Australia’s rooftop solar fleet has continued its strong growth, reaching a total of 28.3 GW of installed capacity by the end of 2025, spread across around 4.3 million systems nationwide. New figures from the Clean Energy Council’s (CEC) latest Rooftop Solar and Storage Report show households and businesses added 2.6 GW of new small-scale solar during 2025, including 1.5 GW in the final six months of the year.
The CEC reports that 139,080 rooftop solar systems were installed between July and December 2025, bringing the year’s total to 254,664 units.
Rooftop PV’s share of electricity generation also continued its upward trend, accounting for 14.2% of total supply in the second half of the year, up from 13.4% over the same period in 2024.
CEC Chief Executive Jackie Trad described the scale of Australia’s rooftop solar build-out as a “national triumph”, noting that aggregated small-scale solar capacity has now overtaken the output of the entire coal-fired fleet, which stands at 22.5 GW.
“Our biggest power station now sits on the rooftops of more than 4.3 million homes,” Trad said. “It not only leads Australia’s transition to renewables but is also unmatched globally on a per-capita basis.”
While total capacity continued to rise, installation numbers dipped 15% compared with 2024, when just over 300,000 systems were added. The CEC says the slowdown indicates the market is approaching saturation and households are increasingly turning their attention to energy storage.
“This is the first year since 2020 that rooftop PV installations have not exceeded 300,000,” the report notes. “It suggests we have passed the peak for new rooftop solar systems as consumer demand shifts towards small-scale batteries.”
Trad said a suite of government incentives – including the federal government’s $7.3 billion Cheaper Home Batteries program, introduced on 1 July – has dramatically accelerated household storage uptake.
“Battery uptake has been extraordinary, with installations more than doubling in just one year,” she said. “Australians installed as many home batteries in the final six months of last year as they did in the preceding five years combined.”
A record 183,245 batteries were added in the second half of 2025, a four-fold jump on the same period in 2024. That six-month figure alone is equal to 99% of all battery sales recorded between 2020 and 2024, lifting the total number of household battery systems to 454,753 by year’s end.
The CEC said the rapid expansion of the small-scale market has outpaced expectations, with rooftop solar capacity now on track to exceed the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) 2030 projections by around 1 GW. AEMO’s 2024 Integrated System Plan forecasts distributed solar to reach 36.1 GW in the National Electricity Market by 2029–30.
Meeting that forecast would require an annual average of 2.5 GW of new rooftop PV from 2023–24 onwards. Over the past five years, the NEM has averaged 2.7 GW each year.