What It Actually Costs to Buy Out a Sunrun Lease or PPA

Prepayment and purchase are not the same thing

Two different exit mechanics live inside a Sunrun lease, and conflating them is where most confusion starts.

Prepayment (Section B of the BrightSave contract) lets you pay off your remaining monthly lease payments at any point during the term. The payoff is the sum of what's left, discounted by the lesser of the prime rate plus 100 basis points or 5.0%. Sunrun's own contract example: prepaying in year 10 at a 4.25% discount rate on a small 8.40 kW system with $148/month payments comes to $32,030. That figure is nearly a decade old and describes a system a fraction of the size of a typical modern install, so don't treat it as a current benchmark — it's here to show how the discounting works, not what you'd pay.

Crucially, prepayment does not transfer ownership. Sunrun still owns the panels afterward; you've simply closed out the payment obligation early, the way you'd pay off an auto loan without it becoming a title transfer.

Purchase (Section G) is the option that actually makes you the owner, and it's gated to specific windows: year 5, year 20, end of term, or home sale. The price there is fair market value, set by an independent appraiser — not the discounted-payment math used for prepayment. If your goal is ownership, prepayment doesn't get you there outside those windows; only the purchase option does, and only when it's open.

Why buyout windows open at year 5, not sooner

Sunrun's contract bars an ownership-transferring purchase before the 5th anniversary of your system going into service, and there's a specific tax-law reason this is a common floor across third-party-owned solar generally, not just Sunrun's house preference.

Third-party-owned solar systems carry the federal investment tax credit (ITC), which the third-party owner — Sunrun, not you — claims. Under 26 U.S.C. § 50(a)(1), that credit is subject to recapture if the underlying property is sold within 5 years of being placed in service: 100% recapture if disposed of in year 1, dropping to 80% in year 2, 60% in year 3, 40% in year 4, and 20% in year 5. Selling you the system earlier would expose Sunrun to giving back a meaningful chunk of a credit it already claimed.

This is a reasoned inference connecting two verified facts — Sunrun's 5-year contractual floor and the recapture statute's 5-year window — not a sentence found stated together in one Sunrun document. EnergySage's own consumer-facing material backs the same logic loosely, describing industry buyout floors (it frames the general industry pattern around year 6, not Sunrun's specific year 5) as tied to "IRS rules governing when financiers can legally sell leased systems to homeowners," without citing the specific code section. Treat the mechanism as solid and the exact number as Sunrun-contract-specific.

Home sale: transfer is the default path, not buyout

If you're selling the house, Sunrun's own materials say most customers don't buy out at all — they transfer.

Under Section G(4) of the lease contract, you have three routes when you sell: (1) the buyer assumes your agreement outright if they have a FICO score of 650 or higher, (2) the buyer assumes it by qualifying for a mortgage or paying cash, with a $250 credit-check exemption fee split between the parties, or (3) you or the buyer purchase the system at FMV before or at the sale closes. Sunrun's live 2026 FAQ claims a 98% success rate getting agreements transferred to buyers rather than requiring a payoff — meaning in the large majority of real transactions, nobody writes a buyout check at all.

The $250 fee figure comes from the 2018 contract template and has not been reconfirmed against a current agreement, so treat it as directionally right rather than guaranteed current. If neither transfer nor purchase happens before closing, the contract treats you as having defaulted, which triggers system removal and a "Make Whole" payment obligation under Section G(10) — a materially worse outcome than either transferring or buying, and a real reason to start this conversation with Sunrun well before your closing date, not after.

Mid-term buyout versus end-of-term: what actually changes

A mid-term buyout (year 5 or year 20) and an end-of-term buyout use the identical pricing mechanism — FMV via independent appraiser — but the leverage and the alternatives differ.

Mid-term, at year 5 or year 20, you're one of three choices Sunrun offers on a fixed schedule; if you skip the window, you're locked into your existing lease payments (or PPA rate) until the next one opens, which per EnergySage's industry-wide figures can mean an ongoing carrying cost in the $300-$1,000/year range if there's an annual fee structure attached to holding rather than buying (this is a general industry figure, not confirmed as Sunrun's specific fee).

At end of term, per Sunrun's current FAQ, you get three options with no obligation to buy: purchase at FMV, renew the lease or PPA annually at a reset rate, or have Sunrun remove the system at no cost. The 2018 contract's renewal formula ties the reset rate to the local utility's on-peak residential rate with a contract-set floor — worth re-verifying against a current agreement before assuming it's unchanged eight years later. The free-removal option is the one lever mid-term buyouts don't offer: you cannot ask Sunrun to simply take the system back before the term ends without triggering default consequences instead.

What we could not verify — and what to ignore online

Two gaps are worth naming directly rather than papering over.

First, no verified 2025-2026 real-dollar figures exist for what actual Sunrun customers have paid in buyouts recently. Reddit and consumer complaint boards were not accessible for this research, and no reliable published source gives a current $/watt or aggregate buyout range specific to Sunrun. If you see a specific dollar figure attached to "typical Sunrun buyout" anywhere online, it is not traceable to a verified source as of this writing (2026-09-05).

Second, a cluster of low-quality domains surfaced repeatedly in searches on this exact topic — sites with suspiciously uniform "fresh 2026" dates, template SEO writing, and in one case a domain built to look like an official Sunrun property. One such source produced a buyout figure of roughly $1,000-$1,800 per watt, which fails a basic sanity check: full installed solar systems run $2-4 per watt total, so a buyout at 500 times that rate is not physically or financially plausible. None of these sites should inform your expectations. The only reliable path to a real number is your own contract's Section G language plus a direct FMV quote request to Sunrun.