Solar Panel Cost in Medford, OR 2026: ~15.4-Year Payback
In Medford, OR, an 8 kW system at $2.47/W produces about 1,316 kWh per kW and pays back in roughly 15.4 years at 14.02¢/kWh with the federal credit at $0.
· Source: EIA Electric Power Monthly Table 5.6.A (July 2026 data) · next EIA update ~Oct 23
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- Medford production
- 1,316 kWh/kW/yr
- Oregon average
- 1,075 kWh/kW/yr
- Electricity rate
- 16.0¢/kWh
- 8 kW installed cost
- ~$19,760
- 2026 federal credit
- $0
- Payback (utility math)
- 15.4 years
Why this number
A kilowatt of panels in Medford produces about 1,316 kWh a year, placing it 2 of 4 among the Oregon cities modeled here. The state spans Bend at 1,418 down to Portland at 1,083, a 31% span, and Medford sits inside it at a payback of about 12.7 years.
An 8 kW system in Medford, priced out
| Metric | Estimate for Medford | Oregon statewide |
|---|---|---|
| Production, unshaded 20° south | 1,316 kWh per kW/yr | 1,075 kWh per kW/yr |
| 8 kW output after a 10% roof derate | ~9,475 kWh/yr | ~7,740 kWh/yr |
| Average residential rate | 16.0¢/kWh (EIA) | 16.0¢/kWh |
| Installed cost, 8 kW | ~$19,760 at $2.47/watt | ~$19,760 |
| 2026 federal credit | $0 | $0 |
| Export rule | Full-retail net metering | Full-retail net metering |
| Export credit modeled | retail (16.0¢/kWh) | retail (16.0¢/kWh) |
| Annual value of that output | ~$1,513 | ~$1,236 |
| Rough payback (your utility) | 15.4 years | 16.4 years (state-average model) |
| 25-year net position | $22,881 | — |
Only the first two rows differ. Everything financial — rate, tariff, price per watt — is inherited from Oregon without change, which is the point: a city page that quietly used a different electricity rate from its state page would be guessing, not measuring.
Doing nothing is not free either. Twenty-five years of the electricity an 8 kW Medford array would produce, with rates rising at 2.5% a year, comes to roughly $51,681.
Solar aside, the EV vs. gas cost calculator runs Medford’s 16.0¢/kWh rate against what a gas car costs to fill instead.
Run it with your own bill
Shared methodology · identical on every city page
- Production figures are unshaded, south-facing, 20° PVGIS values. A real roof — its own pitch, orientation, a tree or a chimney — typically produces 10–25% less; every payback here already carries a 10% real-roof derate.
- Paybacks include $150/yr of running costs and one $2,000 inverter replacement in year 14, which is why they run longer than paybacks quoted elsewhere.
- State export rules cover investor-owned, state-regulated utilities. Municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives are exempt in most states and set their own terms.
- Installed cost is the state-level EnergySage market figure, not a city quote; a swing of 50¢/W moves payback by roughly a year and a half either way. Get three quotes before trusting any payback — including ours.
Oregon is not one solar market
Across the 4 Oregon cities with their own modeled figures, production spans 31% — Portland at 1,083 kWh per kW to Bend at 1,418. Every column except production is identical down this table: same 16.0¢/kWh retail rate, same export regime, same $2.47/W installed cost. The payback differences are caused by weather and nothing else.
| Location | kWh per kW per year | 8 kW output | Annual value | Payback |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bend | 1,418 | 10,210 kWh | $1,630 | 11.8 yrs |
| Medford (this page) | 1,316 | 9,475 kWh | $1,513 | 12.7 yrs |
| Eugene | 1,156 | 8,323 kWh | $1,329 | 15.4 yrs |
| Portland | 1,083 | 7,798 kWh | $1,245 | 16.3 yrs |
| Oregon state average | 1,075 | 7,740 kWh | $1,236 | 16.4 yrs |
Against the state figure, Medford runs 22% above Oregon’s 1,075 kWh per kW — a payback 1.0 years shorter than the statewide 16.4-year estimate on the same hardware at the same price.
What sets Medford apart
Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley sits in a rain shadow and outperforms Portland substantially, though it trails Bend.
Your utility, officially
Oregon’s average residential rate is 16.0¢/kWh, but the bill in Medford comes from PacifiCorp (Pacific Power, OR) at 14.02¢ — 12% below the state figure. These are the residential figures Medford’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:
| Utility | EIA ID | Residential avg price | Residential customers | Net-metering (residential, self-reported) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PacifiCorp (Pacific Power, OR) | 14354 | 14.02¢/kWh | 547,235 | not reported |
How exports are treated matters as much as the headline price: PacifiCorp (Pacific Power, OR) is modeled here under the state’s full-retail net metering rules, and that treatment is baked into every payback figure on this page.
Medford is billed by Pacific Power — PacifiCorp’s Oregon arm, an investor-owned utility with 547,235 residential customers statewide — at a 2024 EIA-861 average of 14.02¢/kWh. That is 23% below the 18.19¢ Portland General Electric charges in Portland, and the gap frames everything about solar in the Rogue Valley: Medford gets substantially more sun than the Willamette Valley and pays substantially less for the electricity that sun displaces.
Start with the resource. At 1,316 kWh per kW of unshaded south-facing capacity, Medford sits in southern Oregon’s rain shadow and outproduces Portland by about 21% and Eugene by about 14%, while trailing high-desert Bend’s 1,418 by 7%. Oregon spans a 31% yield gradient from Portland to Bend, and Medford lands comfortably in the upper middle.
