Moving House With Solar
Moving House With Solar: How to Transfer Your SEG (and FiT) Without Losing a Payment
The short version
Moving home doesn’t cancel your export income, but paperwork gaps do. Sell with the panels and the FiT follows the installation — the buyer inherits it, and you must hand it over cleanly. Take the panels with you and both SEG and possibly FiT reset: new DNO application, new MCS certificate, new registration. Arrive at a house with panels and you’re entitled to that income from completion, if you register it. Three moves, three checklists, zero missed payments.
Almost nobody thinks about export income until the week before completion. Then three emails arrive at once: the buyer’s solicitor asking whose the solar payments are, your energy supplier asking for a final meter reading, and someone from a FiT administration team you’d half-forgotten existed. I’ve been untangling this exact knot for homeowners since the Feed-in Tariff launched in 2010, and here’s the reassuring part — no scheme cancels your income because you moved house. What loses people money is the gap between one registration ending and the next one starting. Here’s how to close that gap, in all three directions.
The three moving scenarios
Everything below follows from one distinction. FiT income is attached to the installation — accreditation sits with the system at its address, which is why it survives a change of owner. SEG income is attached to a registration — a contract between a licensee and whoever registered a specific installation at a specific MPAN. Once you hold that in your head, every moving situation collapses into one of three cases:
| Your situation | Feed-in Tariff | SEG | Biggest payment risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Selling with the panels staying | Transfers to the buyer with the installation; you complete change-of-ownership paperwork | Yours until completion, then closes; buyer registers afresh or takes over the account | FiT payments keep landing in your account after completion and get clawed back later |
| Taking the panels to the new house | At serious risk: accreditation is site-specific and the scheme closed in 2019 — confirm in writing first | Ends at the old address; the reinstalled system needs fresh MCS certification and a new registration | Paying four figures to move kit whose income stream dies in transit |
| Buying a house with panels | Yours from completion via change-of-beneficiary — if the seller starts the paperwork | Re-register the installation in your name; often a chance to upgrade the tariff | Months of unpaid exports while nobody registers the system |
One exclusion before we go further: if the panels are leased — the old rent-a-roof model where a third party owns the kit — none of this is yours to transfer. The lease follows the house and the income was never yours. Our guide to the ‘free’ solar panels that can stop you selling your house covers that situation, including the lender checks that catch people mid-sale.
Selling: what happens to the FiT
The FiT is the simpler of the two, once you accept its logic. Accreditation belongs to the installation, so when you sell the house with the panels on it, the tariff goes with them. The buyer becomes the beneficiary from completion and receives whatever is left of the original term — 25 years for solar accredited before 1 August 2012, 20 years after — still index-linked each April. From 1 April 2026 that indexation runs on CPI rather than RPI, with a 3.4% uplift this year; on a first-cohort system that puts the 2026/27 generation rate around 77p/kWh, per Ofgem’s published FiT tariff tables. That is a genuinely valuable asset changing hands, and it’s why the paperwork matters.
Your side of it is three jobs. Tell your FiT licensee you’re selling and request their change-of-ownership pack early — some administrators move at geological speed. Agree a completion-day generation meter reading with the buyer so the handover date is unambiguous. And finish the beneficiary transfer promptly, because until it lands, payments keep arriving in your name for electricity your buyer’s panels are generating. That money isn’t yours. Hold it separately, pass it over, and keep the correspondence; clawback letters arriving eight months after a house move are entirely self-inflicted.
Two nuances worth knowing. Export under the FiT was generally “deemed” at 50% of generation rather than metered, so the buyer inherits that arrangement too unless an export meter exists. And a FiT holder can opt out of the FiT export portion and take a SEG tariff for exports instead while keeping the generation payments — useful if the new home’s import supplier happens to run a strong export rate. Worth modelling before you assume the default is best.
️ Price it, don’t gift it
An early-cohort 4kWp system carries roughly £2,700 a year of index-linked FiT income for the buyer, on top of bill savings. Estate agents routinely describe this as “free solar” and price it at zero. It isn’t free, and it isn’t zero: it’s a transferable income stream with a calculable value, and it belongs in your asking-price conversation.
Selling: what happens to your SEG
SEG is a contract, not a property right, so it behaves like any other utility agreement: it ends when you leave. Give your supplier notice — up to about 14 days on many tariffs — timed so the closure lands on or just after completion. Take a final export reading (your smart meter’s half-hourly data does this cleanly) and keep the final statement. Anything exported between your reading and the closure is still yours; anything after completion belongs to the buyer, which is exactly the line the reading draws.
