How Much Is Solar in Tampa, FL? $2.13/W, 10.7-Yr Payback

Why this number

A kilowatt of panels in Tampa produces about 1,498 kWh a year, the highest of the 4 Florida cities modeled here — ahead of Miami at 1,481, Orlando at 1,458, Jacksonville at 1,416. On an 8 kW system that is a payback of about 10.4 years, against 11.0 years in Jacksonville, on identical hardware at the same 15.03¢/kWh.

Tampa against the rest of Florida

Across the 4 Florida cities with their own modeled figures, production spans 5.8% — Jacksonville at 1,416 kWh per kW to Tampa at 1,498. Every column except production is identical down this table: same 15.0¢/kWh retail rate, same export regime, same $2.13/W installed cost. The payback differences are caused by weather and nothing else.

Against the state figure, Tampa is the reference point: our Florida page uses 1,475 kWh per kW, which is this city. The value of this page is the comparison above, not a different headline number.

What sets Tampa apart

Marginally ahead of Miami, with a slightly shorter afternoon thunderstorm season.

Your utility, officially

Florida’s average residential rate is 15.0¢/kWh, but the bill in Tampa comes from Tampa Electric Co at 14.67¢ — 2.4% below the state figure. These are the residential figures Tampa’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:

How exports are treated matters as much as the headline price: Tampa Electric Co is modeled here under the state’s full-retail net metering rules, and that treatment is baked into every payback figure on this page.

Tampa Electric is an oddity among Florida’s big utilities: it is essentially a one-metro company. Its 757,280 residential customers sit almost entirely in Hillsborough County and its immediate edges, which makes it a fraction of the size of Florida Power & Light (5.2 million homes) to its south and Duke Energy Florida (1.8 million) to its north. On price it sits between them too — 14.67¢/kWh on the 2024 EIA-861 file, against FPL’s 13.71¢ and Duke’s 16.63¢. Cross the bay to St. Petersburg and you are in Duke territory paying about 2¢ more per kilowatt-hour; the utility boundary, not the weather, is the biggest solar variable in the Tampa Bay area.

Ownership matters here in a straightforward way. Tampa Electric is investor-owned, regulated by the Florida Public Service Commission, and therefore bound by the state’s full-retail net-metering rule (FAC Rule 25-6.065, dating to 2008) that our Florida page describes. Exported energy from a home system is credited against consumption at the retail rate. That is the same regime as FPL and Duke — Florida’s investor-owned utilities are genuinely uniform on this — and it is the municipal utilities in Jacksonville and Orlando that get to write their own rules. Tampa Electric publishes its residential tariffs and interconnection process on its own site at tampaelectric.com ; we could not verify a deeper stable link to the specific net-metering page, so start from the homepage and confirm the current application steps there.

On rate structure, be careful with any single-number quote. A Tampa Electric residential bill is built from a base energy charge plus fuel and other cost-recovery clauses that the commission adjusts, so your effective per-kilowatt-hour price moves over time and varies with the tariff you are on. The 14.67¢ figure is the honest average — total residential revenue over total residential sales for 2024 — not a promise about your next bill.

One gap in the data is itself informative: the 2024 EIA net-metering file in our dataset carries residential totals for FPL (108,585 customers) and Duke (94,005) but none for Tampa Electric, so there is no honest way to say how many Tampa homes have interconnected solar or how the uptake compares across the bay. If you want that number, the utility is the only source — ask for it when you request interconnection, because a utility’s queue length tells you something about how practiced its approval process is.

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

Tampa Electric covers the core of the city, yet its four-county EIA-861 area also includes Duke Energy Florida at 16.6¢, Sumter Electric Cooperative at 13.1¢, and Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative and Peace River Electric Cooperative, both at 12.3¢. Against Tampa Electric’s 14.67¢, that’s roughly a 2.4¢ drop to the cooperatives and a 1.9¢ climb to Duke — a modest but real spread that can shift a solar payback timeline once a different rate and export policy come into play. Florida’s July 2026 state average, 15.03¢, is a later figure calculated differently than these 2024 numbers. Whether an address falls on Tampa Electric or a neighboring cooperative 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 4 service counties of the metro’s main utility; prices are 2024 revenue ÷ sales from the official file.

An 8 kW system in Tampa, priced out

Only the first two rows differ. Everything financial — rate, tariff, price per watt — is inherited from Florida 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 Tampa array would produce, with rates rising at 2.5% a year, comes to roughly $55,370.

Not sure solar is the right move yet? The should-I-go-solar screener asks the four questions that matter before you get a quote.

Run it with your own bill