“Is there a solar panel grant in Crawley?” is the question people type before anything about panels, and the honest answer is short: not a general one. No government grant pays towards solar for an ordinary household in England in 2026. What exists is narrower: two income-linked schemes, a lower-interest loan, a VAT zero rate every household gets anyway, and a county group-buy that was not open when we last checked. This post sets each out, shows what a Crawley roof earns with no grant at all, and says why a page offering free panels is usually a sales page. It supports our solar panels Crawley page.
The short answer
There is no general government grant for household solar in England. An ordinary Crawley household pays for panels itself, and the support that does exist in 2026 is of three kinds: income-linked grants (ECO4, which runs to 31 December 2026, and the Warm Homes: Local Grant), both income-tested; lower-interest borrowing through the Warm Homes Loan Scheme; and a group-buy, Solar Together Sussex, now trading as Switch Together, which is a pooled price rather than a grant.
One thing reaches every household without an application: residential solar and battery installations are zero-rated for VAT in Great Britain until 31 March 2027, and that has an end date.
ECO4: the income-linked scheme with a deadline
ECO4 is the income-linked scheme still running: extended by nine months, it now ends on 31 December 2026. Its companion, the Great British Insulation Scheme, closed on 31 March 2026. Neither was ever a general offer, and we will not pretend an average Crawley household qualifies. If yours might, the thing to know is the date: a scheme that ends on 31 December is one to ask about this autumn, not in the new year.
Warm Homes: Local Grant: who it is written for
The Warm Homes: Local Grant is an England scheme for privately owned homes, owner-occupied or privately rented, with an EPC rating of D to G. You need one of three income routes: the home is in a low-income postcode (IMD deciles 1 and 2), someone in the household receives a means-tested benefit, or gross household income is £36,000 or less. DESNZ updated its guidance on 2 July 2026, and councils usually make contact within 10 working days of an application.
Two details matter for solar. The grant funds a battery only alongside solar PV, so it will not pay for battery storage on its own. And the application route is national, while it is your council that confirms local delivery and makes contact. What Crawley’s position is in any given week is the council’s to confirm, not ours.
Crawley’s tenure figures say who that covers: at the 2021 Census, 55.7% of the town’s 45,500 households owned their home and 19.8% rented privately, together about three-quarters. The 22.9% in social housing fall outside the scheme.
The Warm Homes Loan Scheme: borrowing, not a grant
If none of those tests fits, the government’s other route is a loan. The Warm Homes Loan Scheme, under scheme rules dated September 2026, works through lenders, with caps of £15,000 for solar PV and £15,000 for a battery. The government pays lenders up to 20% of the loan to bring the interest rate down. The honest word for it is lower-interest: the subsidy lowers the rate, it does not remove it. You are still borrowing, and the lender’s rate is the number to read before the cap.
The discount everyone gets: 0% VAT to 31 March 2027
HMRC’s VAT Notice 708/6 zero-rates residential installations of solar panels and batteries in Great Britain until 31 March 2027. From 1 April 2027 the rate reverts to the reduced 5%. It applies to a group-buy and an independent quote alike, so it never separates two quotes. It does not extend to a home EV chargepoint, which is standard-rated at 20%. The detail is in our guide to VAT on solar panels and batteries.
The group-buy: Solar Together Sussex, now Switch Together
Solar Together Sussex, the group-buying scheme run with West Sussex County Council and iChoosr, put more than 1,700 systems on roofs across its first two Sussex rounds and opened battery-retrofit registration from 2023. The scheme now trades as Switch Together, and when we checked its Crawley solar page on 17 September 2026 it said it was not active in the area yet and invited residents to register their interest. Round dates move, so check the operator’s page. The scheme’s history, and how to set a pooled offer against an installer quote, is in our earlier post on Solar Together in Crawley. A group-buy is a price, not a grant.
What the council is doing with public money
Crawley Borough Council spends on its own estate and programmes. It declared a climate emergency on 17 July 2019, brought its net-zero target forward to 2040 in December 2021, and in December 2024 passed a new declaration: net zero for the council’s own emissions by 2030 and borough-wide by 2045. The visible projects are a 350 kW solar carport at K2 Leisure Centre, Re-Energise Manor Royal, which supports businesses putting solar on their roofs, and more than 1,000 council homes upgraded. All of that is the council’s work, reported from its own pages: public money on public buildings and council homes, not a grant for a private roof.
What a Crawley roof earns without a grant
PVGIS 5.3, the European Commission’s tool on PVGIS-SARAH3 data for 2005–2023, puts a 4 kWp array at 35° tilt, due south, with 14% system losses at about 4,020 kWh a year for Crawley, roughly 1,005 kWh per kWp (run 16 September 2026). That squares with the Met Office record for Charlwood: 1,628 hours of sunshine a year over 1991–2020.
That is more than the 2,500 kWh a year Ofgem’s typical medium household uses, so nobody uses all of it. Take an illustrative self-use share of 40%, an assumption rather than a measurement: a battery or someone at home in daylight pushes it up, an empty house pulls it down. Forty per cent of 4,020 kWh is 1,608 kWh used at home, and at the Ofgem price-cap unit rate for October to December 2026, 26.32p per kWh on Direct Debit, 1,608 × 26.32p is about £423 a year kept off the bill. The other 2,412 kWh is exported under the Smart Export Guarantee at a rate we do not print: each supplier sets its own, it must be above zero, and it changes at short notice.
The cost side has two public anchors. The Energy Saving Trust (updated 27 August 2026) puts a typical 4.5 kWp system, about twelve panels, at around £7,600 installed. DESNZ’s May 2026 cost data, from 264,742 installations in 2025/26, gives a median of £1,546 per kW for 4–10 kW systems, so 4.5 kWp × £1,546 is £6,957. Both are the cost of an average job, not a package price, and not our price.
Crawley’s housing is the caveat: at the Census, 37.4% of households were in terraced houses, 22.7% in semis and 25.1% in flats or maisonettes. A mid-terrace roof holds fewer panels than a 4 kWp example assumes, and a flat is outside it altogether. The full run is on our Crawley page; the county picture is on our page for solar panels across Sussex.
”Free solar panels” offers, and what panels actually cost
Say it plainly. A page promising free solar panels to a Crawley household with a driveway and no qualifying benefit is selling. The genuinely free routes are the income-linked ones above, and they test income first. For everyone else the real question is what it costs to have panels fitted, and the honest national answers are the Trust’s £7,600 and DESNZ’s £1,546 per kW, set out in our solar panel installation cost guide. We do not publish a price for your roof: the number comes from a survey of the actual roof, usage and property. We are NAPIT member 73495 and a HIES Consumer Code member (HCE/A/1392), with MCS certification for solar PV via NAPIT, and we quote homes in and around Crawley. Contact us for a survey, or call 0204 547 1892.
Sources: DESNZ, Warm Homes: Local Grant guidance (updated 2 July 2026); Warm Homes Loan Scheme rules (September 2026); government guidance on ECO4 and the Great British Insulation Scheme; HMRC VAT Notice 708/6; Ofgem price cap (October to December 2026), Typical Domestic Consumption Values (1 July 2026) and Smart Export Guarantee guidance; Energy Saving Trust, Solar panels: costs, savings and benefits explained (27 August 2026); DESNZ, Solar PV cost data (May 2026); European Commission JRC, PVGIS 5.3 (run 16 September 2026); Met Office 1991–2020 averages, Charlwood; ONS Census 2021 (TS044, TS054); Crawley Borough Council climate emergency and Reducing our emissions pages; Switch Together, Crawley page (read 17 September 2026).