How Much Is Solar in Los Angeles, CA? 7.1–12.0-Yr Payback

In Los Angeles, CA, an 8 kW system at $2.47/W produces about 1,610 kWh per kW and pays back in roughly 7.1–12.0 years at 23.84¢/kWh with the federal credit at $0.

Updated September 2026 · Source: EIA Electric Power Monthly Table 5.6.A (July 2026 data) · next EIA update ~Oct 23

On this page: CalculatorTableHow we calculatedSources

California is not one solar market

Across the 7 California cities with their own modeled figures, production spans 26% — Eureka at 1,302 kWh per kW to Riverside at 1,640. Every column except production is identical down this table: same 33.6¢/kWh retail rate, same export regime, same $2.47/W installed cost. The payback differences are caused by weather and nothing else.

Against the state figure, Los Angeles runs 0.1% below California’s 1,610 kWh per kW — a payback 2.6 years shorter than the statewide 9.7-year estimate on the same hardware at the same price.

Los Angeles is not California’s best solar city, and that is fine

The basin has a marine layer, and the marine layer is expensive. It thickens exactly when the days are longest — the local names for it, May gray and June gloom, are a fair summary of what a rooftop array sees on a late-spring morning in Santa Monica or Culver City. Riverside sits past the edge of it and picks up 1.9% more per kilowatt as a result.

Two things about that gap. First, it is small: the difference between coastal and inland Los Angeles County is a rounding error next to the difference between either of them and Eureka. Second, it runs the other way in summer heat, because Riverside’s cell temperatures are higher and hot silicon is less efficient. If you are on the west side of the basin, do not assume an inland quote’s production estimate transfers to your roof — but do not assume you are badly off, either. 1,610 kWh per kW is 21% above the national planning figure of 1,328.

Your utility, officially

California’s average residential rate is 33.6¢/kWh, but the bill in Los Angeles comes from Los Angeles Department of Water & Power at 23.84¢ — 29% below the state figure. These are the residential figures Los Angeles’s utility reported to the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Form EIA-861 for 2024 — computed as revenue ÷ sales from the official file, not estimated:

One thing we could not verify with Los Angeles Department of Water & Power is its export rule, which is why the payback above is a range: ask the utility directly whether you get full-retail net metering or a lower export credit , because that one answer picks your end of the range.

If an EV is in the picture, note that California’s major utilities run the time-of-use tariffs our EV + TOU whole-home calculator ships presets for — worth running before sizing an array, because overnight charging is load daytime solar cannot touch. (And if the EV itself is still hypothetical, check where the EV tax credit stands in 2026 first.)

Los Angeles proper is not on NEM 3.0. That single fact undoes most of what people think they know about California solar, so it belongs at the top. Homes inside the city are billed by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power — the largest municipal utility in the United States, with 1,410,191 residential customers at an average of 23.84¢/kWh in the 2024 EIA-861 file. LADWP is owned by the city and governed through its own board and the City Council, not the California Public Utilities Commission. The CPUC’s Net Billing Tariff (NEM 3.0), which cut export credits at the investor-owned utilities to an hourly avoided-cost schedule averaging somewhere in the 5-8¢ band, simply does not apply here. LADWP sets its own solar compensation on its own timeline.

That does not mean LA’s terms are frozen — municipal boards revise programs too, and we could not verify the current details of LADWP’s solar tariff from a page we could fetch, so confirm the live program terms on ladwp.com before running numbers. What the federal data does show: LADWP reported 87,951 residential net-metering customers and 541.837 MW to EIA for 2024, one of the largest municipal solar fleets anywhere, averaging a modest 6.2 kW per home.

The price context cuts in LA’s favor twice. At 23.84¢, LADWP power is expensive by national standards but conspicuously cheap by Southern California standards — Southern California Edison, which surrounds the city, averages 28.25¢. So an Angeleno’s bill pain is smaller than a neighbor’s in Burbank-adjacent SCE territory, while the value of each self-consumed solar kilowatt-hour is still nearly a quarter. Both things are true at once, and both come from the same fact of municipal ownership.

On structure: LADWP’s standard residential rate is tiered — the price per kWh climbs with usage, with allowances that vary by season and by temperature zone within the city, so a Valley household hits the expensive tiers faster relief-wise than one near the coast. For a solar home, tiered rates are friendlier than time-of-use defaults: your panels shave the top, priciest tier first, and there is no peak-window mismatch to engineer around. Start at LADWP’s residential services hub for current schedules.

If you take one thing from this section: the city boundary is the tariff boundary. Cross into SCE territory and you change regulator, rate design, and export regime all at once.

Source: EIA Form EIA-861, 2024 final release , accessed 2026-09-02. Average price is total residential revenue divided by total residential sales for the year — your own rate depends on your tariff and usage tier.

Who else serves the metro

Los Angeles proper runs on the LA Department of Water & Power, yet its two-county EIA-861 footprint also touches Southern California Edison at 28.3¢ and smaller municipal systems: Pasadena’s utility at 26.0¢, Burbank Water and Power at 19.3¢, and Glendale’s utility at 33.8¢. Against LADWP’s 23.84¢, that’s roughly a 4.5¢ gap down to Burbank and nearly a 10¢ gap up to Glendale — differences large enough that a payback calculated on LADWP’s rate and net-metering rules would not transfer to a Pasadena or Glendale address, where both price and export credit differ. California’s July 2026 state average, 33.61¢, is a separate, later figure. Which of these bills a given roof comes down to ZIP code.

