Every claim on this page checked against primary sources on July 29, 2026

Battery storage incentives in 2026

What is actually on offer

This table is generated from the same data that drives the state pages, so every entry carries the date it was last checked against a primary source and nothing appears here that is not also on a state page.

The first thing to notice is the absence. Seven of the 12 states on this site have no residential storage program at all — not a closed one, not an expired one, none. Storage support is not a national baseline with local variations; it is a handful of states doing something and most doing nothing.

Four different ways of paying for the same box

This is the part that no other battery explainer we have seen gets to, because it only becomes visible if you read the programs as filed rather than as summarized. The eight programs above use four genuinely different payment structures, and the difference changes what you are actually agreeing to.

Per kilowatt-hour of capacity — the one people expect

California's Self-Generation Incentive Program and Minnesota's storage incentives both pay against the size of the battery, in dollars per kilowatt-hour of capacity, usually with a cap. This is the shape most people picture when they hear "battery rebate": a discount proportional to how much battery you bought.

A flat payment up front — Utah

Rocky Mountain Power's Wattsmart Battery program pays a capped flat amount rather than anything per unit of capacity. It is the reason this site's data model has an upfront amount type at all: forcing it into a per-kilowatt-hour figure would have printed a number the utility does not publish, which is exactly the sort of confident-wrong figure the whole project exists to avoid. Utah is here.

Per kilowatt discharged, repeatedly — Arizona

Arizona's two programs are the interesting ones, and they are not rebates at all. APS Storage Rewards pays per average kilowatt discharged across an event season; SRP Battery Partner pays per average kilowatt twice a year. You are not being paid for owning a battery. You are being paid for letting the utility discharge it when the utility wants to.

The utility owns the battery and you pay a monthly fee — Missouri

Evergy Missouri West's residential battery pilot inverted the whole arrangement: the utility owned, installed, maintained and operated the battery on the customer's premises, and the participant paid a monthly charge for it. That is not an incentive in the ordinary sense, and this site records it as a storage entry with no direct payment because that is what it was. It was also capped at fifty customers in one utility's territory, and its funding authority ran out at the end of 2025. Missouri is here.

Two things worth knowing that are not on the table

A closed program can still have money in it. California's SGIP is the clearest case: the general-population residential storage budget has been closed at all four program administrators since February 2025 with a substantial balance still unspent, while the equity budgets aimed at lower-income and disadvantaged-community customers remained open at much higher rates. If you read only "SGIP is closed" you would miss that the money that remains is deliberately pointed somewhere specific. SGIP program administrators The California page has the figures.

Storage is starting to appear in tax law, at thresholds far above a house. Nebraska amended its nameplate capacity tax on July 18, 2026 to bring energy storage resources into the tax — at 100 kilowatts or more, which is far above any household battery, and with customer-generators expressly exempt in any case. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 77-6203 It is worth knowing mainly as a signal: storage is becoming a category that legislatures name separately rather than treating as part of a solar system.

What changed federally, and what it means for a battery

The residential credit at § 25D covered qualified battery storage of at least 3 kilowatt-hours, and it is gone for expenditures made after December 31, 2025. 26 U.S.C. § 25D The commercial credit at § 48E survives on its own timeline, which matters because it is claimed by whoever owns the equipment — so a third-party-owned battery sits in a different part of the tax code from one you buy. That split is the subject of the buy-versus-lease page, and what survives federally is here.

What this page does not cover yet

• What a battery costs. This site publishes what programs pay, not installed prices. A rebate expressed per kilowatt-hour of capacity cannot be turned into a percentage of cost without a price, and we do not have a sourced one.
• Dispatch terms for the virtual power plant programs. How often a utility may call on your battery, how deeply it may discharge it, and what reserve is left for your own outage protection are the terms that decide whether these programs are worth joining, and we have recorded the payment structures rather than read the participation agreements.
• Whether any state has added a storage program since its page was last checked. Each row above carries its own verification date; a state with no row has no program as of that state's last sweep.
• Thirty-eight states. The table covers the 12 states with data files here. Several states not on it are known to have storage programs; their absence means we have not read them.
• How § 48E applies to a third-party-owned residential battery. We have set out the ownership split federally but have not verified how it works for storage specifically.

Each of those is queued. When one is verified it will appear above with its own date.