The federal battery tax credit is gone. Ten states did not get the memo.

25D expired December 31, 2025, and it took 30% off the table. What replaced it is not nothing — it is just scattered across state programs that most buyers never find.

For most of the last decade, the arithmetic on a home battery included a 30% federal discount. The Residential Clean Energy Credit — 25D — covered battery storage of 3kWh or more, with no cap, and it was the reason a lot of $15,000 installations penciled out at $10,500.

It expired on December 31, 2025, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Not phased down. Expired. If your system was placed in service after that date, there is no federal residential credit to claim.

What that actually costs you

On a typical $14,000 Powerwall-class install, the credit was worth about $4,200. That is not a rounding error — it is the difference between a 9-year payback and a 13-year one in a lot of utility territories. Anyone who ran the numbers in 2024 and is revisiting them now is looking at a materially different deal, and it is worth being blunt about that rather than pretending the market did not change.

Portable power stations were never eligible anyway — 25D required permanent installation — so if you are shopping a power station, none of this affects you. This is an installed-battery story.

The programs that survived

Here is the part that gets buried: several state programs are not only alive, they are large enough that in a few states the total incentive is better than the old federal credit was on its own.

• Connecticut — Energy Storage Solutions pays upfront incentives that can reach roughly $16,000 for residential systems, structured as an upfront payment plus performance payments over ten years. It is the most generous program in the country right now and it is not close.
• Vermont — Green Mountain Power's programs run up to about $10,500, with a bring-your-own-device path that pays you for grid events.
• Maryland — a 30% credit up to $5,000, which is a near-direct replacement for what the feds took away.
• California — SGIP is still funded, with the largest payouts reserved for equity and fire-threat tiers.
• Massachusetts — ConnectedSolutions pays per-kW for summer and winter grid events rather than upfront, which changes the shape of the return but not the fact of it.

New York, Hawaii, and a handful of others have live programs too. We track all ten on the state incentive pages, and we re-verify funding status monthly, because these programs open, exhaust their budgets, and reopen on schedules that have nothing to do with the calendar year.

The other lever: your utility

The thing that most often gets missed is not a state program at all — it is the utility rate structure underneath it. A battery in a territory with aggressive time-of-use spreads or demand charges earns money every single day by arbitraging peak rates, whether or not a single incentive exists. A battery in a flat-rate territory with net metering earns almost nothing until the power goes out.

That is why two identical installations in two states can have paybacks eight years apart. The incentive is the headline; the rate structure is the business model. Before you shop hardware, look up whether your utility offers a TOU plan and what the peak-to-off-peak spread actually is.

Where this leaves a 2026 buyer

Honestly? In one of two camps.

If you are in Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, or a well-positioned California tier, the economics on an installed battery still work, and in Connecticut's case they work better than they did federally. Get quotes.

If you are in a state with no program and flat utility rates, an installed battery in 2026 is a resilience purchase, not an investment — and you should price it against a $2,000-4,000 portable that covers your actual outage loads for a fraction of the cost. A lot of people who were quoted $16,000 for whole-home backup genuinely needed a fridge, a furnace blower, and a Wi-Fi router to stay on for eighteen hours. That is a very different product.

Our full guide to the expiration goes deeper on the 25C/25D specifics and what still qualifies. The state tracker has current values and funding status by program.

How we source this: figures come from manufacturer spec sheets, published utility and program documents, and our own spec database — never from vendor marketing copy. We re-check incentive values and prices monthly. See our methodology.