Check your solar retailer’s rate card right now and you’ll probably see two numbers that don’t look like they belong to the same product: something like 3c/kWh for power exported between 10am and 3pm, and 15c or more for the same electrons pushed out between 4pm and 9pm. That’s not a typo and it’s not your retailer being stingy for the sake of it. It’s the honest reflection of what your solar export is actually worth to the grid at that moment, and in 2026 it’s become the defining fact of household solar economics.
I get asked about this constantly on site visits, usually by someone waving a printed bill and asking why their feed-in tariffs have shrunk since they got their system installed. The short version: they haven’t been cut so much as the market they’re being sold into has changed underneath them. The longer version needs a bit of unpacking, because it touches network limits, wholesale pricing and the way your switchboard is wired, all at once.
Who actually sets your feed-in tariff #
There’s a persistent myth that the government sets feed-in tariffs. It doesn’t, not directly. Retailers set their own rates and compete on them, the same way they compete on usage charges. What state regulators do is publish a minimum or benchmark figure that’s meant to reflect the wholesale value of solar exports, so retailers can’t quietly pay you nothing while pocketing the difference.
In Victoria, the Essential Services Commission sets a minimum feed-in tariff each financial year, reviewed against wholesale price forecasts. In New South Wales, IPART publishes a benchmark range rather than a floor, because NSW deregulated retail feed-in tariffs some years back. Queensland’s regulator does something similar. None of these bodies actually pay you anything; they set the yardstick retailers are meant to sit above, and most do, at least on their headline flat rate. Where it gets messier is the time-varying products, which increasingly sit below the flat benchmark in the middle of the day and above it in the evening. Worth reading the Default Market Offer explainer if you want the retail-price side of this, because the DMO caps usage charges but has nothing to do with what you’re paid for exports.
Why midday exports are worth so little #
This is the bit that actually explains everything else. On a mild, sunny weekday, rooftop solar across the NEM can push wholesale prices into negative territory for hours at a stretch, because there’s simply more generation than demand and something has to absorb the surplus. AEMO’s own dispatch data shows this pattern has become routine in South Australia and increasingly common in Victoria and Queensland. We’ve covered the mechanics of this in negative electricity prices at midday: what they mean for you, but the short version for feed-in tariffs is brutal: if the wholesale price your retailer receives for your exported power is zero or negative, they can’t pay you a healthy rate for it and stay solvent. Some retailers still do, as a loss-leading marketing play, but it’s not sustainable market-wide.
Think of it like a farmers’ market flooded with zucchini in February. Everyone’s crop comes in at once, the stallholders can’t move it, and the price collapses — not because zucchini got worse, but because supply and demand fell out of sync for a few hours a day. I lost most of my tomatoes to blossom end rot this summer and have a similar glut-versus-scarcity problem with basil, so I’ve got some sympathy for a market that can’t absorb an oversupply gracefully.
Time-varying tariffs and what they mean for system design #
The retail response to negative midday prices has been time-of-export tariffs: low or zero payment in the solar trough, a decent rate in the evening peak. AGL, Origin and several second-tier retailers now offer these as standard rather than opt-in. For a household, this changes the calculus on system design in a way that a lot of the glossy payback brochures still don’t reflect.
If your feed-in value is concentrated in the 4pm-9pm window, a west-facing string suddenly earns its keep even though it produces less total energy than a north-facing one. I’ve had installers argue this both ways for years, but on the numbers now, a mixed-orientation array with some panels catching the afternoon sun genuinely outperforms a pure north-facing system on bill outcomes, even if the datasheet kilowatt-hour total looks worse. It’s a case where the shinier number on paper isn’t the one that pays your bill.
Export limits: the pipe, not the tap #
Separate from what you’re paid is how much you’re even allowed to send back. Every distribution network sets an export limit for new connections, usually somewhere between 1.5kW and 10kW per phase depending on your network and the state of the local transformer. This is set by the distributor, not your retailer, and it’s not about being paid — it’s a hard physical cap enforced by your inverter.
The best way I’ve found to explain it to a homeowner standing in their garage is the garden hose. Your panels and inverter can generate as much pressure as you like, but the export limit is the diameter of the pipe leaving your property. Oversize the panels beyond that pipe and the extra capacity doesn’t get exported, it gets clipped off at the inverter — wasted, not banked, not carried over. This is why proper string sizing matters more than headline panel wattage. A 10kW system jammed against a 5kW export limit is, for exporting purposes, a 5kW system with expensive shading margin.
Some networks, including SA Power Networks and parts of Ausgrid’s territory, now offer flexible or dynamic export limits, where the cap moves through the day based on real-time network capacity rather than sitting at one fixed number. That’s a genuine improvement on the old static limit and it’s the direction the AEMC has been pushing distributors, but it also means your export ceiling can change hour to hour, which is one more variable an installer needs to model rather than assume.
The push to charge for exports #
The more contentious development is export tariffs — networks charging households, above a free threshold, for the privilege of exporting large amounts of solar during congested periods. This isn’t universal and it isn’t retrospective for most existing systems, but several distributors have introduced or flagged two-way pricing structures as part of their regulatory proposals to the AER. The logic from the network side is that midday solar exports are increasingly what’s straining local transformers and low-voltage lines, not evening peak demand, so the cost causation argument has flipped.
I understand the network’s argument on paper. I also think it’s a genuinely uncomfortable ask for households who installed solar in good faith under one set of rules and are now being told the rules have moved because the technology succeeded faster than the network could plan for. Advocacy groups such as Solar Citizens have pushed back on this framing publicly, arguing it punishes early adopters for a network planning problem, and I’d say that criticism has more substance than it’s sometimes given credit for in regulatory submissions. If you want the fuller policy context on where consumer-owned solar and batteries sit in all this, our Consumer Energy Resources roadmap piece covers the AEMC and state-level thinking in more detail.
What a real household actually sees #
Strip away the marketing and here’s roughly what an average rooftop system in the 6-10kW range nets a household on a flat feed-in tariff in the low double digits of cents, with the bulk of the financial benefit coming from self-consumption — not export income. That’s been true for a while but it’s more true now than ever, because export rates have kept falling while retail usage charges have kept climbing. The Clean Energy Regulator’s own data on small-scale solar uptake shows installations haven’t slowed despite this, which tells you most households have cottoned on that the real value is avoiding an 30-40c/kWh peak usage charge, not selling surplus for a few cents.
That’s also the whole commercial case for household batteries and why every retailer and installer conversation now pivots to storage within about ninety seconds. Shifting your own midday solar into your own evening usage sidesteps the entire feed-in tariff problem, because you’re not selling cheap and buying back dear, you’re just using what you already made. It’s worth reading Who Really Pays For Solar? alongside this, because the distributional questions about who subsidises whom in this system are genuinely contested and don’t have a clean answer.
The honest bottom line on the switchboard #
If you’re weighing a new system or a battery add-on in 2026, the feed-in tariff line on the quote is close to the least important number on the page. What matters more is your export limit, whether your network offers flexible exports, how your usage pattern lines up with time-of-use pricing, and whether your existing switchboard and meter can even support a battery retrofit without an upgrade. None of that is as fun to spruik as a big feed-in number, but it’s what actually determines whether the system pays for itself in six years or eleven.
Australia’s rooftop solar fleet is genuinely one of the more remarkable stories in the grid’s history, as we’ve covered in Australia’s Rooftop Solar Success, but it’s a story that’s now running into the physical limits of the network it plugs into. The tariffs are just the price signal telling you that.
— Priya Nair, Solar & Distributed Energy Correspondent
Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash