/9 min read/TaskHatch
Nobody's Paying the 30% Anymore
We get it the 30% tax credit has left the building.
Good morning, and welcome to the first issue.
Before we get into it, I want to acknowledge the true villain of residential construction, the one nobody talks about at conferences: the permit portal password.
You have forty of them. Every jurisdiction built its own. One wants a capital letter and a symbol. One caps you at eight characters, which was a security standard around the time of the Clinton administration. One locks you out after two failed attempts and the reset email goes to a person who left the company in 2023.
There is a portal somewhere in this country that still works best in Internet Explorer. I have seen it. I have used it.
Anyway. Let's talk about the year every federal incentive died and demand mostly didn't.
– Tineessa Nelson
In this issue:
- Solar is down 21%, and SEIA blamed permitting out loud
- Batteries lost their tax credit and got more popular
- HVAC took two punches on the same night
- The last credit standing fell on June 30
- The line item nobody's watching
First, what happened
Three federal tax credits were quietly paying for a big chunk of residential energy work. Within six months, all three were gone.
December 31, 2025. The 30% credit on rooftop solar and home batteries ended. On a typical $31,000 system, that's about $9,300 the homeowner used to get back and now doesn't.
There was no phase-out. A job finished December 30th got the full $9,300. The same job finished January 2nd got zero. Same house, same roof, same crew, two days apart.
That same night. The $2,000 heat pump credit ended.
June 30, 2026. The home EV charger credit 30% of the install, up to $1,000 ended. It was the last one left.
Everyone made the same prediction: demand collapses, contractors fold, market shrinks.
Half right. And the wrong half is the interesting one.
Solar: the number is bad, the reason is worse
SEIA is calling for a 21% contraction in residential solar this year. Painful, and roughly what you'd expect when you delete $9,300 from every quote.
But read what they blamed it on. Their own downgrade cites three things: the tax credit, tax equity drying up, and updated permitting data.
The trade association put permitting in the same sentence as the tax credit. Sit with that one.
The part that isn't a forecast.
On April 15, Freedom Forever filed Chapter 11.
They were the second-largest residential solar installer in the country 6.1% of the national market, behind only Sunrun's 12.7%. They went in with somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in liabilities.
They weren't alone or first. SunPower filed in August 2024. Sunnova followed in June 2025. More than 100 US solar companies have filed or shut down since 2023.
The number that should stop you.
Those collapses left more than 1.3 million homeowners without their original installer.
Think about what that actually means on the ground. A million-plus houses with a system on the roof, a warranty nobody's honoring, and in plenty of cases a permit somebody never closed out.
That's not a market statistic. That's a service call you're going to get.
Batteries didn't get the memo
Home batteries lost the exact same 30% credit on the exact same night.
Then they got more popular.
The share of solar buyers who also bought a battery went from 38% to 45% in one year. Residential storage installs jumped 86% year over year in Q1.
Why that stat matters more than it sounds.
Attach rate isn't a count. It's a percentage — the share of people buying solar who tack on a battery.
If the only people left in the market were credit-chasers, that percentage would have dropped. Instead it climbed. Which means a meaningful number of homeowners looked at a product that got several thousand dollars more expensive overnight and bought it anyway.
Batteries were never really a tax-credit product. They're an "I'm tired of losing my food every time the power goes out" product, and nobody repealed outages.
Congratulations, here's more paperwork.
The reward for growth is oversight. The 2026 edition of NFPA 855 pushes a lot of battery projects toward requiring a formal hazard analysis by default, and there are new provisions for batteries installed inside living space.
Translated: more engineering review, more documentation, more plan-check comments, longer approvals.
Demand went up. So did the paperwork per job.
HVAC got hit twice in the same night
Heat pump contractors got the rough version of this.
Punch one: the $2,000 credit vanished January 1.
Punch two: so did R-410A. Every new residential system now runs low-GWP refrigerant — R-32 or R-454B. New equipment, new handling procedures, new training, and mid-transition pricing on everything.
Two structural changes on the same calendar day. Cool.
And demand went up anyway.
State rebate programs are absorbing some of the shock. HEEHRA can reach $8,000 for income-qualified households, which is four times the credit it replaced.
The catch is that it's administered state by state, funded unevenly, and some programs still aren't fully live. So "let me check if your state's program is open and funded" is now an actual step in your sales conversation — a sentence that would have made no sense in 2023.
