Search "net metering by state" and you'll get a dozen tidy tables: green-checkmark states, red-X states, done. Almost none of them tell you the table is wrong the moment a utility hits its capacity cap, a legislature passes a rate case, or a state renames "net metering" to "net billing" to soften the fact that it just cut your export rate by most of its value. That's not hypothetical — it happened in California in 2023, and it's happening in slower motion in half a dozen other states right now.
This isn't another 50-state spreadsheet pretending to be permanent. It's a guide to how these policies actually move, which states are mid-change as of mid-2026, and how to check the one number that matters for your address: what your specific utility pays you for exported power today.
The three tiers, and why the labels lie
Every state net metering policy falls into one of three buckets, and the label a state uses often obscures which bucket it's actually in.
Full retail net metering pays you the same rate for exported power that you pay for imported power — a 1:1 credit. Roughly two dozen states still run this, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, and Illinois's largest utilities for customers who enrolled before January 1, 2025 (more on that catch below).
Net billing / reduced-rate export pays a lower rate for exports than imports, usually the utility's "avoided cost" — what it would have paid a wholesale generator for that power. California, Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, and Hawaii all run some version of this. The name varies: California calls it the Net Billing Tariff, Illinois calls it "supply-only" credit. Both are the same idea — retail net metering with the exports carved out and paid less.
Avoided-cost / wholesale-only compensates exports close to what a power plant gets paid — commonly 2 to 5 cents per kWh. Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and parts of Texas fall here. South Dakota and Tennessee are reported by industry trackers to have no statewide net metering program of any kind.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 38 states plus D.C. and four territories mandate some form of net metering; utilities in two more (Idaho and Texas) offer it voluntarily without a state mandate — meaning coverage inside those two states depends entirely on which utility serves your address, not which state you live in.
Why the 50-state table goes stale
Three mechanisms quietly break these lists, and none of them show up in a simple state-by-state chart.
Capacity caps. Many states cap net metering at a fixed amount of total enrolled capacity, and once a utility hits it, the program closes to new applicants — even though the state "has" net metering on paper. Maryland set a 3,000-megawatt statewide cap; as of the Public Service Commission's November 2025 annual report, the pending project pipeline plus installed capacity had already reached roughly 4,500 megawatts, and the PSC expects the cap to bind within about two years absent legislative action. Two competing bills in the 2026 session would raise the cap to 6,000 MW or create a successor program once the limit hits. Massachusetts runs separate "public" and "private" caps per utility, and either one can close independently of the other.
Grandfathering rules that vary by utility, not state. Illinois's 2021 Climate and Energy Jobs Act moved new residential customers to supply-only credit starting January 1, 2025 — but existing systems keep full retail credit for the life of the system, unless the system is modified enough to require a new interconnection agreement (ComEd's trigger) or the nameplate capacity more than doubles (Ameren's trigger). Two different utilities, two different rules for losing grandfathered status, same state law.
Co-ops and municipal utilities are frequently exempt. Illinois's net metering statute applies to investor-owned utilities regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission; electric cooperatives and municipal utilities aren't classified as public utilities under the relevant statute and may not be bound by the same rules at all. This pattern repeats nationally — "yes, this state has net metering" can be false for a third of a state's residents depending on who their utility is.
The rename to watch for
When you see "net billing," "value of distributed energy resources" (New York's VDER), or "distributed generation compensation" instead of "net metering," read it as a signal, not a synonym. States rarely announce "we're cutting your export rate by three-quarters." They announce a new tariff with a new name. California's shift from NEM 2.0 to the Net Billing Tariff (branded NEM 3.0) in April 2023 cut average export credit from roughly $0.30/kWh to $0.05–$0.08/kWh — a real reduction of around 75% — while keeping full retail value for anything you use inside the house. New York's VDER and Minnesota's value-of-solar tariff are older, less punitive versions of the same relabeling.
Legal wildcards still in motion (mid-2026)
A few states are actively contested right now, which matters if you're deciding whether to lock in current rules before they move again:
California. The Supreme Court of California unanimously ordered reconsideration of a challenge to NEM 3.0 in August 2025; the case was remanded to the Court of Appeal, with briefs refiled in November 2025 and a ruling expected sometime in mid-2026. NEM 3.0 remains the law while that plays out — don't wait for a reversal that hasn't happened.
Maryland. The two 2026 bills described above were both pending as of this writing; neither had passed.
Virginia. Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power have active proceedings before the State Corporation Commission seeking to change compensation for new net metering customers. Nothing is finalized. Treat any "Virginia is ending net metering" headline as premature until the SCC actually rules.
Arizona. The Arizona Corporation Commission opened a docket in October 2023 to explore cutting export compensation by more than 10% below the state's already-reduced 2017 rate. As of the most recent public tracking, no decision has been issued.
How to actually check your status
Skip the 50-state table entirely and do this instead:
- Look up your specific utility's tariff, not your state's law. Search "[your utility name] net metering tariff filing" — PUC dockets and utility tariff sheets are public record and dated.
- Ask whether the program has an aggregate capacity cap, and how close it is. Utilities running capacity-limited programs typically publish enrolled capacity versus the cap in annual PUC filings or on a public dashboard.
- Confirm whether co-ops and munis in your area follow the same rules as the state's investor-owned utilities. Frequently, they don't.
- Check the interconnection application date that locks your rate, not the date your system goes live. Several states, including California and Illinois, use the application or interconnection-agreement date as the grandfathering cutoff, and processing lag can push your live date weeks or months later.
- Cross-reference DSIRE (dsireinsight.com) and your state PUC's site. DSIRE is among the most consistently updated trackers available, but it still lags legislative and rate-case changes by weeks.
The honest verdict
Net metering isn't disappearing nationally — it's fragmenting. States and utilities aren't voting up-or-down on whether solar customers get paid for exports; each is independently deciding how much, under what cap, and starting when. A flat "does my state have net metering" answer increasingly means nothing without four follow-up questions: which utility, what capacity is left, what the program is actually called this year, and what date you applied. If a quote or article gives you a state-level answer without those details, it's describing last year's rules — or somebody else's utility.