Because Pacific Power is a state-regulated utility, it is bound by Oregon’s net-metering rule, OAR 860-039-0055, which credits residential exports at the full retail rate. In practical terms: a kilowatt-hour your roof sends to the grid cancels one you buy, at par. No battery required to capture the value, no penalty for the midday production peak, and forgiving math if your system runs modestly larger than your daytime load. That combination has been dismantled in California and pared back across much of the West; Oregon still has it.
Here is the contrarian arithmetic worth sitting with. Under full-retail netting, the annual value of a kilowatt of capacity is yield times price: Medford’s 1,316 kWh at 14.02¢ is about $185 a year per installed kilowatt — slightly less than Portland’s $197, despite a fifth more sunshine, because PGE’s expensive power makes every Portland kilowatt-hour more valuable to erase. Cheap electricity is the quiet tax on sunny-town solar. Medford still clearly beats Eugene, where a lower yield meets a municipal utility whose export terms we could not verify; against Portland, its advantage is comfort and headroom, not raw dollars.
Two caveats we owe you. The treatment of year-end credit balances under Oregon’s rule was not confirmed in our review — ask Pacific Power in writing how unused credits settle. And Pacific Power reported no residential net-metering counts to EIA for 2024, so adoption context is a blank we cannot fill.
On incentives, plan around absence. The federal §25D residential credit is $0 for 2026 cash and loan purchases, expired December 31, 2025. Oregon’s Solar + Storage Rebate is exhausted — the $1.1 million budget was reserved the day it opened in June 2026. What remains is structural: no sales tax in Oregon, a property-tax exemption for net-metered systems, and EnergySage install quotes averaging $2.47/W, among the lowest in the country. At those prices, Medford does not need a subsidy — it needs a correctly sized system and Oregon’s rules to hold.
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.
Medford against the rest of Oregon
Same rate, same export rule, same installed price per watt — only the sunshine changes:
| City | kWh per kW | Payback |
|---|---|---|
| Bend | 1,418 | 11.8 years |
| Medford | 1,316 | 12.7 years |
| Eugene | 1,156 | 15.4 years |
| Portland | 1,083 | 16.3 years |
A 31% production span across one state is the reason a single statewide number is only ever a starting point.
What Oregon pays Medford for exported power
Oregon credits exported power at the retail rate under OAR 860-039-0055 , so a kilowatt-hour a Medford array sends to the grid is worth the same as one you buy. That is the best case for solar economics and it is why the payback above is what it is.
It is also the assumption most likely to change. Twenty-two states have already moved to net billing. If Oregon did the same on typical terms, this system would take about 22.1 years instead of 15.4 — 6.7 years’ difference from a policy change, with no change to the hardware and none to Medford’s weather.
The treatment of year-end credit balances was not confirmed.
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 1,316 kWh per kW figure for Medford is a modeled location point, not an interpolation from the Oregon 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 Oregon’s residential average; EIA does not publish a Medford figure, so the state rate is used and labeled as such.
- Export rules: OAR 860-039-0055 , from our Oregon 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
How much do solar panels cost in Medford in 2026?
About $19,760 for a typical 8 kW system at $2.47 per watt, before any incentive. With the federal credit at $0 in 2026 that is close to your net cost. Note that the price per watt is a Oregon market average — there is no reliable city-level cost data, so treat it as a starting point and get three quotes.
What is the solar payback in Medford?
Roughly 15.4 years on this model, using Medford’s own production figure of 1,316 kWh per kW and its own utility tariff (14.02¢/kWh) with each utility’s real export treatment. That includes $150 a year of running costs and one inverter replacement, which many published paybacks leave out.
Is Medford better or worse for solar than the rest of Oregon?
Against the state figure, Medford runs 22% above Oregon’s 1,075 kWh per kW — a payback 1.0 years shorter than the statewide 16.4-year estimate on the same hardware at the same price.
Is solar worth it in Medford in 2026?
At 15.97¢/kWh and 1,316 kWh per kW, an 8 kW system in Medford pays back in about 12.7 years on this model. Treat that as a starting point for reading real quotes rather than as a quote: your roof’s orientation, its shading and the price you are actually offered will move it more than your city does.
How we calculated this
Year-1 saving = production (kW × the city’s modeled kWh per kW) × the blended kWh value (retail rate for self-use, the state export rule for exports). Payback = net cost ÷ year-1 saving, with the federal credit at $0 for 2026 purchases and cost per watt from the state’s installed-price band. Production is modeled from PVGIS/NSRDB irradiance for the city.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 Oregon
- Solar panel cost in Oregon — The statewide picture: Oregon’s rate, incentives, export rules and the 1,075 kWh per kW average this page corrects.
- Solar panel cost in Bend — 1,418 kWh per kW and a 11.8-year payback — better than Medford on identical hardware.
- Solar panel cost in Eugene — 1,156 kWh per kW and a 15.4-year payback — worse than Medford on identical hardware.
- Solar panel cost in Portland — 1,083 kWh per kW and a 16.3-year payback — worse than Medford on identical hardware.
- Solar panel cost in Yakima — 1,320 kWh per kW in Washington — the closest production match to Medford in our data.
- Solar panel cost in Philadelphia — 1,320 kWh per kW in Pennsylvania — the closest production match to Medford in our data.
- All city solar figures — The 66 US cities with their own modeled production data, and the spreads between them.