Two kinds of panel go on French roofs and people mix them up constantly, so let us start there.
Photovoltaïque panels make electricity. Thermique panels make hot water. They look similar from the road, they cost very different amounts, and they are worth very different things to you. When someone says "solar panels" in France they almost always mean the photovoltaic sort.
And something important changed in June that most English-language advice has not caught up with: France has cut the support for domestic solar very hard. If you read an article from last year telling you panels pay for themselves in ten years, that article is out of date.
Here is where it actually stands.
What changed in June 2026
Two things, in the same decree, signed on 1 June and in force from 5 June 2026.
The self-consumption grant was abolished. The prime à l'autoconsommation used to pay you a lump sum for installing panels — €80 per kWc for a domestic system in the months before it went. For new applications there is now nothing.
The price paid for your surplus collapsed. Electricity you generate but do not use is sold to the grid under a twenty-year contract. That rate fell from about 4 cents a kWh to 1.1 cents. It still rises 2% a year, and it is still guaranteed for twenty years, but it is roughly a quarter of what it was.
There are two bits of good news in the detail. Existing contracts are untouched — if you already have panels, nothing changes for you. And anyone whose connection application was complete before 5 June 2026 keeps the old terms.
One more rule worth knowing: for a domestic system of 9 kWc or less you can no longer sell your whole production. Self-consumption with surplus sale is the only option.
The practical effect of all this is simple and it governs everything below. Panels now pay you by saving you from buying electricity, not by selling it. At 1.1 cents, exporting is close to pointless. At around 20 cents a kWh, using your own is worth about eighteen times more.
The one subsidy that survived, and it is a good one
VAT on domestic photovoltaic dropped to 5.5% on 1 October 2025, from 20%, for systems up to 9 kWc. On a €14,000 job that is around €2,000 saved, and unlike most French home-energy help it does not depend on your income and does not require the house to be two years old. New builds qualify.
The catch is that the panels themselves must meet a specification set out in a 2025 order — limits on the carbon footprint of the modules, on the silver in the cells, and on lead and cadmium — and the system must include an energy manager that tracks production and consumption in real time and shifts appliances to use your own power. Any serious installer quoting in France knows this. Ask them to confirm in writing that the quote is at 5.5%.
The four things people mean by "solar"
Photovoltaic panels make electricity. This is the main event and the rest of this article is mostly about them. A domestic system is usually 3 to 9 kWc — roughly six to eighteen panels.
**Solar thermal, a *chauffe-eau solaire***, makes hot water and nothing else. Two and a half to three square metres of collector and a 250 to 300 litre cylinder suits a family of four, and in the west of France it covers around 55 to 65% of a year's hot water. Installed, expect €5,500 to €7,000.
Be careful with this one. There is grant money for it, but MaPrimeRénov' is income-tested — nothing at all for higher incomes — and it requires a house more than two years old. If you are building new, or you are not on a modest income, you will pay the full price and the payback stretches past fifteen years. And if your house already has a thermodynamic hot water cylinder, as every house we build does, a solar water heater is doing a job that is already being done.
**Hybrid or aérovoltaïque panels** make electricity and blow warm air from behind the panels into the house. They are heavily marketed in France, often door to door, at prices far above ordinary panels. Treat any unsolicited offer with real suspicion.
Solar tiles are photovoltaic cells made to look like roof tiles. They look far better, they cost two to three times as much per unit of power, and they are usually the answer when a planning officer will not accept panels on a visible roof.
What installing actually involves
The physical work is a day or two on the roof. The paperwork is four to six months, and that surprises people.
A déclaration préalable at the mairie. Panels on a roof are a change to the appearance of the building, so the commune has to be told. Allow about a month. If the mairie does not reply in time, silence counts as consent.
Longer, if you are near a listed building. Anything within 500 metres of a monument historique goes to the Architecte des Bâtiments de France, and where your roof can be seen in the same view as the monument, their opinion is binding, not advisory. Allow two to three months. Most applications do get through, but this is where solar tiles sometimes become the only option — and it is worth checking before you buy a plot if panels matter to you.
