How much do solar panels for holiday lets cost?

Every figure on this page is an indicative scoping range, not a quote. Real cost depends on your roof, your hot tub, your heating, whether guests charge EVs, and whether you add a battery. Holiday-let sizing is driven by two things a normal domestic quote ignores: the seasonal occupancy curve and the hot tub. Because your busiest, highest-earning months of April to October are also your sunniest, in-season self-consumption is naturally high, so we size to your in-season daytime baseload of the highest-value loads first, hot tub, hot-water and laundry re-heat at changeover, and any guest EV charging, rather than to an annualised average.

Cost per kW by system size

As a rough guide, small domestic-scale systems for a single cottage or lodge run around £1,400 to £2,000 per kW installed, falling toward roughly £900 to £1,400 per kW at small-commercial park scale where the array is larger and the fixed costs spread further. A battery adds cost but is usually where the return comes from on a holiday let, because the defining loads (the hot tub, evening hot-water re-heat and evening guest EV charging) largely fall outside peak sun and need midday generation stored and released after dark. These per-kW figures are modelled from commercial cost-per-kW assumptions scaled to domestic size, not from a holiday-let quote database.

Indicative cost by property type

A single self-catering cottage with a hot tub is indicatively a 4 to 8 kW array plus a 5 to 10 kWh battery, around £7,000 to £16,000, with an indicative payback of roughly 7 to 11 years. A premium lodge or cabin, which tends to run its hot tub harder and increasingly offers EV charging, is indicatively 5 to 10 kW plus a 5 to 13 kWh battery, around £9,000 to £20,000. A glamping site, frequently on a weak or non-existent grid supply, is indicatively 3 to 15 kW of PV plus battery (and sometimes a small backup generator), around £10,000 to £45,000 depending on storage, and its economics are weighed not against a grid bill but against the cost and lead time of a DNO grid extension, which solar-plus-battery often beats outright. A small self-catering park, taking a site-wide array across reception, an amenity or shower block and the cottages or lodges, is indicatively 15 to 50 kW, around £22,000 to £70,000. The cards below summarise the ranges by sub-type.

The hot tub is the swing factor

The single biggest variable in a holiday-let payback is the hot tub. A cottage without one looks like a modest domestic system on a long payback. Add a season-long hot-tub load of roughly 2 to 3 kW, kept hot and filtered for back-to-back guests, plus a battery to time-shift it, and self-consumption, and therefore return, rise sharply. Guest EV charging pushes the case further still, because daytime charging absorbs solar at near-100% self-consumption. This is why we model your payback both with and without a battery, and overlay your occupancy calendar on the generation curve, so you can see the seasonal match before committing.

Financing and the April 2025 tax change

Most owners pay by capital purchase or with asset finance spread over the system's life. The important point on financing is a tax one, and it changed. The Furnished Holiday Lettings regime, which let holiday lets claim capital allowances (including the Annual Investment Allowance) on plant such as solar, was abolished from 6 April 2025 (1 April 2025 for companies). If you hold the property personally you can no longer write the panels down as plant and machinery; only Replacement of Domestic Items Relief applies, and that is for furnishings, not solar. If the let is held in a limited company, solar may still be qualifying plant and the company may be able to use the Annual Investment Allowance, but only where the company and its activity qualify. We are not tax advisers and we quote no allowance figures as current fact, please take your own tax advice and speak to your accountant. See our grants and funding page for the SEG, VAT and OZEV detail.

What else affects the price

Beyond the array and battery, budget for the things that vary site to site: the DNO connection (a straightforward G98 notification for the smallest cottage arrays, or a G99 application and, at park scale, a half-hourly meter read for larger systems), scaffolding and access on older stone barns and coastal properties, any roof repair or strengthening a survey turns up, and a coastal salt-resistant specification where the property is near the sea. Planning is usually permitted development, but not on a highway-facing roof in a conservation area, and listed cottages and barns always need Listed Building Consent, which can add time rather than much cost. On the income side, the Smart Export Guarantee pays for surplus you export in the quiet off-season, which for a seasonal let is a meaningful part of the return.