Solar panels in your Polish municipality: output and payback

What the calculator does, step by step

First, output. You pick a municipality (gmina) or a county (powiat), and the calculator takes the PVGIS yearly yield for that place and spreads it over the months using the profile of your voivodeship. If the roof does not face south or has another tilt, output drops by the factors PVGIS gives for each direction. Details are on the page how much power solar panels produce.

Next, self-consumption: what you use while the panels are working. The Polish Renewable Energy Act nets imports against exports hour by hour, so the calculator works through an average day of each month, hour by hour: what the panels produce, what the house uses, what is left over. That share is the most valuable, because it saves the full price of a kilowatt-hour, distribution and fees included.

Last, the surplus and the deposit. Energy exported to the grid is valued at the PSE market price, multiplied by 1.23 and credited to the prosumer account for 12 months. The deposit pays for energy drawn in the evening, at night and in winter. When there is more deposit than you need, part comes back as a cash refund and the rest is forfeited. The page net-billing explains all three flows.

Example: Warsaw, 4,000 kWh a year

The table shows four common sizes for the same house: roof at 35° facing south, settlement at RCE, use spread evenly over the day, no battery. It shows the key feature of net-billing: each extra kilowatt adds less and less, because a growing share of output goes to the grid at the wholesale price.

At 6 kWp the saving is about PLN 3,425 a year when settled at RCE and PLN 3,346 at RCEm. The gap has two causes: RCE never goes below zero, and the refund cap is 30 rather than 20% of the value of exported energy. Sizing for your house is covered on the 4 kW, 6 kW, 8 kW and 10 kW pages.

Yield per kWp in each voivodeship

Regional differences are smaller than sunshine maps suggest, but they exist. Roofs on the lowlands of southern and central Poland produce most; the coast, Warmia and Masuria, and mountain valleys where the sun drops early behind the slope produce least. The table gives the average over the municipalities of each voivodeship, with the weakest and the best one.

Electricity prices behind the saving

By default we use the 2026 G11 tariff approved by the URE President on 17 December 2025: energy at PLN 0.4970/kWh net (the price of the default sellers Tauron, Energa and PGE), variable distribution at PLN 0.3485/kWh net from the Energa-Operator tariff, plus the quality, renewable and cogeneration charges. With VAT this comes to about PLN 1.09 per kilowatt-hour. Every network operator has its own distribution rate, so both price fields can be changed to the figures on your own bill.

Surplus prices come from PSE, the transmission system operator. RCEm, the monthly price, is published on the tenth working day of the following month; the latest available is for September 2026: PLN 345.68/MWh. Hourly RCE comes from the open PSE API. Price history and a valuation of your own surplus are on the RCE and RCEm page.

Home battery, heat pump and grants

A battery shifts energy from midday to the evening, raising self-consumption and shrinking the surplus sold cheaply. The calculator compares the same house with and without a battery on the solar with battery page, and the battery grant calculator works out the Przydomowe Magazyny Energii grant, open from 20 October 2026 to 1 October 2027.

A heat pump changes the household balance: power use rises, but mostly in winter, when panels produce least. The heat pump and solar page works out how much of the pump’s power the roof covers, and heat pump running costs compares it with coal and gas. For a 120 m² house at 110 kWh/m², a pump at the minimum efficiency allowed in the EU costs about PLN 4,656 a year to run, coal PLN 4,228 and gas PLN 5,403 including fixed charges.

The Czyste Powietrze programme funds heat sources and insulation. Since 20 July 2026 it has new rules on how long you must have owned the house; the grant level depends on income and the amounts on the type of equipment. The Czyste Powietrze calculator works them out.

How this calculator works

This site gives the result at once, with no form, name or phone number, and instead of an installer quote it shows how much you can pay for a system and still see it pay back. It nets energy hour by hour, as the Polish renewables act requires: a kilowatt-hour used at home is worth as much as power from your bill, while one exported to the grid is worth only its market price for that month or hour. Czyste Powietrze is calculated under the rules in force since 20 July 2026.

Here, output comes from PVGIS for your municipality, the surplus is valued at PSE prices over the last 12 months, the deposit covers only what the law allows, and grants are copied from NFOŚiGW documents with their dates. We ask for no contact details and pass none on. Every assumption is described on the method page, together with the limits of the model.

What the calculator does not know

It does not know your roof: shade from a chimney, a tree or the next building, the state of the rafters or where the inverter can go. Nor does it know your contract with the seller if your price differs from the tariff, or government plans for power prices after 2026. We assume no price rises and no panel degradation, and give payback in simple years. That simplification cuts both ways, which is why we state it plainly.