You've seen the ad. Twenty-four cents a unit for the power your panels push back to the grid. That rate is real. Here's the bit they leave off the poster: it's paid at 7am and again at 6pm, when your roof is dark or barely awake. The rate that actually lands on your bill is the quiet one underneath. On some plans it's as low as 8c.
Powerswitch, run by Consumer NZ, lists Contact Energy's home buy-back at 8c a unit. That is the lowest in the country. And it matters more than the headline, because a solar home sends most of its power to the grid in the middle of the day, when the sun is high and the house is empty. So that quiet 8c, not the 24c on the ad, is what your roof actually earns.
What actually changed on 1 July 2026
Since 1 July 2026, the four biggest retailers have had to offer a plan where the export rate changes through the day. The Electricity Authority wrote the rule. It decided it in July 2025 and spelled out what retailers must do in December.
Here is the important part. The rule sets the shape of the price, not the level. Retailers can put the peaks and troughs wherever they like, and there is no floor. A retailer could offer a 4c peak and a 3c off-peak and still tick the box. That makes the headline peak rate the most valuable thing a power company can advertise, and the one number you cannot check.
One more wrinkle worth knowing. Export is treated as its own plan. A retailer can run a tidy time-of-use plan for the power you buy and still drag its feet on the power you sell.
The big four own 87% of the country
Four retailers, Mercury, Genesis, Contact and Meridian, hold 87% of New Zealand's power connections between them: Mercury on 25%, Genesis 22%, Contact 20%, Meridian just under 20%. The rule bites at 5% of the market, so those four are in. Everyone smaller is out.
The logo wall will not tell you who is who. Frank is Genesis. Powershop is Meridian. Glo-Bug is Mercury. Flick is gone: Meridian bought its book in 2025. The market quietly bunched up right before a rule that only touches the big players.
Here is the sting. The two retailers that pay the best, Ecotricity and Octopus, both sit under the 5% line. So the rule meant to improve export pricing does not apply to the two already doing it best.
Every rate in the country, side by side
Nobody puts every retailer's peak, off-peak and window on a single screen. So we did. This is live from our own registry, and dated.
Buy-back conditions
Contact Energy
Contact publishes the Good Charge peak window (7am to 9am and 6pm to 10pm weekdays, for battery-and-solar customers) but not the peak rate: it prices by address, so there is no national figure to print, and your export rate is set when you register your solar. Powerswitch lists Contact's residential buy-back at 8c/kWh, the lowest here. So the 25c peak quoted all over the internet is a national number for a retailer that does not have one.
Buy-back conditions
Ecotricity
ecoSOLAR pays 21c/kWh peak and 16c/kWh off-peak on Ecotricity's own page. The peak WINDOW is not published, and neither is the GST basis. The off-peak rate is the strongest here, which matters more than the headline for a household without a battery.
Buy-back conditions
Electric Kiwi
Sources disagree and we will not pick one. Electric Kiwi's own solar page advertises a 23c/kWh buy-back and quotes 11.5c/kWh off-peak (incl GST). Its Powerswitch profile says MoveMaster pays 20c/kWh peak (weekdays 7 to 9am, 5 to 9pm) and 10c/kWh off-peak, and that the Everyday and GO250 plans pay 8c/kWh. Ask for the number in writing before you switch.
Buy-back conditions
Frank Energy
Flat 12.5c/kWh, and Frank's own FAQ says the credit is shown before GST. If you are not GST-registered you are not making a taxable supply, so 12.5c is what lands on the bill: the 15% is added only for GST-registered customers, via a buyer-created tax invoice.
Buy-back conditions
Genesis Energy
Genesis's Powerswitch profile states a flat 12.5c/kWh excluding GST for home and business connections, the same rate as its Frank brand. Paid at one rate all day: no peak window to chase.
Buy-back conditions
Mercury
Two plans. The flat plan pays 11.1c/kWh. The Flex plan is seasonal AND time-of-use: winter (1 May to 30 Sep) 20.38c peak and 15.75c off-peak; summer (1 Oct to 30 Apr, the seven months a roof exports most) 10.44c peak and 9.17c off-peak. Peak is 7 to 11am and 5 to 9.30pm. The 9.17c shown here is the rate that applies for most of the hours a roof actually exports. Rates exclude GST. A further 6.9c/kWh for two years is available if you install through one particular installer: that is an installer arrangement, not a plan rate, and it is deliberately not folded into the rate above.
