing from February 2026, imports are billed at your slab rate while exports sell for about Rs 11. The same 5kW system that paid back in under three years now takes roughly four and a half, and longer if you export a large share of your generation.
How many units a month do I need for solar to be worth it?
As a rule of thumb, solar makes clear sense above 500 units a month with genuine daytime demand, works reasonably from about 350 to 500 units, and struggles below 300 units where bills are already small. The threshold is not just total units, though. A 400-unit house that runs its load at midday can beat a 600-unit house that runs everything at night.
What is the current solar export (buyback) rate in Pakistan?
New net billing connections are paid the National Average Energy Purchase Price, reported at roughly Rs 8.13 to Rs 11 per unit in 2026, with some industry guides quoting up to Rs 13. NEPRA revises it, so confirm the exact figure with your DISCO before signing. Consumers with net metering agreements signed before 9 February 2026 keep their older, higher rate of around Rs 25 per unit until their agreement expires.
Is a 5kW or 10kW system better value in 2026?
Neither is universally better; it depends on your usage. A 5kW system suits homes around 450 to 650 units a month, a 10kW suits 800 to 1,200. The 10kW can deliver the shortest payback of all when it displaces top-slab Rs 47.20 units in a big daytime home, but it delivers the worst payback in this guide when installed on a small user who exports most of its output.
Does solar still make sense if my bill is under Rs 15,000?
Usually not on payback alone. A bill under Rs 15,000 points to a low user on cheaper slabs, where the yearly saving is too small to recover Rs 500,000-plus of hardware inside a reasonable window. Cut the bill with free measures first; solar tends to pay off best once your unprotected bill sits well above that level.
Will tariff and rate changes affect my solar payback later?
They can, in both directions. Rising import tariffs make your avoided units more valuable and shorten payback, which is the trend. A cut to the NAEPP export rate lengthens it for exported units. Because net billing settles monthly, any new export rate shows up on your very next bill, so keep an eye on the export credit line to see the current rate you are actually being paid.
Check your bill before and after you go solar
The only way to know if solar was worth it for your house is to watch the bill. Before you install, pull your last twelve bills to see your real monthly units and slab. After you install, the export credit line tells you the rate you are actually being paid and how many units you sold versus kept. You can view and download your bill for free on our service pages for every DISCO in Pakistan, LESCO, MEPCO, IESCO, K-Electric and the rest, with just your reference number. Check this month’s bill, find your usage, and run it through the tables above before you spend a rupee.