Is My Solar Quote Too High? (Florida, 2026)

If you have a solar quote in hand and you're trying to figure out whether the price is fair, you've probably already run into the problem: every website gives you a different "average," and almost all of them are run by companies that make money when you buy. This page is different. It walks you through how to check your own Florida quote against the one pricing dataset that isn't selling anything, and shows you the specific numbers to compare against.

The short version

In Florida, the single most useful number for judging a quote is price per watt — the total system price before incentives, divided by the system size in watts. You get it like this:

Against independent Florida data for owned (cash or loan) systems, anything roughly at or below $3.00 per watt is competitive, the mid-$3 range is around the typical market level, and above the high-$3s is worth questioning. Below we explain where those numbers come from and why most of the figures you'll find elsewhere are unreliable.

Why the "average price" you found online is probably wrong

Search "Florida solar cost per watt" and you'll see numbers ranging from about $2.19 to over $3.00 — a spread so wide it's almost useless for judging your own quote. There are three reasons for the mess:

Most sources have a financial stake. A large share of the cost pages that rank in Google are run by installers or lead-generation companies that get paid when you request a quote. A low headline number gets you in the door. That doesn't make every figure dishonest, but it means you should never anchor on a number from a site that profits from your decision.

They blend different kinds of deals together. A cash purchase, a loan, a lease, and a power-purchase agreement (PPA) are priced completely differently, and many "average" figures mix them. Lease and PPA pricing in particular can distort an average in ways that don't reflect what you'd pay to own a system outright.

They use stale or thin data. Solar pricing moves, and a figure from 2023 doesn't describe a 2026 quote. Some state "averages" are also built on small samples that don't hold up.

The benchmark worth trusting: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

The most credible public source for what people actually pay is the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which publishes a dataset called Tracking the Sun. It's compiled from millions of real installed systems, it isn't trying to sell you anything, and it can be filtered to the comparison that matters: host-owned systems — meaning cash and loan purchases, not leases or PPAs.

Filtered that way, the Florida figures we benchmark against are:

• Typical (median) owned-system price: roughly $3.73 per watt
• Competitive level (the better end of the market): roughly $2.98 per watt

A genuinely good quote lands toward the competitive end. A quote in the mid-$3s is roughly typical. A quote well above the high-$3s isn't automatically a ripoff, but it's the point at which you should ask the installer to justify the price.

One important note on these numbers: they describe systems people bought. If you've been handed a lease or PPA, price per watt doesn't apply the same way, and comparing a lease "price" to these figures will mislead you. That's a separate analysis.

Price isn't the only thing that decides if a quote is fair

A low price per watt on bad equipment, or with an inflated production estimate, isn't actually a good deal. Three things matter alongside price:

Production estimate. Your installer's projected annual kWh should be close to an independent estimate for your roof, address, and shading. If their number is meaningfully higher than an independent calculation, your projected savings are inflated and your real payback will be longer than promised. (A quote that lowballs production is the more conservative error and less of a concern.)

Equipment. The panel and inverter brand, and the warranty terms in writing, separate a durable system from a cheap one. A rock-bottom price often signals lower-tier hardware or short warranties.

The escalator (for leases and PPAs). If your agreement raises your payment every year, the rate of increase quietly determines whether you actually save money over time. A high annual escalator can erase the savings entirely.

A suspiciously low quote deserves scrutiny too

It's natural to celebrate a quote that comes in well under market. But an unusually low price sometimes means an undersized system, lower-tier equipment, a production estimate that won't hold up, or a thin warranty. The point isn't to be paranoid — it's that "cheapest" and "best value" aren't the same thing, and the only way to know is to check the price, the production estimate, and the equipment together.

How to check your own quote

You can do the price-per-watt math yourself with the numbers above. To check all of it at once — price against the Berkeley Lab benchmark for your specific state, production against an independent estimate for your address, and equipment and warranty quality — you can run your quote through our free grader. It's independent: it takes no installer referral fees and no lead-generation revenue, so the grade isn't influenced by anyone trying to sell you a system.

Frequently asked questions

Informational only. SolarScore provides data-based analysis of solar quotes and does not provide financial advice. Pricing benchmarks are derived from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tracking the Sun dataset; production estimates reference NLR PVWatts v8.