By Solar Expert
July 29, 2026
Choosing among the best solar companies in NJ comes down to twelve specific questions, and price per watt is not the first one. Homeowners in PSE&G, JCP&L, Atlantic City Electric and Rockland Electric territory all sign the same kind of contract, register for the same state incentive, and wait on the same utility approvals, so one checklist works across New Jersey. This guide gives you the twelve questions, explains why each one matters, and describes what a solid answer sounds like next to an evasive one.
As of July 28, 2026: New Jersey's residential SREC-II incentive is $77 per SREC-II for registrations received on or after July 27, 2026, down from $85 for registrations received before that date, per the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. The federal residential clean energy credit is also gone for homeowner-owned systems where installation was completed after December 31, 2025. Both facts change what an honest 2026 proposal should say.
Official sources (last checked: July 28, 2026):
To vet any solar company in New Jersey, work through these 12 questions in order before you sign anything:
Screenshot that list and take it to every appointment. The rest of this article expands each question so you know what you are listening for.
Yes, a residential solar installer in New Jersey must be licensed — and it needs two separate credentials, not one. Questions 1 through 3 confirm that the company in front of you actually holds both, and that the people who show up at your house are covered by them.
Solar work in New Jersey is electrical work, and it falls under the Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors within the Division of Consumer Affairs. The license must be current, and the business must also hold a valid business permit. A good answer is a number, offered immediately, that you can type into the state's public verification portal at newjersey.mylicense.com/verification while the salesperson is still sitting at your table. An evasive answer is "our electrician is licensed" without a name or number, or a promise to send it later.
Separately from the electrical license, a company performing residential home improvement work in New Jersey must be registered as a Home Improvement Contractor with the Division of Consumer Affairs. That covers the non-electrical side of your project — the roof attachments, the racking, the site work. New Jersey is currently transitioning home improvement contractors from registration toward full licensure under a 2024 law, and existing registrations remain valid and renewable while the rules are being finalized, so what you are checking today is that the registration is active and searchable.
Subcontracting is legal and common, so this is not a trick question — the point is to learn whose license and whose insurance actually cover the work. Ask for the name of the subcontracting company, whether it is separately licensed and registered, and which entity holds the workmanship warranty you will be relying on in five years. A good answer names the entity plainly and produces a current certificate of insurance for general liability and workers' compensation. An evasive answer describes crews as "our team" without saying who employs them.
Claim: Checking a New Jersey solar company's credentials means running two separate searches, not one.
Evidence: The two credentials come from two different regulatory tracks. The electrical contractor license and its accompanying business permit are issued through the Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors and govern the wiring, the service connection, and the disconnect. Home Improvement Contractor registration is administered by the Division of Consumer Affairs and governs the company's right to sell and perform residential improvement work at all. A company can hold one and not the other, which is precisely why the state maintains a single public verification portal where you can search by business name or registration number.
New Jersey law requires any home improvement contract over $500 to be in writing and to contain a notice telling you that you may cancel for any reason before midnight of the third business day after you receive a copy. Questions 4 through 6 are about the paperwork you sign and the money it commits you to.
Point at the contract and ask the salesperson to show you the clause. Under N.J.S.A. 56:8-151, the cancellation notice is required to appear in the contract itself, the right applies to all home improvement contracts over $500 rather than only to door-to-door sales, and any money you have paid must be refunded within 30 days of your cancellation. A contract that omits the notice is a red flag about the company's compliance generally, not just about that one clause. A good answer finds the paragraph in seconds; an evasive answer explains why the clause "does not really apply here."
These four structures produce very different long-term outcomes, and the monthly payment on the front page rarely tells you which one you are in. Ask directly whether the paper is a purchase agreement, a loan, a lease, or a power purchase agreement; whether a dealer fee or origination fee is folded into the cash price; and whether the payment escalates annually. Escalators are common in leases and PPAs and compound over a 20- to 25-year term. This is not a hypothetical concern in New Jersey: the state Attorney General's May 2021 settlement with NRG Residential Solar Solutions resolved allegations of deceptive sales practices around solar leases and required the company to disclose lease terms and payment schedules clearly and to honor cancellation rights.