A Consuel certificate, which is the electrical safety sign-off and is required before you can be connected. Around €140, about three weeks, and your installer files it.
A connection agreement with Enedis. For the normal case — self-consumption with surplus, and a Linky meter already fitted — this costs around €50. Other configurations can run to several hundred. Tick the box for the EDF OA purchase contract in the same application.
What a roof in Brittany or Normandy actually produces
This is where the north of France has to be honest with itself.
A kilowatt-peak of panels in Brittany produces roughly 950 to 1,100 kWh a year. Brest is at the bottom of that range, Lorient and Vannes near the top. The Vendée does better, as it does with everything involving the sun. The south of France does better still, which is why so much French solar advice reads optimistically to anyone living on the Atlantic coast.
So a 6 kWc system — a common domestic size, costing somewhere around €13,000 to €14,500 installed — generates about 6,300 kWh a year in Brittany.
The honest arithmetic
Take that 6 kWc system. What it is worth to you depends almost entirely on one number: how much of those 6,300 kWh you use yourself rather than exporting.
Without much thought, a household uses about 40% of what it makes — the rest is generated at midday when everybody is out. That is about 2,500 kWh saved, worth around €520 a year at today's prices, plus about €40 for the exported surplus. Call it €560. Against €13,500, that is a payback somewhere around twenty-four years.
With the system working for you — the hot water cylinder timed to run at midday, the washing machine and dishwasher on daytime timers, a car charged at home, an energy manager doing the shifting automatically — self-consumption of 70% is achievable. That is 4,400 kWh saved, around €925 a year. Payback drops to roughly fifteen years.
Those are illustrative figures, not a quotation, and they move with the price of electricity. But the shape of them is the point: the same panels on the same roof can take fifteen years or twenty-five to pay back, and the difference is not the roof. It is whether the house is set up to use what the roof makes.
Add a battery and self-consumption rises further, typically to 70-80%. Batteries also cost several thousand euros and have a finite number of cycles in them, so at the moment they usually extend the payback rather than shorten it. That may change. It has not changed yet.
So are they worth it?
Our honest answer, for a new house in Brittany, Normandy or the Vendée.
As an investment, no. Fifteen to twenty-five years to break even, on equipment with an inverter that will want replacing somewhere in the middle of that, is not a financial product. Anybody presenting it as one — particularly anybody who knocked on your door — is selling, not advising.
As a hedge, often yes. You are fixing part of your electricity cost for twenty-five years. If you believe power is going to get dearer, and most people do, that has a value the arithmetic above does not capture.
As a way of running a house, yes, if the house suits it. A south-facing roof at around 30 degrees, somebody at home during the day, an electric car, a pool, a heat pump — the more of those you have, the better it gets. A holiday home that sits empty from October to Easter is the worst case: you generate in summer when nobody is there, and export it at 1.1 cents.
And one practical point for anyone building: if you are at all likely to want panels later, say so while the plans are being drawn. Getting the roof orientation right, running the cable route at first fix and leaving space in the consumer unit costs almost nothing at the time, and makes a later installation straightforward instead of awkward.
Where we stand on it
Every house we build is RE2020 and carries a DPE A rating, with a reversible heat pump and a thermodynamic hot water cylinder as standard. That is already a very low running cost — our owners generally report heating costs around €35 a month — and it is why we do not fit solar as standard. On a well-insulated new house there is simply less left to save than there is on an old stone longère with electric radiators.
Panels remain a sensible option on top of that, and we are happy to price them into a build or to prepare the roof so you can add them in five years. What we will not do is tell you they pay for themselves in ten years, because since June they do not.
You can see the full specification of what is included as standard on our how we build page, and our free guide goes through the running costs of a new French house in detail — download it here, there is nothing to pay. Current house and land packages are listed with all-in prices.
Tariffs, grants and VAT rules checked in October 2026, and this is an area that has changed twice in a year. We are builders, not an energy adviser: use this to ask the right questions of an installer rather than as a substitute for a quotation.