What does plug-in solar actually cost in the UK?
A complete kit is £329 to £419 today, not the round £400 most articles quote. Here is every line item priced and sourced, the VAT position nobody explains, and a payback worked from our own output model.
Rules and product details last checked on .
Key takeaways
- A complete 800 W kit costs £329 to £419 today, in the only range we could verify against a live UK price: EcoFlow’s STREAM bundles, checked on 23 August 2026. The microinverter alone is £122.55.
- The headline price is most of the price. The extras that exist are small: mounting brackets at £9.90 each in the current EcoFlow sale, and nothing else is compulsory. Telling your network operator is free.
- VAT is 0 per cent until 31 March 2027, then 5 per cent. That is HMRC’s published position, though its definition was written for installed systems, so check the invoice rather than assuming.
- Honest payback on our model is roughly four to five years for a London balcony kit used by someone home during the day. Anyone promising eighteen months is not showing their arithmetic.
- Rooftop solar, by comparison, runs £5,000 to £8,000 installed, and a power station is a different product entirely.
Most cost articles round everything to £400. We would rather show you the actual numbers, each with a source and a date, because a payback calculation built on a guessed price is a guess wearing a suit.
The prices below were checked on 23 August 2026, four days before plug-in solar becomes legal and one day after the Guardian reported on the coming launch. They will move. What will not move nearly as fast is the structure of the costs, which is the part worth understanding.
What you are actually buying
Our guide to what is genuinely on sale found that almost everything marketed as a “solar kit” in the UK is a portable panel or a battery power station, which is not the same product. The one complete, grid-connected range we could verify is EcoFlow STREAM. Anker UK currently lists portable panels (PS100 at £249.99 up to PS400 at £599.99) but no plug-in kit with a microinverter, which is consistent with what we found in that guide.
Here is the full price list for a legal kit, checked today:
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| STREAM 800 W microinverter | £122.55 | Regular price £179; sale price on 23 Aug 2026 |
| With two 400 W panels | £329 | Bundle, regular £479 |
| With two 450 W panels | £379 | Bundle, regular £529 |
| With two 500 W panels | £419 | Bundle, regular £678 |
| Balcony bracket (semi-enclosed) | £9.90 | Sale price; regular £99 |
| Balcony bracket (concrete) | £9.90 | Sale price; regular £129 |
| Facade bracket (adjustable) | £9.90 | Sale price; regular £49 |
Two of those panel options produce more DC than the inverter can pass through, which is perfectly legal: as our microinverters guide sets out, the law caps the AC side at 800 W while the government specification allows up to 2,000 W of panel. The oversized panels give you more output in poor light, at the cost of clipping in the best hours.
So the honest floor for a working, complete kit is **£329 plus a £9.90
The costs nobody mentions
VAT. HMRC’s published position is that solar panels are zero-rated for VAT UK-wide from 1 May 2023 until 31 March 2027, reverting to the 5 per cent reduced rate from 1 April 2027. That comes from the HMRC internal manual setting out the rates and dates, and the same manual’s definition of solar panels covers “photovoltaic (PV) panels with cabling, control panel and AC/DC inverter”, including equipment mounted in the grounds of a home.
One honest caveat: that guidance was written for systems installed on buildings, and plug-in solar is new enough that HMRC has not addressed it by name. The safe move is to look at the invoice: the price you see should be the price you pay, with VAT shown at 0 per cent. If a seller adds 20 per cent, that is a question to ask before buying, not after.
Telling your network operator: free. This is the cost line other sites either omit or inflate. Notifying your DNO under G98 costs nothing and is done through their website; our step-by-step guide walks through it. There is no electrician’s bill in the legal route, because the whole point of the category is that you connect it yourself through a standard socket.
The optional electrician. The government’s product specification says households with more than 960 W of panel capacity “should consider professional assessment of their existing electrical installation”. At two 400 W panels you are under it. At two 500 W panels you are over it, and the Guardian’s reporting on 22 August carried a further warning from Electrical Safety First about older RCDs, so a one-off check on an ageing consumer unit is a legitimate line item, and the only one that could reach three figures.
The accessories you are not allowed to buy. Extension cables, multi-way adaptors and RCD adaptors are explicitly prohibited by the specification, so budget for nothing there. If your socket is too far away, the answer is repositioning the kit, not a reel from the shed.
What it saves: an honest payback
Cost is only half of a payback sum. The other half is output, and we have already modelled that for seven UK cities. Using our own figures, published with their method:
- A London kit mounted vertically on a railing produces about 594 kWh a year. Tilted at 35 degrees, about 815 kWh.
- Only the electricity you use while it generates saves money. At a 60 per cent self-consumption assumption and the current Ofgem cap of 26.11p per kWh, that railing kit saves about £93 a year. If nobody is home during the day, halve it.
- The standing charge, 57.19p a day this quarter, is untouched by any of this. Generating your own electricity does not reduce it.
Put today’s verified prices against that: a £329 kit plus bracket on a London railing pays back in just under four years for someone home during the day, and in about eight for someone who is not. Tilted rather than vertical, roughly three to six. Our savings calculator runs the same arithmetic for your own city, orientation and tariff.
That is slower than the industry figures quoted in the Guardian, £80 to £120 a year from a 460 W system, only because we refuse to count exported units, which earn nothing without an export arrangement. Promises faster than ours are usually counting electricity you cannot sell.
bracket**, at today’s prices. The £122.55 inverter on its own is only a
The comparison that puts the price in context
Against rooftop solar, the comparison is not close: a professionally installed 3 to 4 kW system runs £5,000 to £8,000, roughly fifteen times a complete plug-in kit, and is not available to a tenant at any price. A plug-in kit will not offset as large a share of your bill, but it is the only solar most flat-dwellers can actually buy, and you can take it with you when you move, which is its own advantage.
Against a battery power station, it is a category error. A £300 power station charges from the wall and gives the electricity back to you later, with the same money. A £329 plug-in kit makes new electricity from sunlight for a decade or more. Both are legitimate purchases; only one of them reduces what you draw from the grid.
One more line item deserves a mention: your home insurance. Our guide to plug-in solar and home insurance found that informing your insurer is generally free and generally wise, and that failing to do so is the one way a £329 kit could cost far more than £329.
What we have verified, and what we have not
Verified on 23 August 2026. Every EcoFlow price in the table above, against the live UK store; the Anker UK listing range; the HMRC VAT rates and their dates; the 960 W assessment threshold in the government specification; the Ofgem cap figures; and the Guardian’s reporting of the previous day.
Not verified. Whether the launch prices hold past 27 August, when the first wave of competing kits arrives and the EcoFlow sale presumably ends. Whether HMRC will rule explicitly on plug-in kits before the zero rate lapses on 31 March 2027. Street prices for ranges that have not launched.
Modelled, not measured. The output and saving figures come from our PVGIS-based model with its method published, not from metering a kit over a year.
Our editorial policy explains how we handle prices and modelled figures.
Prices on this page carry the date they were checked and will date quickly. If a price has moved, tell us and we will re-verify it and update the date.
bargain if you already own suitable panels.