Buy-back conditions
Meridian Energy
15c/kWh year-round on the open-term Freedom and Night Saver plans, lifting to 24c/kWh in the winter peak windows only (7 to 10am and 5 to 9pm, July to September, weekdays). Exports bill at 15c and the extra 9c arrives as a separate credit; you need a communicating smart meter to get it. Fixed-term plans, including EV, get a flat 12c. Meridian's page says rates do not include GST.
Buy-back conditions
Octopus Energy
The Peaker plan pays 23c/kWh peak and 10c/kWh off-peak (peak: 7 to 11am and 5 to 9pm, weekdays). Octopus says on its own page that you are unlikely to make the most of the peak rate without a battery. The standard OctopusFlexi plan is 19c peak and 14c off-peak. Both are lower on the Northpower and Top Energy networks (Peaker 21c/8c, Flexi 17c/12c), so these are not national numbers. Powerswitch lists Flexi as a flat 17c: the two sources disagree and we have used Octopus's own page.
Most peak windows miss the sun
The high rate is only paid in these hours, and most land before or after your roof is generating.
Now line that up with the sun. The morning window catches a low sun and a house waking up and using its own power, so barely anything reaches the meter. The evening window is worse: the sun is gone and demand is peaking, so a home without a battery has, most evenings, nothing to sell into its best-paying hours. And most of these windows are weekday-only. That is 104 days a year, every weekend, with no peak rate at all. Octopus is the one exception. Its 7 to 11am window catches genuine generation from 9am on.
The 25c nobody can show you
Contact's Good Charge plan is quoted all over the internet at 25c peak. We went looking for it, and the hunt turned out to be the story.
Contact's own solar page mentions "a higher buy back rate during peak usage times" for homes "running battery and solar". It publishes the window, not the rate. The Good Charge page does the same, then points you at an address checker.
And that is the catch: the only rate on offer is whatever the address checker returns once you enter a specific property, and even then Contact publishes no export rate to go with it. There is no single Good Charge number you can look up and compare before you commit.
And here is the part that matters more than the missing number. Contact prices by address. There is no national Contact rate to publish, which makes the 25c doing the rounds a national number for a retailer that does not have one. Powerswitch lists one figure for Contact: 8c. That is what is on the record, and the export rate itself is only set once you register your solar with Contact.
We are not saying Contact never pays 25c to anyone. We are saying nobody can show you the number before you sign. A rate you cannot check is not a rate you can shop on.
The highest peaks we could actually verify: Meridian's 24c winter peak, Octopus's 23c on Peaker, and Ecotricity's 21c. Every one of them a window rate.
What each headline is actually worth
The headline peak rate is not what fills the windows. A house without a battery exports what its roof makes above what it is using, overwhelmingly between 9am and 4pm. Only a sliver falls in the morning and evening peaks, and there is no peak rate on weekends anyway. Work it through and only about 4% of your exported power lands at peak. It is an estimate, not a measurement, but the conclusion holds even if we are well off.
Run every plan through that 4% and the headlines fall apart. Here is the whole field, scaled to a 6.6 kW array making 9,000 units a year, keeping 40% for yourself and exporting the other 5,400.
Octopus Peaker's big 23c realises just 10.5c, two-thirds of what Ecotricity's humbler 21c pays, because Peaker is really a battery plan. Contact's peak is not published, so a home without a battery earns near its 8c off-peak; even a 25c peak, if it exists, would only lift that to about 8.7c. Meridian's 24c runs July to September only, arrives as a separate 9c credit on top of 15c, and needs a smart meter that can talk back. And watch Mercury Flex: its seasons run backwards, with a 10.44c summer peak below its 15.75c winter off-peak, and "summer" runs October to April, exactly when your roof exports most. Where retailers and Powerswitch disagree, we have published the range.
The gap between best and worst is about $443 a year, and the headline peak is not what moves it. That is worth roughly ten times a 1c change in the import rate, so for a decent-sized system the export rate is what actually moves your bill. Compare two retailers on the net, not the headline: import cost minus export credit, on your own export volume. A retailer paying 16c off-peak with a 36c import beats one paying 8c off-peak with a 32c import, by about $267 a year, because it pays properly for what you export.
One number to be sceptical of while you are at it: a salesperson telling you a unit you use yourself saves you 42c. That 42c is MBIE's national average, a modelled figure with the daily fixed charge baked into the cents. You save your variable rate, not that. Inflating it is one of the oldest tricks in solar sales. Most retailers quote buy-back before GST, and if you are not GST-registered the number you see is the number you get, so ask how many cents will actually show up as a credit on your bill.