At the other end, your new home’s panels — if it has them — need a registration in your name. Here’s the bit that surprises people: SEG is completely decoupled from your import supplier. You can buy your electricity from one company and sell your exports to another, and the best rates usually sit with suppliers you don’t otherwise use. So moving is the natural moment to shop rather than roll over. Open, no-strings export tariffs paid around 3–6p/kWh in Which?’s April 2026 round-up, customer-tied fixed deals sat at 15p and above, and battery-linked time-of-use tariffs higher still — our 2026 ranking of the best SEG tariff rates has the live table and the eligibility small print.
What you’ll need to register: the installation’s MCS certificate number, the MPAN from your electricity bill, and a smart meter capable of half-hourly export readings — a SMETS2 in most cases. If the new property has no smart meter, book one early; it’s the long-lead item in this whole process.
Taking the panels with you
Sometimes the honest answer is “leave them”. Panels bolted to a roof are fixtures in UK property law, so they’re assumed to pass with the house unless your contract says otherwise — and a working system usually adds more to the sale price than it would earn you in the two years before it pays for its own relocation. But if the system is yours outright, unloved by the buyer, or genuinely well-matched to the new roof, moving it is a real option. Just go in with your eyes open, because three resets happen at once.
- The DNO reset. A reinstalled system needs a fresh grid notification (G98 or G99 depending on size and network) at the new address. The old approval doesn’t travel.
- The MCS reset. The original MCS certificate covers the installation as commissioned at the old address. The reinstalled system needs fresh certification from an MCS-certified installer willing to sign off second-hand kit — and not all of them will. No MCS certificate, no SEG eligibility, at all, ever, for that system.
- The FiT reset — the dangerous one. FiT accreditation is tied to the installation as commissioned at its original site, and the scheme closed to new applications on 1 April 2019, which leaves no route to re-accredit a relocated system. In practice most licensees treat a permanent move as ending the original accreditation. Before anyone unbolts a FiT-earning array, get written confirmation from your licensee of exactly what happens to the tariff. A first-cohort system left behind earning ~£2,700 a year is usually worth far more than the same panels re-erected and earning nothing.
Cost-wise, budget four figures once scaffolding, removal, new fixings and recommissioning enter the picture — our 2026 solar panel removal cost guide itemises every line, including the hidden ones installers forget to mention. Then compare that total against a fresh system at the new address: with 0% VAT running until 31 March 2027 and typical payback on a new 4kW install at 7–12 years, relocating 15-year-old kit rarely wins on pure maths. It wins on sentiment, on a perfect roof match, or when the FiT question doesn’t arise.
⚠️ The warranty footnote
Panel product warranties often survive a move; workmanship warranties usually don’t, because they belong to the original installer’s commissioning. Get whatever survives in writing before the rails come off, and check whether your insurer will cover the system in transit — most buildings policies stop at the roofline.
The completion-day checklist
- Four weeks out: open both files. Notify your FiT licensee and your SEG supplier of the move in writing. Request the change-of-ownership pack from the first and the closure/switch terms from the second. Ask whether the new address has a working SMETS2 smart meter.
- One week out: build the paperwork folder. MCS certificate, DNO notification reference, FiT statements showing the current tariff and end date, inverter and panel warranties, and a year of export or generation history. Photocopy or PDF the lot; the buyer’s solicitor will want it and so will your future self.
- Completion day: read everything. Photograph the FiT generation meter, the export meter or smart meter display, and the inverter’s lifetime total. These four images settle every apportionment argument before it starts.
- Completion day: sign the handover. Date the FiT change-of-beneficiary form to completion and send it the same week. Agree with the buyer who chases the licensee if it stalls — nominating one person avoids the classic scenario where both assume the other did it.
- First week in: close and open. Confirm your old SEG closure in writing and check the final statement against your completion reading. At the new home, register the system — inherited or reinstalled — with its MCS number, MPAN and smart meter, and shop the tariff before accepting whatever default you’re offered.
- Six weeks in: chase the first payments. FiT beneficiary change confirmed? Old SEG final payment received? New SEG first payment scheduled? Three yeses and you’re done. Any no becomes a complaint trail now, while dates are fresh, rather than a mystery next spring.