Ask the salesperson to walk down the savings column and name the source of every incentive line. In 2026 this doubles as an honesty test. The federal residential clean energy credit is not available for a system you own where installation was completed after December 31, 2025, so a 2026 proposal that shows a 30% federal credit for a homeowner-owned system is showing you money you cannot claim. The commercial investment tax credit does still exist for commercially owned systems, which is why lease and PPA providers can still benefit from it — but that credit belongs to the system owner, not to you.
Claim: A salesperson who still quotes a 30% federal tax credit to a New Jersey homeowner buying their own system in 2026 has told you something important about the whole proposal.
Evidence: The residential credit under Section 25D was repealed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and per IRS guidance it no longer applies to expenditures made after December 31, 2025, with an expenditure treated as made when the original installation is completed. That is public, settled, and roughly seven months old as of this writing — the kind of change any company that files New Jersey solar paperwork for a living is expected to know. A rep who has not updated the pitch is either not tracking the rules or is relying on the homeowner not to.
Check the system size against your last 12 months of electricity use, and check the year-one production estimate against a published New Jersey benchmark of roughly 1,280 kWh per installed kW-DC. Questions 7 and 8 are the two places where an optimistic proposal is easiest to catch.
New Jersey's net metering rules cap an individual residential system at roughly 100% of the customer's electricity use over a trailing 12-month period, so your own bills are the design constraint. More importantly, oversizing is not free upside: surplus generation beyond your annual usage is cashed out at your utility's avoided cost of wholesale power at the annual true-up, which is far below the retail rate those kilowatt-hours would have offset. A good answer references your actual usage history and explains any planned load changes, such as an EV or a heat pump. An evasive answer is "we filled the available roof space."
Divide the proposal's first-year kWh estimate by the system's DC size in kW and compare the result to about 1,280. If a proposal lands materially above that per kW, ask which assumptions produce it — tilt, azimuth, the shading model, or the total system loss factor. There are legitimate reasons for a well-oriented, unshaded south-facing roof to beat a statewide average, and a competent designer will name them. What you should not accept is a number with no stated assumptions behind it, because production estimates drive every savings figure downstream.
Claim: New Jersey homeowners have an official, regulator-grade benchmark for judging whether a solar production estimate is realistic.
Evidence: In its current residential incentive modeling, NJBPU Staff used a representative New Jersey residential system of 9.8 kW-DC with a 20% total DC power loss and arrived at a year-one energy yield of 1,280 kWh per kW. The modeling was run in NREL's System Advisor Model and, per the Board's own description, calibrated toward real metered generation data reported through PJM-GATS rather than a theoretical ideal. That makes it a state regulator's working assumption for a typical New Jersey home, which is a far better yardstick than a vendor's spreadsheet — and it is the number the state itself relies on when setting the incentive you will be paid.
Your installer normally files the SuSI registration, the municipal permits, and the utility interconnection application on your behalf, and each of those filings has consequences for what you get paid and when. Questions 9 through 11 pin down the timing, the ownership, and the fallback plan.
Residential systems in New Jersey register under the Administratively Determined Incentive sub-program of the Successor Solar Incentive program, through NJ's Clean Energy Program online registration portal, on a first-come first-served basis against an annual capacity block. The rate is locked at registration for a 15-year term, and per NJBPU the residential level is $77 per SREC-II for registrations received on or after July 27, 2026, compared with $85 before. Because registration can be submitted before interconnection approval and permits are finalized, the filing date is a choice your installer makes — so ask them to confirm the timing in writing, because the filing date determines your rate.
