What solar costs in your California city

57 California cities have a page here, and not one of them prints a price. That is deliberate. The number that governs your project is the one on the contract you are handed, and under California Business and Professions Code section 7169 it has to arrive in writing, on the front or cover page, in boldface 16-point type, showing the total cost of the system including financing costs.

What a city page does carry is the part that genuinely differs by address: which utility bills it and whether a community choice aggregator supplies the generation, what that city’s own adopted fee schedule says about a solar permit, whether the permit can be filed online, and the California rules that apply the same way everywhere. Every one of those is stated beside the document it came from and the date it was checked.

The rate you pay now is the other half of the arithmetic, and it is not a city fact but a utility one. The California utility rate tracker holds the current average residential rate for each biller with the CPUC report it came from. If your utility is SDG&E, the plan you are on moves the bill before solar enters the picture at all — SDG&E time-of-use rates sets out the peak windows and what changing plan does. For a business property the question is a different one, priced per watt against load and tariff rather than per household: commercial solar cost per watt in California is where that starts.

Source for the disclosure requirement above: California Business and Professions Code §7169 — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov — verified 17 September 2026.