What a feed-in tariff actually is
A feed-in tariff (FiT) is the rate your electricity retailer pays you for solar power you send back to the grid, measured in cents per kilowatt-hour (c/kWh). When your panels generate more than your home is using, the surplus flows out to the network and your retailer credits it against your bill. Two things set it apart from the rebates covered elsewhere in this guide. First, it is an ongoing credit rather than an upfront discount — it lands on every bill for as long as you have solar, instead of coming off the purchase price once. Second, in most of the country your retailer sets it, so it is part of the plan you choose, not a fixed entitlement. And it only ever applies to power you export: power you use the instant it is generated never touches the grid and never earns a FiT — it simply reduces what you have to buy.
Why the rates have collapsed
A decade ago, feed-in tariffs of 44–60c/kWh made exporting genuinely lucrative. Those were deliberately generous schemes designed to kick-start rooftop solar, and they have almost all closed to new customers. Today most standard rates sit somewhere between roughly 3 and 12c/kWh, with the bulk at the lower end, and the direction is still down. The reason is solar’s own success: more than four million Australian homes now have panels, and around the middle of the day they all export at once. That midday flood pushes the wholesale value of electricity down — sometimes to zero or below — so retailers simply cannot pay much for power that arrives when the grid is already awash with it.
The retreat from regulation tracks the same story. Victoria was the last big state to scrap its mandatory minimum, from 1 July 2025, leaving rates there to the market like NSW and South Australia. A few places still set a floor — Tasmania, the ACT, and regional Queensland on the Ergon network keep regulated minimums that tend to beat mainland market rates — but they are now the exception. The clearest sign of the trend: from 1 July 2026 AGL’s standing-offer feed-in tariff drops to zero, and EnergyAustralia’s standard rate falls to 3c at the end of that same month.
The number that actually matters: export versus self-use
Here is the reframe that makes sense of everything else. Grid electricity costs you somewhere around 25–40c/kWh to buy. Your feed-in tariff pays you a few cents to sell. So every kilowatt-hour you use at home the moment your panels make it is worth several times more than the same kilowatt-hour exported — typically three to six times more. Use a unit of solar to run your dishwasher and you avoid buying about 30c of grid power; export that same unit and you might earn 5c. Same sunshine, very different outcome.
This is why the advice has flipped from “generate as much as possible” to “use as much as possible,” and it is the single biggest reason home batteries have taken off. A battery lets you store the midday surplus you would otherwise sell for a pittance and spend it in the evening, displacing power you would otherwise buy at the full retail rate.
The new shape of feed-in tariffs
The flat, single-rate FiT — one number for every unit you export, any time of day — is no longer the only model, and increasingly not the most valuable. As the midday glut has deepened, retailers and networks have started pricing exports by when they happen. Time-varying feed-in tariffs pay little or nothing for power exported in the saturated middle of the day, and a premium for power sent during the late-afternoon and evening peak when the grid actually needs it. Some plans now pay 0c for midday exports outright.
The flip side of the same idea is the “solar soaker,” or free-hours plan: cheap or free electricity in the middle of the day to nudge you into using power when it is plentiful. From July 2026, for instance, NSW households with a smart meter get three free hours of daytime electricity, solar or not. The practical upshot is that a battery — or simply shifting heavy appliances to the right time of day — is what lets you capture the high-value windows and sidestep the worthless ones.
Export limits and the 'sun tax'
You may have heard about a “sun tax.” It is the nickname for two-way pricing: a charge some networks now apply to solar exported during the saturated midday window, paired with a reward for exporting in the evening peak. It was approved by the national energy rule-maker to help manage grid congestion, and it is a network charge passed through your retailer — usually folded into your feed-in rate rather than shown as a separate line on the bill.
NSW led the way. On the Ausgrid network it applied to solar homes with a smart meter from July 2025, typically around 1.2c/kWh on exports between 10am and 3pm above a generous monthly free-export threshold, with a roughly 2.3c/kWh reward for exporting between 4pm and 9pm; other NSW networks are phasing it in. South Australia introduced its own export charges over the same period. Several other regions — Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, WA and the NT — have not, and some state governments have explicitly ruled it out.
Before you panic: the sums are small. Ausgrid estimated the typical cost at a few dollars a year for an average system, and the regulator’s own modelling put the net impact at well under half a cent per kilowatt-hour. It is a behavioural nudge toward self-consumption far more than a meaningful cost — but it is one more reason the old “export everything” instinct no longer pays.