Under a cash purchase or a loan, you own the system, the registration is yours, and the SREC-II income is yours. Under a lease or a PPA, the third-party owner registers the system and keeps the SREC-II income, because the incentive is paid to whoever owns the generating asset. Neither structure is inherently wrong, but a savings estimate that shows you SREC-II revenue on a leased system is describing income that will not reach you. Ask the question plainly and check the answer against the contract's ownership language.
Your system cannot legally produce power for your home until the municipal inspection passes and your utility approves interconnection and grants permission to operate. In New Jersey that utility is PSE&G, JCP&L, Atlantic City Electric or Rockland Electric, and each runs its own application process. Ask who submits the applications, who tracks them, who responds to a request for more information, and what the company does if approval stalls for months. A good answer describes an internal person or team by role. An evasive answer puts the follow-up on you.
Claim: The date your installer files your SuSI registration is worth real money to you over 15 years.
Evidence: The incentive is administratively determined, meaning the rate attached to your project is fixed when your registration is received and then holds for the full 15-year term rather than floating with a market. NJBPU set the residential level at $77 per SREC-II for registrations received on or after July 27, 2026, and $85 for those received earlier, and the Board's own rationale for choosing a future effective date was to let installers register existing customers who were still awaiting interconnection approval or permits. That confirms two things a homeowner can act on: registration precedes full installation, and the filing date — not the install date — sets the rate.
A workmanship warranty covers how your system was mounted and wired rather than the equipment itself, and it is the only warranty that pays for a leak at a mounting penetration. Question 12 covers the three things that matter after the crew drives away: coverage, roof responsibility, and response time.
Ask for the term in years and for the specific list of what is covered. Panel and inverter warranties come from the manufacturers and cover equipment defects. The workmanship warranty comes from the installer and covers the mounting, the wiring, and the labor to fix them. Ask whether a service call under the workmanship warranty carries a trip charge, and whether removing and reinstalling panels to reach a problem is included.
Get roof-penetration leaks named explicitly in the warranty document rather than implied by a general workmanship clause. Ask what happens if your roof needs replacing during the warranty term: who removes and reinstalls the array, at what cost, and whether the warranty survives that work. Also ask how the company handles a roof that is already near the end of its life at the time of installation, since mounting a 25-year array on a 20-year-old roof creates a predictable and expensive problem.
Ask for the actual mechanics: is production monitored, does the company notice an outage before you do, what is the target response time for a service call, and is there a phone number staffed by the installer rather than by an equipment manufacturer. A system that quietly underproduces for a year costs you a year of savings, and nothing in a panel warranty catches that.
Claim: The workmanship warranty is the only one of your solar warranties that depends on the installer still being in business.
Evidence: Panel and inverter warranties are obligations of the manufacturers and travel with the equipment regardless of who installed it. The workmanship warranty is an obligation of the installing company alone, and roof-penetration leaks, racking failures and wiring faults fall under it exclusively — no manufacturer covers them. That is why a company's track record and longevity in New Jersey are not a marketing detail but a term of the warranty in practice.
Decide on the specificity of the answers, not the enthusiasm of the pitch: a company that answers all 12 questions in writing is a materially safer choice than one that answers seven and deflects five. Online NJ solar company reviews are worth reading, but they mostly capture the sales experience and the first month — the twelve questions capture the next twenty-five years.
Use the table below as your scoring sheet. Ask the question, then note which column the answer landed in.
