The Mix-Up Behind This Objection
“Will solar increase my property taxes” usually comes from a reasonable but mistaken assumption, that a tax break tied to solar somehow also affects property tax. The federal Section 25D or 48E solar tax credit is a federal income-tax mechanism, applied against what a homeowner owes the IRS. Property tax is assessed locally, based on a home’s value, by a completely separate system. Conflating the two is understandable, they are both taxes and both mentioned in the same sales conversation, but they have nothing to do with each other, and the real answer to this objection lives entirely on the property-tax side.
The Current Count: 34 States Plus Puerto Rico and DC
As of October 2025, per Palmetto, 34 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. have a property tax exemption in effect for residential solar. In practice, the added home value a solar system creates is not factored into the property’s taxable assessment in those states, so a homeowner’s property tax bill does not rise simply because a solar system was added. Palmetto’s own page notes plainly that this list is “subject to change,” a fair caveat for state-by-state tax policy generally.
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Book a Solar CallWhy an Older Source Says 36 States
A second source, EcoWatch, citing SEIA, states that 36 states currently offer a property tax exemption for solar, two states higher than Palmetto’s October 2025 count. EcoWatch’s own page discloses it was last updated May 4, 2022, more than three years before the Palmetto figure above, despite living at a URL that otherwise reads as current. That gap is best read as real policy movement over three-plus years, states adding or narrowing exemptions is genuinely plausible over that span, rather than one of the two sources simply being wrong. The fresher, October 2025 Palmetto figure is the one worth leading with in a homeowner conversation, with the 2022 count disclosed only as an older comparison point if it comes up.
How to Answer This for a Specific Homeowner
The honest answer to this objection is never a single national number; it is whichever side of the state list a specific homeowner’s property sits on. A rep confident enough to say “solar will not raise your property taxes” needs to know that the homeowner’s specific state is one of the roughly 34 states plus Puerto Rico and D.C. currently offering that exemption, not assume it applies everywhere by default.
What to Say in a State Without an Exemption
In the states outside that current list, the honest answer is more nuanced: a solar system may add assessed value the same way any home improvement can, depending on the local assessor’s practice, and that is a fair, disclosable fact rather than something to avoid mentioning. A rep who only has a confident answer for the states with an exemption, and no honest answer for the states without one, is not equipped to handle this objection everywhere it comes up.
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.
- Palmetto, sales and property tax exemptions for solar panels, updated October 2025
- EcoWatch, solar tax exemptions exist, find out how to save, updated May 2022