Arriving at a house with panels
The happiest version of moving with solar is doing no work at all and inheriting someone else’s. On completion, ask for three things: proof the panels are owned outright rather than leased, the MCS certificate, and the current export arrangement. If the seller was on the FiT, their change-of-beneficiary paperwork should name you from the completion date — chase it if they haven’t started, because the income is legally yours from the day you own the installation, but administrators can only pay the person on their records.
If the seller was on SEG, their registration can often be re-registered into your name at the same address — sometimes carrying the tariff across, more often moving you onto the current rate. Either way it’s a ten-minute job with the licensee, and it’s also your cue to compare: inherited tariffs are frequently the installer’s default from years back, sitting at 3–4p while better open rates and 15p-plus fixed deals exist elsewhere. You keep the import supplier you like and point the exports wherever pays.
And if the paperwork reveals a roof lease instead of ownership? Stop, and read the lease before you worry about tariffs. Our guide to buying a house with solar panels walks through the ownership checks, the lender handbook requirements and the documents to demand from the seller’s solicitor before exchange.
✅ The upgrade window
A move is the cheapest moment you’ll ever get to add storage: the scaffolding-free survey is done, the paperwork is already open, and 0% VAT on domestic battery installs runs until 31 March 2027. If the inherited system has no battery, time-of-use export tariffs become reachable, and our grants and VAT guide shows what else the new address qualifies for.
Timelines: what a gap actually costs
People imagine export income as pocket money, so they tolerate months of administrative limbo. Then they look at what scheme they’re on. The chart below is the argument I have most often in September, the peak of UK house-moving season: a one-month paperwork gap on a first-cohort FiT system costs about thirteen times what the same gap costs on a decent SEG tariff.
One month of export income at risk, by scheme
FiT bars use 2026/27 indexed rates (first cohort ~76.9p/kWh from Ofgem’s table; 2011–12 cohort ~39p, our estimate from the same indexation) plus deemed export at ~5.5p/kWh. SEG bars show 150 kWh exported in a month at a good customer-fixed rate and at the best open tariff in Which?’s April 2026 round-up.
Two timing rules fall out of this. First, FiT paperwork leads the move: start the beneficiary change a month before completion, because administrator delays are the one variable you can’t compress. Second, SEG registrations don’t generally pay for electricity exported before the application existed — a few suppliers backdate to the application date, almost none to the day you moved in — so register in your first week, not your first quiet weekend.
Four mistakes that cost real money
They belong to the buyer from the day the installation does. Licensees claw back overpayments with interest once the beneficiary change finally processes, which is usually after you’ve spent it. Ring-fence every payment dated after completion.
It doesn’t. The registration dies with the old MPAN, and exports at the new address are unpaid until someone registers them. The gap is silent — no bill arrives, nothing bounces — which is why people discover it a year later.
Accreditation is site-specific and the scheme closed in 2019, so relocation can extinguish a tariff worth thousands a year. One written confirmation from your licensee before any scaffolding goes up; that’s the whole prevention.
No MCS number, no SEG registration — for the life of the system, not just until you find the paperwork. It lives in the folder from step two of the checklist, ideally as a PDF in three places before the removal van is booked.
Frequently asked questions
Can I transfer my SEG tariff to my new house?
No — an SEG contract is tied to the installation and its MPAN, not to you personally. When you move, the old registration ends with the old address and the panels’ exports belong to whoever registers next. At the new home, you register the system there afresh with its MCS certificate number and a smart meter, and that’s your chance to pick a better tariff rather than rolling over whatever the seller was on.
What happens to FiT payments when I sell a house with solar panels?
They stay with the installation. FiT accreditation follows the system, so the buyer becomes the beneficiary from completion and receives the remaining index-linked payments until the original end date. Your job is to notify your FiT licensee and complete their change-of-ownership paperwork promptly; if payments keep landing in your account during the handover, they belong to the buyer, so keep them separate and pass them on.
Will I lose the FiT if I take my panels to my new house?
Very possibly, yes. FiT accreditation is tied to the installation as commissioned at its original address, and with the scheme closed to new applications since April 2019 there is no route to re-accredit a relocated system. Most licensees treat a permanent move as ending the original accreditation. Before unbolting any FiT-earning system, get written confirmation from your licensee — leaving the panels behind with the tariff intact is often worth more than moving the kit.
Move day is chaotic enough without an income stream going missing in the post. Do the FiT paperwork first, close the SEG cleanly on a reading, register the new address in week one, and keep the MCS certificate somewhere you’d keep the deeds. Boring, sequential, unglamorous — and worth several hundred pounds a year in payments that simply keep arriving.
