Solar feed-in tariffs explained

A feed-in tariff (FiT) is a credit, not a wage. When your panels generate more electricity than the house is using, the surplus flows out through the meter and your retailer knocks a few cents per kilowatt hour off the bill. That is the entire product. It is not a rebate on the hardware, it is not GreenPower, and it is not a reason to pick a plan with your eyes closed.

Australian rooftop solar is almost always net metered. The inverter and the meter let the house use its own generation first. Only the leftover kilowatt hours are exported. That leftover is what the feed-in tariff prices. The kilowatt hours you use yourself never appear as a feed-in line. They show up as usage you did not have to buy.

If that distinction is fuzzy when you open a bill, stop and learn how to read your electricity bill before you start shopping for a “better” export rate.

What the credit actually pays for

Retailers buy wholesale electricity, pay network charges, and sell you a retail plan. When you export at noon on a sunny weekday, you are delivering energy into a part of the day that is already crowded with rooftop and utility-scale solar. The wholesale price at that hour has been weak for years. A retailer that pays you 8c for an export it can replace for less is not being generous for long.

That is why feed-in tariffs have fallen across the National Electricity Market. The mid-2010s premium rates — state bonus schemes in New South Wales and Queensland, early Victorian minima well above 10c — belonged to a different wholesale market. Those legacy schemes are closed to new connections. If you are still on one, treat it as a closing window, not a market you can re-enter.

In 2026, a new connection is looking at retailer-set credits. Some Victorian offers advertised headline feed-in rates around 0–8c/kWh, usually with conditions: a daily export cap, a time-varying rate that is higher after dark and lower at midday, or a credit that only applies on a particular market offer. Other states are in the same neighbourhood. Treat any website table titled “best feed-in this week” as marketing until you have the energy fact sheet in your hand.

Victoria’s 0c floor, and everyone else

Victoria used to have a positive minimum feed-in tariff set by the Essential Services Commission. That world has ended. For 2026-27 the regulated minimum is 0c/kWh. Retailers may offer more than zero. They may not charge you for exporting. Zero is the floor, not a promise that every plan pays zero, and not a reason to leave credits on the table if a competitor is paying a few cents.

The rest of the country never had a single national minimum. New South Wales, south-east Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT leave the rate to the retailer. Western Australia is a different market again; Synergy publishes its own buyback arrangements, and you should not assume an east-coast fact sheet applies. How electricity markets differ across Australian states is the map if you have just moved.

A 0c regulated floor sounds brutal. In bill maths it is less dramatic than it looks, because the valuable kilowatt hour was never the exported one.

Self-consumption is the real tariff

Every kilowatt hour your panels cover while the dishwasher, the air-conditioner or the office running in the spare room is on is a kilowatt hour you do not import. That avoided import is worth the retail usage rate on your plan — often something in the twenties or thirties of cents, sometimes more on a peak window — not the feed-in tariff.

Work a simple day. The array exports 12 kWh at 5c and you buy 8 kWh after dark at 32c. The export credit is 60c. The evening import is $2.56. Shifting 4 kWh of laundry and cooking into daylight, or storing them in a battery, is worth far more than chasing another 2c of feed-in.

That is the whole argument for whether a home battery is worth it, and it is the reason the best electricity plans for solar households start with the import rate and the supply charge, not the banner feed-in.

Self-consumed solar is usually worth the retail import rate. The feed-in tariff is what is left over.

Time-varying credits, export caps and ugly conditions

A single flat feed-in is easy to advertise and easy to misunderstand. Plenty of 2026 plans do something more awkward.

• Time-varying feed-in. Some retailers pay more for evening or overnight exports and little or nothing at midday. That can suit a battery that discharges to the grid at peak, or a west-facing array that still produces at 5 pm. It does nothing for a household that dumps everything at noon and imports everything at 7 pm.
• Daily export caps. A headline 8c that applies only to the first 5 or 10 kWh a day, with 0c after that, is not an 8c tariff. Large arrays on a quiet weekday will blow through the cap before lunch.
• Plan lock-in. The generous credit is on the market offer. Move to a standing offer, miss a benefit period, or accept a “save” call, and the credit can reset.
• Network export limits. The distributor, not the retailer, decides how many kilowatts you may export. A 5 kW inverter on a single-phase site is a common ceiling. Extra panels that clip against that limit never become feed-in.

Read the fact sheet down to the footnotes. Then compare the whole year on Energy Made Easy or Victorian Energy Compare, the same way you would compare any electricity plan.

How solar sits on time-of-use and Solar Sharer

Smart meters make the clock visible. A time-of-use tariff is often cheap in the middle of the day — exactly when the panels are already covering the house — and expensive from late afternoon. Solar does not automatically make time-of-use a win. It can make the evening peak more expensive relative to a flat rate, unless you can move load or store energy.

In Default Market Offer areas, the Solar Sharer Offer goes further: a free midday window for eligible smart-meter customers, up to a daily kilowatt-hour cap commonly described as 24 kWh. If your own array is already flooding that window, free grid energy is less useful than it is for a renter with a washing machine and no roof. If you can charge a battery or an electric vehicle on the free window, the offer starts to look like a second feed-in — except the credit is “do not pay for imports”, which is the valuable kind.

Feed-in tariffs and Solar Sharer are not substitutes. One prices your exports. The other prices a slice of your imports. A household can have panels and still be better off on Solar Sharer if the evening rate on that standing offer is tolerable and the midday free block covers a heat pump or a charger. Or the opposite: a high-export site on a decent credit and a cheap flat import rate can beat a free window it never uses.

What a feed-in is not

Households mix up four different money flows. Keep them in separate drawers.

• Feed-in tariff. Retailer credit for exported kilowatt hours, after you are connected.
• STCs. Small-scale technology certificates that cut the upfront price of eligible solar (and, under the federal battery program, eligible batteries). They are not a tariff. See solar rebates and STCs.
• GreenPower or carbon-neutral plans. Those are about the residual grid electricity you still buy. They do not raise your feed-in.
• State energy concessions. Concession cards reduce the bill. They are not paid because you have panels.

The Clean Energy Regulator and the state energy departments publish the rebate rules. Retailer blogs publish the feed-in banners. Use the first group for hardware, the second only after you have a fact sheet.

A working method for 2026

Do not start with a ranking of feed-in rates. Start with a year of exports and a year of imports, or two seasonal bills if that is all you have.

• Note annual import kilowatt hours and the rate you pay after sunset.
• Note annual export kilowatt hours and the current credit, including any cap.
• Estimate how many export kilowatt hours you could still shift to self-consumption with timers, a hot-water mode, or a battery.
• On the government comparator, enter solar exports. Rank by estimated annual cost, not by feed-in.
• Open the two cheapest plans and check the export cap, the time-varying credit, and whether the import rate is a peak window you actually live in.
• If you are in New South Wales, south-east Queensland or South Australia, test Solar Sharer as a separate scenario, not as a line on a solar plan.

Prices still move because wholesale costs, networks and environmental certificates move. Why Australian electricity prices change is the background. The feed-in tariff is one noisy line on that bill. Treat it as a leftover price for leftover energy, then spend your attention on the imports you have not yet got rid of.