Welcome to edition one of The Solar Briefing — the digest we’ll keep publishing for the UK solar trade: the numbers, deadlines and commercial signals that actually move installers’ order books, in one sourced read. No press-release recycling, no supplier advertorial. Here’s where the market stands at the halfway point of 2026.
The install base: still riding a record
The market is working through the aftermath of a record year. MCS logged 257,397 certified installations in 2025 — up 32% on 2024 and the highest annual total ever, beating even the 2011 Feed-in Tariff peak. Cumulative certified installs now stand above 1.85 million, deployed capacity is roughly 21.6 GW, and solar supplied about 6.4% of UK electricity last year.
Two structural notes inside that headline matter more than the headline itself. First, new-build share keeps climbing — around 35% of installs and rising as the Future Homes Standard pushes developers toward solar-as-standard, which shifts volume from doorstep retrofit sales into framework contracts. Second, the certified contractor base is at an all-time high (5,250+), which means the demand growth is being shared across more vans. Winning work is increasingly a distribution question, not a demand question — the theme running through our installer marketing coverage.
The clock that sells: 273 days of 0% VAT
The single most usable commercial fact in the market right now is a date: 31 March 2027, when the 0% VAT rate on residential solar and battery storage is scheduled to revert to 5%. From today that is roughly nine months — enough time for a considered purchase, short enough to justify moving this year.
Used honestly, it is the cleanest close in the industry because the customer can verify it on GOV.UK in thirty seconds. On a £7,000 system the difference is several hundred pounds; on a solar-plus-battery package it is more. Expect demand pull-forward through late 2026 and price your install capacity accordingly — and if you want the consumer-facing explanation to send prospects, our sister site’s guide to what the VAT change adds to a quote does the maths neutrally.
Export tariffs: the flexibility gap is widening
The Smart Export Guarantee remains a supplier-by-supplier lottery — the best fixed and variable export tariffs sit toward the top of a roughly 12–20p/kWh range while laggards pay pennies. The commercial signal for installers is that the gap between “any SEG tariff” and “the right smart tariff plus a battery” keeps widening. Time-of-use export, cheap-rate winter charging and early virtual-power-plant schemes all reward exactly the storage-and-controls conversation where installer margin is healthiest. Our guides to the battery brand landscape and VPPs and flexibility tariffs cover the positioning.
Sector watch
Warehouses and logistics remain the strongest commercial pipeline — big roofs, daytime loads and energy costs that make the warehouse solar case almost self-writing. Schools continue to be the most accessible public-sector entry point via Salix finance and LA net-zero targets (see solar for schools). Farms keep converting barn roofs under the Improving Farm Productivity grant — around 25% of eligible cost, and worth restating: not the misquoted “FETF 40%” that still circulates (farm solar has the current picture). And the O&M market — servicing the ageing FiT-era fleet — keeps consolidating around specialists such as Solar Maintenance Solutions, a recurring-revenue model more installers should be copying.
One number to keep
49. That’s roughly the number of installations per certified contractor per year at current volumes — the arithmetic behind every pricing and marketing decision this year. The market is growing; the competition is growing faster. The installers thriving in 2026 are the ones treating customer acquisition as seriously as installation quality.
That’s edition one. Future briefings will follow the same format: sourced numbers first, commercial meaning second, no filler. The archive lives under market data, and every edition is dated so you can hold us to it.