Grants and funding for solar panels for holiday lets

There is no single grant that pays for solar on a holiday let, but there is a set of real reliefs, export income and, at park scale, capital support worth understanding before you commit. The most important thing to say first is what changed, because the headline tax route holiday-let owners used to rely on has gone.

The April 2025 Furnished Holiday Lettings change, take your own tax advice

The Furnished Holiday Lettings (FHL) tax regime was abolished from 6 April 2025 for income tax and 1 April 2025 for corporation tax. Before then, holiday lets were treated like a trade and could claim capital allowances, including the Annual Investment Allowance, on plant and machinery such as solar PV. After abolition, personally-held lets are treated as an ordinary property business: they can no longer write solar down as plant and machinery, and only Replacement of Domestic Items Relief applies, which is for furnishings, not for solar. Transitional rules let existing capital-allowance pools continue to be written down, but new expenditure from the change date falls under standard property rules.

If your 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, and potentially the 50% First Year Allowance, but only where the company and its activity qualify. Because this now depends entirely on your ownership structure, we quote no allowance figures as current fact and we are not tax advisers. Please take your own tax advice and confirm your position with your accountant before relying on any allowance. We will not pretend the old FHL allowances still apply, because they do not.

Smart Export Guarantee, the income that matters most for a seasonal let

The Smart Export Guarantee pays you for the electricity you export to the grid. It matters more for a holiday let than for most homes precisely because your occupancy is seasonal: in the quiet off-season from October to March, when the property is often empty, an owned array exports meaningfully and earns on power you would not have used anyway. Tariffs are supplier-set (indicatively 4 to 15p per kWh in 2026), so it pays to shop around. The one hard requirement is that the system must be MCS-certified to qualify, which is why we install to that standard as a matter of course.

0% VAT on domestic-scale solar and battery, with a caveat

Qualifying residential installs of solar PV and battery storage in Great Britain attract 0% VAT on energy-saving materials until 31 March 2027. This is a genuine, dated relief worth having. The caveat is important, though: it is a residential and domestic relief, and its application to a property run purely as a commercial holiday let is not clear-cut. Confirm your specific position, and take your own tax advice, before assuming it applies to your install.

Workplace Charging Scheme, for parks and multi-unit sites

If you run a small self-catering park or a multi-lodge site offering guest or staff EV charging, the OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme can help fund the sockets: up to 75% of cost, capped at £500 per socket (raised from £350 on 1 April 2026) for up to 40 sockets, using an OZEV-approved installer and chargepoints. It pairs naturally with on-site solar, because daytime guest charging is a near-perfect match for solar generation. It is more relevant to parks and multi-unit sites than to a single cottage.

Green Tourism and the booking advantage

Green Tourism accreditation is not a grant, but it is a real commercial lever, and on-site solar is auditable evidence that contributes directly to an award. A Green Tourism award, or the equivalent VisitScotland and Visit Wales sustainability schemes, measurably helps direct and platform-booking visibility with eco-conscious guests, which is why several owners now mention their solar and low running costs directly in their listing. Worth noting too: Scotland's SME Loan Scheme has historically funded holiday-let renewables, as it did for the Highland Farm Cottages project near Dingwall.

How these stack, and the honest bottom line

In practice, a typical owned install combines the SEG for off-season export income, the 0% VAT relief where it applies, and, for parks with guest charging, the Workplace Charging Scheme, with Green Tourism accreditation as a booking benefit on top. What it does not include, for most personally-held lets, is a capital-allowance tax write-down, and any page telling you otherwise post-April-2025 is out of date. The figures on our cost page are indicative scoping ranges, not quotes, and every tax point here comes with the same instruction: take your own tax advice.