Will your mortgage lender pay you for getting solar?

Yes, if you're with the right lender. Mortgage lenders currently help with solar in three distinct ways. Some pay a cash reward when you install panels on the home they hold the mortgage on. Some lend you the installation money on preferential terms through a further advance (extra borrowing secured against your home). And some offer better remortgage deals once your home has a strong energy rating, which solar can help you reach.

The warning comes first: this corner of the market churns constantly. Santander's £1,000 greener homes cashback ended in June 2025. Virgin Money's reward closed the same month, and the brand itself has since been absorbed into Nationwide. Coventry Building Society's £500 cashback wound up in 2024. Plenty of articles still recommend all three. Everything below was checked against the lenders' own terms in July 2026, but check again in the week you apply, because these schemes can be changed or withdrawn without notice.

Barclays' Greener Home Reward pays existing residential mortgage customers £500 for installing solar panels, battery storage or solar thermal (£1,000 for a heat pump). You don't need to take any new borrowing. The conditions: the work must be done by an MCS-certified installer, you claim within three months of the date on your MCS certificate, and it's one reward only, ever, per borrower. Worth knowing: the reward was cut in January 2026 from a previous maximum of £2,000, so older articles overstate it.

Halifax's Green Living Reward pays £1,000 for solar panels or a home battery (£2,000 for a heat pump, £500 for smaller measures) and includes a free EPC assessment afterwards. The condition that trips people up: it's tied to a mortgage product taken since late July 2024, including product transfers and further advances, and the work must complete within about a year of the mortgage completing. Lloyds runs a near-identical Eco Home Reward with one extra hoop: you need a Club Lloyds current account when you claim.

If the obstacle is finding the money rather than earning a reward, several lenders offer green further advances: extra borrowing secured on your home that must be spent on energy improvements. Nationwide's version is the standout. Existing mortgage customers can borrow between £5,000 and £20,000 with no interest charged for an initial fixed period, provided the whole loan goes on qualifying improvements, and solar panels and battery storage are explicitly on the list. It's a limited allocation that Nationwide can withdraw at any time, though it was extended in March 2026 to reach 10,000 households, and solar is among the most popular uses.

Skipton, Coventry and Leeds building societies offer similar green borrowing at discounted rates, with ceilings from £25,000 to £50,000 and a common rule that at least half the money must go on the energy improvements themselves. All of these are secured borrowing against your home with normal affordability checks, so treat the decision with the same care as any remortgage. Speak to the lender or an independent mortgage broker before acting; nothing in this guide is financial advice.

The third route is indirect. An Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) scores your home out of 100 and bands it from A to G, and a clutch of lenders (NatWest, HSBC and Santander among them) reserve their best green deals for homes rated A or B. Solar helps here more than almost any other single measure: a well-sized system typically adds somewhere in the region of 6 to 10 points, because the rating is built on modelled energy costs and solar cuts them directly.

Assessment rules changed in your favour in June 2025. Under the updated methodology used in England and Wales (Scotland's EPC regime differs), assessors now record your actual installation, panels, battery and even a solar diverter, rather than leaning on default assumptions, so a real system finally gets full credit. The honest caveat: band B starts at 81 points and the average UK home sits in band D, so solar alone won't lift a typical D-rated home to B. If you're already a high C, it can tip you over. Get a fresh EPC after installation (Halifax provides one free with its reward) and put it on the table at your next remortgage.

The next wave is already scheduled. Under the Warm Homes Plan, the government's Warm Homes Loan Scheme puts £300 million behind participating lenders so they can offer low-interest loans for solar panels, batteries and heat pumps, with a grant of up to 20% knocked off the loan principal. There is no income threshold and no minimum EPC requirement.

Lenders applied to join over the summer of 2026, and loans are expected to reach consumers from around September 2026, with the scheme running to 2030. As of July 2026 there is nothing to apply for yet. If your installation isn't urgent, it may be worth watching how these loans compare with the bank schemes above. And whichever route you take, 0% VAT on solar and battery installations runs until March 2027 regardless of how you pay.

One historic scheme still causes genuine mortgage trouble: the rent-a-roof deals of the early 2010s, where a company installed free panels in exchange for a 25-year lease over your roof. That lease is a third-party legal interest in the property, and industry-wide lender rules mean a non-compliant lease can still hold up a remortgage or a sale today. Panels you own outright, or funded with a loan, carry none of this baggage. Lenders treat them as a normal fixture, and when you eventually sell, your conveyancer will simply want the MCS certificate and warranty paperwork.

As for value: the evidence is consistently positive, though the size of the effect is contested. Industry research by Solar Energy UK, drawn from millions of property listings, put the average uplift at roughly 1 to 2% of sale price. A 2024 academic study by Swansea University and the University of Birmingham, using over 1.5 million actual transactions, found solar homes selling for 6 to 7% more. Take the range rather than either number. Perhaps the strongest signal is the lenders' own behaviour: banks don't put interest-free money behind improvements they believe weaken their security.