SGIP Is Closed. Here's What's Actually Available for California Batteries in 2026.

If your proposal includes an SGIP rebate as a line item reducing your battery cost, ask your installer to show you, in writing, exactly which SGIP budget that rebate is coming from. For most California homeowners in 2026, the honest answer is none of them. Here’s the current state, plainly.

What actually happened

All three of the state’s main ratepayer-funded battery rebate budgets, General Market, Equity, and Equity Resiliency, closed to new applications at the end of December 2025 under CPUC Decision 25-12-003. PG&E’s own program page states it directly: this rebate is closed. That is not a lead-gen exaggeration. It is the utility’s own language.

Closed to new funding is not quite the same as gone entirely, though, and this is the nuance most summaries skip. PG&E’s page also directs homeowners to submit a waitlist application through their contractor, because previously reserved funds do periodically cancel and return to the program, and that returned money funds whoever is next in line. So there is a line. It is just not a line with a timeline, and installing in anticipation of a rebate that may or may not arrive is a real financial risk worth naming plainly.

Who can still get something meaningfully better than that

One state-funded pathway sits apart from the three closed budgets: the Residential Solar and Storage Equity program, funded under California Assembly Bill 209. RSSE targets income-qualified households specifically, generally at or below 80 percent of the area median income, along with households enrolled in CARE or FERA, living in a high fire-threat district, or relying on electric medical equipment. For a qualifying household, RSSE can cover most or all of a battery system’s cost.

The honest limit: RSSE’s own funding is currently fully reserved as well. SCE’s own page confirms it plainly, the budget’s funds have been exhausted and new applications go to a waitlist, with no confirmed date for when that changes. If you think you qualify, applying now to hold your place in line still makes sense. Just do not plan your finances around a rebate that has not yet been confirmed, and do not let anyone talk you into installing before you have that confirmation in hand.

One change worth knowing if you are in the RSSE queue. In February 2026 the CPUC directed every SGIP program administrator to tighten how it verifies a project’s total eligible costs before paying out any RSSE incentive, effective immediately. In practice that means more documentation scrutiny on what your installer says the system costs. If you are working through an RSSE application, expect the cost side to be examined more closely than it once was, and make sure the figures your installer submits match the contract you actually signed.

What’s actually available to most California homeowners right now

Take the SGIP rebate off the table in your planning, and here is what is actually left on it in 2026.

The property tax exclusion, and it has a real deadline. California has long excluded the added value of a solar or storage installation from a property tax reassessment, so adding a system does not raise your property taxes the way most home improvements would. Under current law that exclusion sunsets for new construction on January 1, 2027. To qualify, your system needs to be completed, meaning interconnected and granted permission to operate, before that date. Permitted is not enough. Under contract is not enough.

Two things follow from that, one reassuring and one not.

The reassuring one: if you already have solar, or you get your system finished before the deadline, you keep the exclusion. Senate Bill 710, signed in October 2025, confirmed that a system qualifying before January 1, 2027 stays excluded afterward, until the home changes ownership. You do not need to do anything to preserve it.

The one that should affect your timing: a second bill, Assembly Bill 2389, would extend the exclusion to new systems of 10 kilowatts or less through 2031. It has been held in committee since May 2026 and is not currently moving. Some solar marketing pages still describe it as advancing, which could lead a homeowner to assume the deadline will be pushed and there is no rush. Plan on the deadline being real. If it moves later, you lose nothing by having finished early; if it does not, waiting costs you the exclusion for as long as you own the house.

Net Billing Tariff export compensation. If you are on NEM 3.0, what you export to the grid still has value, just structured differently than the older net metering programs. Pairing a battery with your system to maximize self-consumption during the hours your utility pays least for exports is now a bigger part of the financial case than it used to be, independent of any rebate.

The federal tax credit, but only through the ownership structure you’d expect. The 30 percent residential credit expired for homeowners who buy their system outright, in cash or with a loan, at the end of 2025. It has not disappeared from the picture entirely: a third-party-owned system, a lease or power purchase agreement, still allows the company that owns the equipment to claim the credit and pass some of that value through to you in the price. We cover exactly how that works, and how to tell whether a given TPO offer is actually passing the value through, in our companion piece on the 2026 tax credit.

Utility- and manufacturer-specific programs, smaller than SGIP but real. Sacramento Municipal Utility District customers have their own separate battery incentive program, unaffected by the CPUC-run SGIP closure. A handful of manufacturers and utilities run their own smaller enrollment incentives as well. None of these approach what SGIP paid at its strongest, but they are not nothing, and they are worth asking your installer about by name.

What this changes about your decision

For most non-income-qualified California homeowners, a battery in 2026 needs to make sense on its own economic merits, self-consumption value under time-of-use rates and NEM 3.0, backup value during outages, without an SGIP rebate propping up the math. That is a real shift from a few years ago, and it is worth running the numbers with that assumption rather than the one your proposal may still be quietly using.

If a proposal in front of you right now includes an SGIP line item, that is worth a closer look before you sign anything.

This page is reviewed quarterly given how quickly program status changes; check the date above before relying on it for a decision you’re making today.