The exact answer is a ZIP question, not a city question: look up your utility by ZIP . Candidates: utilities EIA-861 lists in 2 service counties of the metro’s main utility; prices are 2024 revenue ÷ sales from the official file.

What actually decides this in Los Angeles: NEM 3.0

LADWP’s 23.84¢/kWh — below California’s 33.6¢ state average, but still far above what most of the country pays — is what produces the 7.1–12.0-year payback above. But since April 2023 the thing that separates a good Los Angeles system from a mediocre one has not been the array — it has been how much of the output you keep. For the state’s investor-owned utilities, export credit under the Net Billing Tariff averages around 6.5¢ against California’s 33.6¢ average retail rate — a kilowatt-hour you use is worth roughly five times a kilowatt-hour you sell. LADWP, a municipal utility, is not bound by NEM 3.0 and sets its own export terms; that unverified export treatment is exactly why the payback above is a range.

That is why an LA quote should be sized to your daytime load, not to your annual consumption, and why batteries and daytime EV charging change the answer here more than an extra two panels ever will.

What California pays Los Angeles for exported power

California does not credit exports at the retail rate, and that rule reaches Los Angeles unchanged. The program is Net Billing Tariff (NEM 3.0) , in force since 2023-04-15, crediting surplus power at a published rate of 6.50¢/kWh against a retail rate of 33.6¢.

Export credits come from the CPUC Avoided Cost Calculator , which sets a different price for every hour of every month split weekday/weekend — 576 values a year — so there is no single export rate. Commonly reported annual averages land in the 5-8c band against a retail rate near 34.7c; 6.5c, the midpoint, is used here.

Because a typical home uses only about 40% of its generation as it is produced, most of what a Los Angeles array makes is sold at that lower rate. That is why the payback above is 7.1–12.0 years and not the 5.1 years the same hardware would return under full-retail net metering. Raising self-consumption is the lever that closes the gap.

Because the ACC is hourly, your own average depends on when your array actually exports. Evening export is worth far more than midday export.

Sources and method

• Production: modeled with PVGIS v5.2 PVcalc (European Commission JRC) using the PVGIS-NSRDB radiation database — the same NREL satellite dataset PVWatts draws on for the Americas. Assumptions: 4 kWp, standard c-Si, 14% system loss, roof mounting, 20-degree tilt, due south, horizon shading on. The 1,610 kWh per kW figure for Los Angeles is a modeled location point, not an interpolation from the California average. PVGIS is free to use with JRC attribution requested; the underlying NSRDB is public domain (NREL/DOE).
• Real-roof derate: a separate 10% deduction for azimuth, pitch and shading, applied in the shared model rather than folded into the production data — so you can adjust it if your roof is genuinely unobstructed.
• Electricity rate: U.S. Energy Information Administration, average price by state . This is California’s residential average; EIA does not publish a Los Angeles figure, so the state rate is used and labeled as such.
• Export rules: Net Billing Tariff (NEM 3.0) , from our California state page and the shared export-rules dataset behind it.
• State average rate: EIA Table 5.6.A, July 2026 data (released Sep 2026), used for every state-average comparison on this page.
• Payback model: shared with the solar savings calculator and the state pages — 2.5%/yr utility inflation, 0.5%/yr degradation, $150/yr running costs, one $2,000 inverter replacement in year 14, federal credit $0. The rest of the toolset — battery, sizing, financing — is under all calculators .
• Incentives: DSIRE . City and utility programs change more often than state ones — check yours directly.

Electricity rate, export regime, production figure and installed cost on this page were last verified on 30 August 2026. Export credits reset on annual tariff cycles and incentive budgets run out mid-year, so treat every figure as a snapshot at that date and confirm current terms before acting. Nothing here is tax or financial advice.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) electricity rates · DSIRE incentive records · public IRS/OBBBA guidance. Figures are modeled estimates, not quotes or tax advice. See our methodology.

Compare with the rest of California

• Solar panel cost in California — The statewide picture: California’s rate, incentives, export rules and the 1,610 kWh per kW average this page corrects.
• Solar panel cost in Riverside — 1,640 kWh per kW and a 9.5-year payback — better than Los Angeles on identical hardware.
• Solar panel cost in Bakersfield — 1,579 kWh per kW and a 9.9-year payback — worse than Los Angeles on identical hardware.
• Solar panel cost in San Diego — 1,576 kWh per kW and a 9.9-year payback — worse than Los Angeles on identical hardware.
• Solar panel cost in Fresno — 1,546 kWh per kW and a 10.1-year payback — worse than Los Angeles on identical hardware.
• Solar panel cost in Sacramento — 1,541 kWh per kW and a 10.1-year payback — worse than Los Angeles on identical hardware.
• Solar panel cost in Eureka — 1,302 kWh per kW and a 11.9-year payback — worse than Los Angeles on identical hardware.
• Solar panel cost in Honolulu — 1,610 kWh per kW in Hawaii — the closest production match to Los Angeles in our data.
• Solar panel cost in Reno — 1,596 kWh per kW in Nevada — the closest production match to Los Angeles in our data.
• All city solar figures — The 66 US cities with their own modeled production data, and the spreads between them.