Comparing plans without getting stung
This is where most people go wrong, so it is worth slowing down. The feed-in tariff is only one of three levers a retailer sets, and they move together: the FiT (what you are paid to export), the usage rate (what you pay to import), and the daily supply charge (a fixed fee just to stay connected). A retailer can advertise an eye-catching FiT and quietly recover it through a higher usage rate or supply charge — they know solar shoppers fixate on the export number. And for most households, especially without a battery, you import far more than you export — mornings, evenings, overnight — so the rate you buy at usually matters more than the rate you sell at.
So do not compare on the feed-in tariff. Compare on the whole plan, using your own numbers. Pull your annual import and export in kilowatt-hours from a recent bill — or, better, your smart-meter data, which your retailer or distributor can provide — then run each plan through all three levers: (usage rate × kWh imported) + (supply charge × days) − (FiT × kWh exported) = your net annual cost. Compare that figure, not the headline.
A quick worked example shows the trap. Say you import 5,000 kWh a year and export 3,000 kWh, with similar supply charges on each plan. Plan A boasts a 12c FiT but charges 35c usage; Plan B offers just 6c but charges 28c. On exports, Plan A pays $360 against Plan B’s $180 — Plan A looks $180 better. But on imports, Plan A costs $1,750 against Plan B’s $1,400 — Plan B is $350 cheaper. Plan B wins by $170 a year despite the “worse” feed-in tariff. The bigger your import is relative to your export, the more the headline FiT misleads.
Two structural traps are worth checking while you are at it. Capped feed-in tariffs advertise a high rate but only up to a daily export limit, then drop sharply — AGL’s Queensland solar plan, for example, has paid 10c for the first 10kWh exported each day and 3c after that. And promotional rates often revert: a generous FiT for the first 12 months can quietly fall to something ordinary once the intro period ends. The honest shortcut is to use the free government comparison tools: Energy Made Easy for most of the country, and Victorian Energy Compare in Victoria.
The table below is a snapshot of standard single-rate offers from a few major retailers as of June 2026, just to show the lie of the land. Treat it as a frozen example, not a recommendation — rates change constantly, vary by state and postcode, and (as the notes show) several are about to fall.
| Retailer | Typical standard FiT (c/kWh) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AGL | ~5–6c on market plans | Standing-offer FiT drops to 0c from 1 July 2026 |
| EnergyAustralia | ~4–6c | Standard rate falls to 3c from 31 July 2026 |
| Origin | ~5–6c | Victorian standard 3.3c plus a 2.7c bonus on some plans |
| Alinta Energy | ~7.5c (up to 10c) | Among the higher flat rates in mid-2026 |
| GloBird Energy | up to ~10c | High headline rate — check the rest of the plan |
| Amber | market-linked | Tracks the live wholesale price; varies every 30 minutes |
Where VPPs fit in
If you have a battery, or are adding one, a virtual power plant (VPP) is an alternative to a plain feed-in tariff that is often worth more. A VPP links thousands of home batteries with software so they can act as one big plant: you let the operator dispatch some of your stored energy when the grid needs it, and in return you get a boosted export rate, fixed bill credits, an upfront battery discount, or per-event payments (occasionally as high as around $1/kWh during price spikes, though those events are irregular and usually capped). Real-world earnings typically run in the low hundreds of dollars a year for a household battery — more in South Australia, where price spikes are frequent.
The trade-offs are real and worth weighing. You hand over some control of when your battery runs; some VPPs lock you to a particular retailer; and the extra cycling is worth checking against your battery warranty. Two things to look at closely are the minimum reserve (some operators keep around 20% for your backup, while others can empty the battery, leaving nothing for a blackout) and the caps, which often matter more than the headline rate. As with everything else on this page, judge the whole plan — a generous VPP credit bolted onto a poor base tariff can leave you worse off. One handy detail: any battery bought under the federal battery rebate has to be VPP-capable, so you can join one later even if you don’t at the start.
What it all means for your system
Pulling it together: in 2026 the feed-in tariff is a bonus, not the foundation of a solar investment. Don’t let a big export number drive your decision, and don’t over-weight it when you are working out payback. The real value of solar now comes from using your own generation — run heavy appliances like the dishwasher, washing machine, pool pump, and hot-water or EV charging during daylight, and you capture the full retail rate rather than a few cents. For many homes that shift alone is enough to make solar pay.
A battery is the next lever. It stores the midday surplus that is worth almost nothing exported and lets you spend it at night against 30c-plus grid power, and with the federal battery rebate taking roughly 30% off the cost, the case has strengthened considerably. A battery doesn’t always stack up — it depends on your usage, your rates, and how much surplus you actually have — but the lower feed-in tariffs fall, the better it tends to look. The bottom line hasn’t changed even as the numbers have: solar is still well worth it. The money just comes from using your sunshine, not selling it.
To go further, two related guides in this section are worth a look:
