Where Solar Pays Back Fastest

The same rooftop system pays for itself in 2.1 years in Iloilo and 7.1 years in Lanao del Sur. The panels are the same. What changes from place to place is the rate you stop paying and how much sun you get. Here are all 131 distribution utilities, ranked.

Download the full ranking as a CSV, with each utility's rate, export credit, sun hours, value per kWp and payback. You're welcome to use it if you credit us and link to this page.

Reading the ranking

ILECO 3 tops it at 2.1 years on a ₱16.48 rate and 5.2 sun hours. One kWp of panels there avoids ₱21,870 of electricity a year. Meralco, which most readers are on, sits at 2.4 years and ₱18,947 per kWp.

At the other end, LASURECO takes 7.1 years, for a simple reason: its customers pay ₱5.26/kWh, the cheapest in the country, so there's less of a bill for solar to cut. That's a good position to be in, and the one place on this page where a slow payback isn't bad news.

The order isn't just the rate table sorted differently. Sun hours range from 4.17 to 5.66 a day across the country, a difference of roughly a third, which is enough to move a utility several places up or down. Pangasinan and Ilocos have a strong dry season and clear skies in March. Leyte and the Bicol provinces get the amihan, and lose sun for it in December and January.

Net metering changed this year

The power you export is only worth something once your utility connects you, and the rules for that were rewritten in April 2026. A distribution utility now gets 10 working days to decide on a complete application, down from 20, with no extensions. LGU electrical permits are limited to 3 working days. If an agency misses its deadline, the application is deemed granted.

The 100 kW personal-use cap set by RA 9513 (Renewable Energy Act of 2008) stayed the same, despite what some installer blogs say. Nationwide there were 17,175 users and 157 MW as of 2025-05. The whole process is explained in the net metering guide.

Frequently asked questions

Where the numbers come from

The rates are the monthly figures from the rates tracker, each with its own source and month. Sun hours are Global Solar Atlas (Solargis) long-term satellite averages, taken at a geocoded point inside each utility's service area, and each utility's entry records that point with a link. Installed cost, export credit and performance ratio come from the shared dataset. It's all on the methodology page.

Use this ranking for planning, not as a quote. It takes one point to stand for each service area, and sunlight varies within a province. Which way your roof faces, how much shade it gets and how much power you actually use in the daytime will change your own number more than the gap between neighbouring rows here.