HomeEvery solar company in New York will give you a number. Very few will explain how the number was built, which is the part that lets you compare two quotes honestly. This is that explanation.
We are not going to print a price list. Equipment pricing, labour and the NYSERDA incentive block all move, and a fixed figure published in September would be misleading by spring. What does not change is the structure of the cost and the arithmetic you should run on it.
Ask for the price per watt
Solar is priced per watt of installed DC capacity. A 7,000-watt system quoted at $28,000 is $4.00 per watt. That single number is the only way to compare quotes for differently sized systems, and any reputable installer will give it to you without hesitating.
When you get two quotes at different prices per watt, the gap is almost always explained by one of five things:
- What is inside the scope. Does the price include the DOB filing, the Con Edison interconnection application, the structural review, the inspections, and the property tax abatement paperwork? Or are some of those extra line items you discover later?
- Equipment tier. Panel efficiency and inverter type. Microinverters and DC optimisers cost more than a single string inverter and are worth it on a shaded or complex Brooklyn roof — and unnecessary on a clean, unshaded plane.
- Roof difficulty. A three-storey brownstone with hatch-only roof access costs more to install on than a semi-detached house in Bay Ridge with a side yard. This is real, not padding.
- Racking. Ballasted flat-roof racking with a structural review is more involved than flush-mounting on a pitched roof.
- Whether the NY-Sun incentive is already deducted. This is the big one, and it is covered below.
A cheap price per watt is not automatically a better deal, and an expensive one is not automatically thorough. But you cannot evaluate either without the number.
The single most common apples-to-oranges trap
The NYSERDA NY-Sun incentive is paid per watt and claimed by the installer, not by you. It gets deducted before you sign.
Which means one quote may show gross cost before NY-Sun and another may show net cost after it. Those two numbers can differ by thousands of dollars for identical work, and if you compare them directly you will reach the wrong conclusion.
Ask both installers the same question: is the NY-Sun incentive already deducted from this figure, and what per-watt rate did you use? The rate steps down in blocks as regional capacity fills, so a quote based on a stale block assumption may not survive to contract.
The 2026 incentive stack, corrected
This is where most of the information online is now wrong, including proposals still in circulation from last year.
The 30% federal residential credit is gone. Section 25D was repealed for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. If you buy a system in 2026, there is no federal credit on your tax return. Any Brooklyn quote showing a 30% federal line for a purchased residential system is either out of date or misleading.
What remains:
- NYSERDA NY-Sun — per watt, claimed by the installer, already in your contract price.
- New York State Solar Energy System Equipment Credit — 25% of system cost against your state income tax, capped at $5,000. On most Brooklyn residential systems the cap binds, so treat it as a flat $5,000. Unused amounts carry forward five years.
- NYC solar property tax abatement — 30% of eligible cost, delivered as 7.5% a year off your property tax bill for four years. Application due March 15 for a given tax year.
One large exception, and it is the most important thing to understand about 2026 pricing. Section 48E – the business-side credit – was not repealed and runs through the end of 2027, and it goes to whoever owns the system. So a third-party-owned structure can still capture 30%. Under a prepaid lease, a financing entity owns the system for an initial term, claims that 30%, applies it as an upfront discount to you, and then transfers ownership to you – commonly around year five or six. You end up owning the system having captured a credit a cash buyer in 2026 simply cannot get. The NYC property tax abatement still comes to the building owner either way. Price both structures before deciding; the gap between them is usually larger than the gap between two installers.
Run the arithmetic in that order, and note that the abatement arrives over four years rather than as a lump sum. It is not smaller than the old federal credit — it is slower, which is a different thing.
The abatement trap specific to Brooklyn brownstones
The abatement cannot exceed your property tax bill in a given year. Class 1 assessment caps mean that row houses held for decades often carry annual tax bills that are low relative to what the house would sell for.
Work it through with real numbers. If 7.5% of your system cost is $2,100 a year and your annual property tax bill is $1,600, you realize $1,600 that year and the remaining $500 is simply lost. Across four years a nominal $8,400 abatement quietly becomes $6,400.
Your property tax bill is public and takes two minutes to look up on the Department of Finance property lookup. Do that before you finalize system size — it is the one piece of the Brooklyn solar calculation that installers most often skip and that most often changes the answer.
How to get to payback without being sold a number
Payback periods in sales material rest on assumptions you cannot see — an electricity rate escalator, a production estimate, a degradation rate. Here is how to build your own:
- Take the contract price after NY-Sun.
- Subtract the state credit (usually $5,000).
- Subtract the abatement you will actually realize — 30% of eligible cost, or four times your annual property tax bill, whichever is lower.
- Divide by your current annual Con Edison spend on the electricity the system will offset. Use twelve months of real bills, not a summer month multiplied by twelve.
That gives you a payback in years on today’s rates. It is conservative, because it assumes Con Edison rates never rise, and they have risen substantially over the past decade. But conservative is the right direction to be wrong in.
What to be suspicious of
- A quote with no price per watt. There is no good reason to withhold it.
- A federal tax credit line for a purchased system. It does not exist in 2026.
- A production estimate from satellite imagery on a shaded roof. Ask whether shade was measured on the roof.
- A quote that prices only one financing structure. In 2026 a cash purchase, a prepaid lease and a standard lease produce materially different numbers, because only a third-party-owned system can still capture the 30% federal credit under Section 48E. An installer who has not priced at least two structures for you has not finished the job.
- Pressure tied to an expiring incentive. The state credit and the abatement are not expiring this month. The NY-Sun block genuinely does step down, but that is a modest change, not a cliff.
If you are holding a Brooklyn quote and want it read line by line against what is actually available in 2026, send it over. We will do that on a competitor’s proposal as readily as our own — a quote that survives scrutiny is worth more to you than one that avoids it.