| Question | A good answer sounds like | An evasive answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Electrical contractor license | Gives the number on the spot; you verify it while they wait | "Our electrician handles all that" |
| 2. HIC registration | Gives the registration number and spells the legal business name | "We're fully licensed and bonded" with no number |
| 3. Employees or subcontractors | Names the entity and produces a certificate of insurance | "Our guys" with no employer named |
| 4. Cancellation notice | Points to the clause in the contract in seconds | Explains why it does not apply to your situation |
| 5. Financing structure | States purchase, loan, lease or PPA and identifies every fee and escalator | Leads with a monthly payment and changes the subject |
| 6. Incentives assumed | Names each incentive and its source; no homeowner federal credit in 2026 | Still shows a 30% federal credit on a system you would own |
| 7. System sizing | References your trailing 12 months of usage and any planned new loads | "We filled the available roof space" |
| 8. Production estimate | States kWh per kW and the tilt, azimuth, shading and loss assumptions | A single large kWh number with no stated basis |
| 9. SuSI registration timing | Commits in writing to a filing date and states which SREC-II rate applies | "We take care of all the state paperwork" |
| 10. SREC-II ownership | Matches the contract's ownership language without hesitation | Shows SREC-II income to you on a leased system |
| 11. Permits and interconnection | Names the internal role that files and tracks each application | Puts the follow-up on you if approval stalls |
| 12. Warranty and service | Written term, roof penetrations named, monitoring and a staffed service line | Points only to the panel and inverter manufacturer warranties |
Key takeaway: No company will give a perfect answer to all twelve, and one soft answer is not disqualifying — but a pattern of vagueness on licensing, cancellation rights, incentive sourcing and registration timing is the pattern that costs New Jersey homeowners money.
Yes, in most cases. Under New Jersey's home improvement contract law, a contract over $500 may be cancelled for any reason before midnight of the third business day after you receive a copy of it, and that right applies to all such contracts rather than only to door-to-door sales. The contract itself is required to contain the cancellation notice, and money you have already paid must be refunded within 30 days of your cancellation. Cancel in writing and keep proof of delivery.
Yes. Residential solar work in New Jersey requires an electrical contractor license with a current business permit, issued through the Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors, plus Home Improvement Contractor registration with the Division of Consumer Affairs. They come from two different regulatory tracks and a company can hold one without the other. Search both by business name or registration number on the state's public verification portal before you sign.
Ask them to point to the current guidance in writing, and treat the answer as information about the whole proposal. The federal residential clean energy credit is not available for a system you own where installation was completed after December 31, 2025. The federal investment tax credit for commercially owned systems does still exist, which is why lease and PPA providers can claim it — but in that case the credit belongs to the system owner, not to you, and it should not appear in your savings column.
You get the rate in effect when your registration is received by the state program, which is why the filing date matters more than the installation date. NJBPU set the residential level at $77 per SREC-II for registrations received on or after July 27, 2026, down from $85 for earlier registrations, and whichever rate attaches to your project holds for the full 15-year term. Ask your installer to confirm the filing date in writing rather than relying on a verbal assurance.
Divide the proposal's first-year kWh figure by the system's DC size in kW and compare it to roughly 1,280 kWh per kW, the year-one yield NJBPU used in its current residential modeling with a 20% total system loss. A number close to that benchmark is reasonable; a number well above it is not automatically wrong, but it needs an explanation grounded in tilt, azimuth, shading and loss assumptions. If nobody can explain the assumptions, treat the savings estimate built on top of it as unsupported.
The installer, under its workmanship warranty — provided roof penetrations are named in that document. Panel and inverter manufacturer warranties cover equipment defects and do not cover leaks caused by how the array was mounted. Before signing, confirm the workmanship term in years, confirm that penetration leaks are explicitly covered, and ask what happens to the warranty if your roof is replaced during the term.
This checklist was written to be used on everyone you talk to, and that includes us. PowerLutions, a long-established, award-winning solar and battery installation company serving New Jersey, believes homeowners should hold every installer - including PowerLutions - to the same licensing, workmanship and disclosure standards.
So bring the list. Ask for our license and registration numbers and verify them on the state portal before you take another step. Ask where the cancellation clause sits in our contract, which incentives our proposal assumes and where each one comes from, what year-one production per kW we are using and why, when we will file your SuSI registration and which SREC-II rate that locks in, and exactly what our workmanship warranty says about your roof. Then ask a second company the same twelve questions and compare the answers side by side.
If the answers hold up, you will have chosen your installer on evidence instead of on a sales pitch. To start that conversation, request a written proposal from PowerLutions and put it through all twelve.
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