Solar panel price per watt by market

In short: Before tax, the median single rooftop module in our live shop offers costs 0.168 EUR/W across all markets. By country the medians are Poland 0.146, Germany 0.177, Italy 0.190 and the United States 0.383 EUR/W. The market table also gives the band holding the middle half of each country's offers, so you can see whether the gap between two countries is bigger than the spread between shops inside one.

Shops print a price per module, and modules differ in power, so comparing two listings means dividing one number by the other in your head. Price per watt does that division for every listing at once. It also answers something no single shop can: what a watt of module costs in different countries right now.

What price per watt measures

Price per watt is the module price divided by its rated power. A 450 W module at 90 EUR costs 0.20 EUR/W; a 500 W module at 95 EUR costs 0.19 EUR/W, so the dearer listing is the cheaper watt. The watt is the rating at standard test conditions, the number in the product name.

The question here is narrow. Among single rooftop modules for sale today, what is the typical price per watt before tax in each market, and how wide is the range inside each one? It isn't the price of a finished installation, which adds mounting, inverter, cabling and labour. And it isn't a forecast.

Module prices have fallen a long way over the decades, as the long-run world average below shows. That chart stops in 2021 and averages the whole world, so treat it as background.

Where the prices come from

Our crawler reads the product pages of shops in several countries for the live offers list. So these are the shops' own asking prices, read one listing at a time.

From the 6,576 offers filed as solar panels, I dropped pallets and multipacks (687 offers), because their price covers many modules at once; pallet or single module covers what they save. I kept single modules of 400 to 800 W with a price (2,714 offers), the size class sold for roofs. Then I dropped prices that can't be real. That leaves 2,685 offers from 117 shops in 18 markets. The exact rules are under "Figures and denominators" below the article.

Each price is the shop's own figure with tax taken off, converted to euro at the European Central Bank's reference rate for the day the offer was read. Taking tax off is what makes markets comparable, because VAT rates differ between countries and sometimes between buyers in one country.

Price per watt across all markets

Across every market, the median rooftop module costs 0.168 EUR/W before tax. Half of all offers fall between 0.145 and 0.220 EUR/W. The chart shows the whole distribution.

Price per watt by country

The table splits the same pool by market, and lists only countries with at least five shops in it. The other markets count in the overall figures, but with a handful of shops a market's figure is just those shops' price list. Read the median first, then the middle-half band, which runs from the 25th to the 75th percentile. The last two columns say how much each row rests on.

How to read the bands

Put two markets' bands side by side. Where one market's band contains the other market's median, the gap between the two medians is smaller than the spread between shops inside that band, and the shop you pick matters more than the country. Where the bands don't touch, the country itself is part of the price.

Then look at each band on its own. If the 75th percentile sits much further above the median than the 25th sits below it, the market has a tail of dear listings above a tighter core of cheaper ones.

Where one market sits apart, this data shows the gap but can't explain it. A listing prints one price, and nothing in it says how much is the module, the import duty, the freight or the shop's margin.

Two real modules and their prices

A median is easier to picture with a product behind it. I picked these two by a rule: among modules we could match to our catalogue, the ones quoted in the most markets when I wrote this, with ties going to the module with more offers. Nobody paid for a place here.

The module that was quoted in the most markets:

The runner-up under the same rule:

The cheapest current offers for the first one, each in the shop's own currency and on the side of VAT the shop printed. Its module page has the full list.

Cheapest current offers for JA Solar JAM54D40-470/LR, prices read 9 Oct 2026.

Each price is the figure the shop printed, on its own side of VAT.

For the same pool split by module power instead of by market, see which power class is cheapest per watt.

What this means when you buy

Tax decides what you pay

Every figure above is before tax, and you'll usually pay tax. In Germany, the VAT Act sets a zero rate for modules supplied to the operator of a system on or near a home, and treats any system up to 30 kWp as meeting that condition. In our German pool, 193 of 233 offers were listed at a zero VAT rate.

Elsewhere the rate depends on the country, and the gross price sits above the net figure in the table by that rate. Gross or net shows which shops print prices with VAT and which without, market by market. The same module, different shop measures how far apart shops are on one and the same module.

Modules are a minority of a rooftop system's cost

Take a 6 kWp array and two example prices, 0.15 and 0.38 EUR/W:

Fraunhofer ISE puts the total investment for a small rooftop system in Germany (up to 30 kWp) at 1,000 to 2,000 EUR per kWp, so 6,000 to 12,000 EUR for this array. Against the lowest total, the modules are 900 / 6,000 = 15 % at the lower price and 2,280 / 6,000 = 38 % at the higher one. Each cent per watt is 0.01 × 6,000 = 60 EUR on this array, between 0.5 % and 1 % of the total.

The same study put the lowest net wholesale price for crystalline modules in Germany in the fourth quarter of 2023 at 270 EUR per kWp, which is 0.27 EUR/W. You can hold it against the German row above, as long as you remember the table holds today's retail asking prices and the study a 2023 wholesale one. The levelized cost of electricity of a home system follows the whole investment, so it moves less than the module price does.

Compare within one market, per watt, on the same tax basis

A cheap listing with a lower power rating can cost more per watt than a dearer one with a higher rating. Divide the net price by the rated watts, and check whether the shop printed the price with or without VAT; our offers list marks that next to every price. If you know your roof, the roof-fit selector finds the module sizes that fit it and prints the cheapest offer we hold for each.

Type in the offers you're weighing and the figure below ranks them that way, against the market median before tax.

A higher price per watt can still pay back

What a watt earns depends on where it sits. A sunny site has a higher specific yield than a cloudy northern one, so the same price per watt buys a different return in different places.

To see what a given price means for your own payback, put it into the solar payback calculator. I would do that before chasing the last cent per watt.

What these figures cannot tell you

These are asking prices. A shop may sell below its listed price to installers or for larger orders, and we only see what the product page shows. Shipping isn't included.

Prices move every day, and so does the pool. New shops get added, so a market's figure next month may rest on a different set of shops. A currency swing also shifts a non-euro market's figures without any shop changing a price.

Every offer counts once, so a shop with a long catalogue weighs more in its market's median than a shop with five listings. In a small market one shop can hold much of the pool, which is why the table prints offer and shop counts next to every median.

Power comes from the listing, not from our catalogue: the rated power is the figure the shop printed. The 400 to 800 W window and the price sanity range catch the worst parsing errors, not every one.