The real ceiling.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 40,100 HVAC openings every year through 2034, with employment growing 8% — much faster than average. Most of those openings exist to replace people retiring or leaving the trade entirely.
You'll see bigger, scarier numbers thrown around at conferences. Most of them don't trace back to anything. The BLS version is boring, sourced, and bad enough.
Demand you can't staff isn't demand. It's a waiting list, and waiting lists leak.
EV charging: last one out
Section 30C was the final federal incentive standing for homeowners. It was written to run through 2032. It got pulled forward to June 30 of this year.
The word that cost people money: "operational."
The test was never when you signed the contract or when the equipment shipped. It was whether the charger was installed and working by the deadline.
A unit sitting in a box on July 1 qualified for nothing. Any contractor who booked past that Tuesday was selling a $1,000 credit their customer was never going to receive.
That's not a technicality. That's a conversation with a homeowner in April 2027 when they file their taxes.
The part that should worry you.
A Level 2 home install runs $1,100 to $3,600. Panel work is the wild card — a service upgrade can add $4,000 on its own.
And the permit runs $50 to $800 depending on the city, averaging around $297.
Now put that next to a $1,000 credit that no longer exists.
The permit didn't get more expensive this year. Your ability to not think about it did.
Around the industry
Solar-plus-storage is now nearly half of new residential solar. Attach rate at 45% and climbing. If you install solar and don't sell batteries, you're leaving the second half of the ticket on the table.
The 2026 NEC tightened qualified-installer requirements for EV charging. More regulation arrived the same year the subsidy left. That's a pattern, not a coincidence.
Geothermal did not survive either. If you've seen a guide saying the 30% geothermal credit runs through 2032 — that was the old schedule, and it's been dead since December. Check the publish date on anything you're quoting from. I nearly ran the wrong version of this myself.
1.3 million homeowners lost their installer to the bankruptcy wave. Somebody has to close out those permits. It may as well be whoever picks up the phone.
What actually changed
Not demand. Demand is fine — down in solar, up in storage, up in HVAC, steady in charging.
Here's what changed.
A 30% federal credit is an outstanding concealer.
It covers a permit that sits in a queue for three weeks. It covers a tech standing in a driveway for four hours waiting on an inspector who doesn't show. It covers Thursday, which your office manager spent on hold with a building department, learning a portal she'll never use again.
When somebody else is paying 30% of the ticket, nobody audits the 6% you're bleeding to paperwork.
Nobody's paying the 30% anymore.
The inefficiencies didn't change. Your ability to absorb them did.
The line item nobody's watching
I'll show my hand here, because I run a company that does exactly this work and you should factor that in.
The costs this year exposed aren't equipment or labor. They're administrative, and they've always been there:
An inspection window costs you $176 to $383 in field labor before you count the truck roll when the inspector no-shows. A four-hour window is half a day of a tech producing nothing. Most projects run two or three of them.
A permit in a city you've never filed in costs your office manager half a day of research that bills nobody.
An unfinaled permit is a title defect. Your customer can't sell their house. And it's expiring while it sits — in one backlog we cleared, one in four permits had already lapsed. Those didn't need an inspection. They needed a full re-application under whatever code was current that week, new fees, fresh review.
None of that is construction. All of it is on your payroll. And last year, a federal tax credit was quietly picking up the tab.
The read
The incentive era is over. The operations era started January 1, and most people haven't repriced for it.
Whoever's still standing in 2028 won't be the company that found a clever replacement for the tax credit. There isn't one.
It'll be the company that went looking for money it was already leaving on the table — and found most of it sitting in a building department queue, waiting on somebody to pick up the phone.
Go check your open permits. I'll wait.
– Tineessa
Tineessa Nelson is the founder of TaskHatch, which handles permitting, inspection coordination, and business licensing for residential contractors. Fifteen years, 30,000+ permits, 40 states, 8,000+ jurisdictions, and an unreasonable number of portal passwords.
Sources: SEIA Solar Market Insight Q2 2026 · ACP + Wood Mackenzie US Energy Storage Monitor Q1 2026 · Wood Mackenzie market share data · SolarInsure · pv magazine · US Bureau of Labor Statistics · IRS guidance on P.L. 119-21 (OBBBA) · NFPA 855 (2026 ed.) · DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center · EnergySage