Rent-a-roof solar: reading the deal properly

In a rent-a-roof arrangement a company installs panels at its own cost and keeps the benefit. You get some cheaper electricity; they get the asset, the export income, or both.

These are commercial contracts, not grants, and they should be judged as contracts. The clause that matters most is the one about selling your house, and the numbers you are trading away are calculable before you sign.

Where the model came from, and why it is back

The first rent-a-roof boom ran on the old Feed-in Tariff, which paid the system’s owner for every unit generated; that scheme closed to new entrants in 2019, and thousands of households are still inside 20 to 25 year agreements signed during it. The model’s return today comes instead from export income and from selling you the electricity or the arrangement around it. The economics changed; the contract shape, and its pitfalls, did not.

What you are actually agreeing to

You are granting a company rights over part of your roof, typically for twenty years or more, in exchange for the use of some of the electricity generated.

The company owns the equipment. They take the income it produces. You take the benefit of consuming generation you did not pay for.

That can be a reasonable deal for someone who cannot fund an installation and does not intend to move. It is not free, and it is not a grant, and any page presenting it as “free solar panels from a government scheme” has told you what kind of page it is.

The clauses to read first

What happens when you sell. The single biggest source of regret. Your buyer inherits the arrangement, and their solicitor will scrutinise it. Some agreements have historically complicated mortgage lending, because a lender is being asked to accept a third party with long-term rights over the security. Ask specifically: does the agreement transfer automatically, does the buyer have to consent, and what happens if they will not?

The term, and what happens at the end. Who owns the equipment when the agreement expires? Is it removed, does it transfer to you, or does the arrangement roll on?

Buy-out. Can you end it early by purchasing the system, and how is the price calculated? A formula stated in the contract is far better than a price determined later by the company.

Roof access rights. What can they do, when, and with how much notice.

Responsibility for the roof. If the covering needs replacing during the term, who pays to remove and refit the array? That is scaffolding plus a strip-and-refit, twice, and it is worth knowing before rather than after.

What happens if they cease trading. Who then owns equipment attached to your house, and who maintains it. Administrators sell books of these agreements; your counterparty in year fifteen may be a company you have never heard of.

What you are giving up, priced

The export income. A typical domestic array exports on the order of 2,000 kilowatt hours a year, worth about £240 at a 12p export rate. Over a twenty year term that is roughly £4,800 flowing to the equipment’s owner rather than to you.

The asset. An owned median 4kW system costs about £7,100 on the government’s installation cost data, zero-rated for VAT through March 2027, and returns around £650 a year in the standard worked example. Over twenty years the owned system pays for itself and then keeps paying; the rented roof delivers only the slice of self-consumed generation the contract grants you.

Flexibility. Adding a battery, extending the array, or changing supplier can all be constrained by an agreement written to protect someone else’s asset.

Compare it against the alternative

Model all three, with the same generation and tariff assumptions:

Rent-a-roof: zero capital, some reduction in your bills, no export income, no asset at the end, and constraints for the term.

Buying outright: the installed cost, the full saving, the export income, the asset, and no constraints.

Buying with finance: total repayable rather than monthly payment, compared against the cash price, with the interest priced honestly. Even at commercial rates, the financed owner keeps the export income and the asset, which the roof-renter never does.

For anyone who can access capital or reasonable credit, ownership in either form usually beats the arrangement over the life of the system. The rent-a-roof deal is, in effect, a loan repaid from your roof’s output at a rate you are never shown, and working out that implicit rate, the value the company takes divided by the value you receive, is the honest way to price it.

Where it genuinely suits

• A household that cannot raise capital and cannot get affordable credit.
• A property the owner is confident they will not sell for a very long time.
• Someone who values a zero-capital, zero-maintenance arrangement above the return.

Those are real situations. The mistake is entering one believing it is a government scheme, or believing “free” describes the economics rather than the deposit.

Before signing anything

Have a solicitor read it, specifically on the sale and buy-out clauses. The fee is small against a twenty-year encumbrance on your largest asset, and this is the kind of agreement where the difficulty appears years later, at the worst possible moment. Then run the ownership numbers with your own consumption and rates: if the owned system’s payback is within reach of any financing you can get, the roof is worth more working for you than rented out.