If you have a battery, use your power, do not sell it
Here is where the marketing pushes you the wrong way. A battery fills up midday and you get a choice: sell that stored power into the evening peak, or use it yourself when you would otherwise be buying from the grid. The ads want you to sell. The maths says use it.
Sell it and Peaker pays 23c at peak instead of 10c, so you are 13c a unit ahead on the roughly 250 weekday-window days a year: call it $260. Use it yourself and you dodge a 30c evening import instead of earning 10c, so you are 20c ahead on about 350 days: call it $560. Using your own power wins by around $300 a year, and that is on the plan with the highest verified peak in the country. On every plan we could see, the peak export rate sits below the peak import it would replace. (Those import rates are illustrative and depend on your address, so use your own bill.)
Your battery also spills plenty outside the windows, every weekend, all summer, every day it fills by 11am, and that power is paid the 8c to 10c off-peak. And the person the headline serves worst is the most common of all: no battery, switching on a peak rate whose page, in Contact's case, does not even print the number.
Use your own power first. Our battery storage guide runs the sums.
If you're weighing up a battery
Three of the batteries most quoted in NZ. Compare the full specs in our independent tool.
Tesla
Powerwall 3
Big power, big name
- Usable capacity
- 13.5 kWh
- Warranty
- 10 yrs
- Indicative price
- $19,000
BYD
HVM 8.3
Punchy modular
- Usable capacity
- 8.28 kWh
- Warranty
- 10 yrs
- Indicative price
- $9,500
Sungrow
SBR HV 9.6
Quiet achiever
- Usable capacity
- 9.6 kWh
- Warranty
- 10 yrs
- Indicative price
- $11,500
One last thing solar will not fix: your daily fixed charge. Solar cuts your units, not the fixed line, and that charge is about to climb. The low-user cap rises to $1.80 a day before GST on 1 April 2026, then on 1 April 2027 it goes entirely, in MBIE's words power companies "are no longer required to offer customers a low fixed charge". Solar households, usually under the low-user threshold, feel it hardest. How many kilowatts your lines company lets you export in the first place is a separate question that varies across all 30 networks: we mapped it in the grid access scorecard.
Five questions to ask before you switch
- Ask for the pair, not the headline. If they give you one number, you have your answer.
- Ask for the window, in hours and in days. A rate paid from 6 to 10pm is a battery rate, not a solar rate.
- Ask whether it is weekday-only. Most are. That is 104 days a year with no headline rate.
- Ask what basis it is quoted on, and how many cents land on the bill. Half the market does not say. Get it in writing.
- Compare the net, on your own export volume. Import cost minus export credit, for the units you actually export.
And the move that makes all five matter less: use more of what you make.
Where we've corrected this page
Hands up: we got a couple of things wrong the first time and fixed them in the open. An overstated Mercury rate, a few dead links, and a 25c Contact peak we could not actually find. The top number here is now Meridian's 24c.
Every rate was read on 14 July 2026 from the retailer's page or Powerswitch, linked below. If you are a retailer and we have misread you, or you publish a rate we said you did not, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page. We would rather be corrected than be right.
Keep reading
Sources
Regulator and government
- Time-varying price plan requirements: Retailer Guidance, 3 December 2025 (PDF, 37 pages), Electricity Authority
- Improving pricing plan options for consumers, decision paper, 16 July 2025 (PDF), Electricity Authority
- Energy Competition Task Force, Electricity Authority
- Market share snapshot, active ICPs at 31 May 2026, Electricity Authority EMI
- Mid-point review of the phase-out of the Low Fixed Charge Regulations, MBIE
- Electricity cost and price monitoring: Quarterly Survey of Domestic Electricity Prices, report for 15 May 2026, MBIE
- Solar buy-back rates, Powerswitch, Consumer NZ
Retailer pages and profiles, all read on 14 July 2026
- Solar, Contact Energy. Publishes the Good Charge peak window, not the rate.
- Solar, Meridian Energy
- Solar, Mercury
- Solar and battery, Octopus Energy
- OctopusPeaker, Octopus Energy
- Solar, Electric Kiwi
- Solar, Ecotricity
- Solar buy-back export FAQ, Frank Energy
- Solar, Genesis Energy
- Solar buy-back, Nova Energy
- Retailer profiles on Powerswitch, Consumer NZ, for the Contact, Electric Kiwi, Genesis, Mercury, Meridian, Nova and Octopus buy-back entries quoted above
Market
- Ampol exiting retail electricity, Meridian takes on customers, Meridian Energy, 13 May 2025
- What went wrong for Flick, RNZ
compare.
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