Two Different Markets Living Inside One Set of 2026 Numbers
Residential solar’s first-install market is forecast to contract 18% to 21% in 2026, and customer acquisition cost is projected to spike 40% to $0.84 per watt in the same year, up from a five-year low of $0.60 per watt in 2025. Read together, those two numbers describe a market getting both smaller and more expensive to sell into at the same time, for the specific slice of buyers who have never had solar before.
That is not the whole solar market, though. A second population exists alongside the shrinking first-install pool: homeowners who already have a system, installed 10 to 15 years ago, sitting on a string inverter carrying only a 10 to 12-year standard warranty against a 25-year panel warranty. That gap leaves a 13-plus-year stretch where a $1,500 to $3,000 inverter replacement is an out-of-pocket cost, and it is the mechanical reason this second population is not shrinking the same way the first-install market is. It grows every year another system crosses out of its inverter warranty.
Why This Distinction Matters for an Appointment-Buying Decision
An appointment vendor’s value depends on the size and direction of the pool it is drawing appointments from. A vendor pulling exclusively from the first-install pool is competing for a shrinking, increasingly expensive-to-reach population, the exact dynamic behind the 40% CAC spike. A vendor, or an internal pipeline, that also reaches the repowering and solar-orphan population described elsewhere on this site is drawing from a segment that adds new, qualified candidates every year almost independent of what happens to first-install demand.
That is a genuinely different argument than the general case for buying appointments instead of straining an unpredictable in-house team. It is specifically about where the addressable population is still growing in a year where the headline market number is a contraction.
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Book a Solar CallWhat “Re-Solarization” Means as a Pitch
Re-solarization is not a rebrand of repowering, it is the sales argument built on top of it: in a market where the first-install pool is both shrinking and getting more expensive to reach, the appointments worth paying for increasingly include the ones drawn from an aging fleet crossing out of inverter warranty, not only the ones drawn from homeowners buying solar for the first time. A sales org that treats “solar appointments” as a single, undifferentiated category is missing that the two populations behind those appointments are moving in opposite directions in 2026.
The Practical Version of This Pitch
In practice, this means asking an appointment vendor, or an in-house team, a more specific question than how many appointments can be booked this month. The more useful question is where those appointments are coming from: first-install prospects competing in an 18% to 21% contracting pool, or a mix that also includes homeowners whose system is old enough to need real attention. VA Horizon books both, and every appointment, first-install or repowering, is confirmed twice by a real person before a rep is sent out, not generated from a list and hoped into a calendar.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.