Net metering in Nevada, in plain English

Yes, Nevada has net metering. If you switch a system on in Clark County this year you go on a rate called NMR-405 Tier 4. Inside each month your exports cancel your usage one for one. Only what is left over at the end of the month is credited, and that credit is 75 percent of the retail volumetric rate. On the schedule in force today it is $0.08717 per kilowatt hour.

That is the scheme in four sentences. The rest of this page is where each sentence comes from, what the credit cannot pay for, and the three things that move you off the rate you started on. Every figure here is on a document you can open yourself, and the links are at the bottom.

The rate has a name, and it is worth learning

NV Energy's interconnection handbook, revision 7 dated October 16 2025, says NMR-405 Tier 4 is the default net metering rate for a newly installed system of 25 kW or less. Above 25 kW and up to 1 MW you are on NMR-B instead. Your account is placed on the rate after the project receives Permission to Operate, not when the panels go up.

Learn the name because it is the only way to get a straight answer on the phone. "My solar credits" gets you a general answer. "Schedule RS, NMR-405 Tier 4, what is my Excess Energy Credit per kilowatt hour" gets you the number, and it is printed under exactly that heading on the rate schedule.

Two limits sit around the whole thing. NRS 704.771 defines a net metering system as one that runs on renewable energy, has a capacity of not more than 1 MW, sits on your premises, operates in parallel with the utility and is intended primarily to offset part or all of your own electricity requirements. The handbook then adds the practical ceiling: a net metering system must be sized to meet no greater than 100 percent of your annual electricity needs, and NV Energy checks that during application review against your own billing history. You cannot build a power station on a tile roof and sell the surplus. Sizing is a separate question and we work it through in how many panels a Las Vegas house needs.

Monthly netting is the part everyone gets wrong

NRS 704.775 subsection 1 is one line:

The billing period for net metering must be a monthly period.

NV Energy's own net metering answers describe what that means in practice. Within a monthly billing period, exported energy is netted against delivered energy. Only if excess remains does the 75 percent credit apply, and that credit goes into a carryover bank for a later month.

NV Energy's NMR-405 page works two examples, and they are worth reading because they settle most arguments:

So a kilowatt hour you push out at one in the afternoon and pull back at eight the same evening, in the same billing month, is settled one for one. The 75 percent never touches it. The discount only bites on the surplus that survives a whole month of netting.

One correction while you are here. The 15 minute netting you may have read about is a northern Nevada rate called NMR-2025, the default for northern Nevada applications approved on or after October 1 2025. Southern Nevada is monthly. If somebody tells you your exports are settled every quarter hour, they are describing Reno.

What 75 percent is in cents, today

NV Energy publishes the actual number, which almost no article about Nevada solar mentions. It is a line on the southern Nevada net metering rate schedule, the bill insert called Excess Energy Credit, or EEC, broken out by tier.

Here is Schedule RS, the standard single family residential rate, as it stands now and as it changes on October 1 2026.

Two things follow from that table.

The credit is 75 percent of the retail volumetric rate, which is the consumption rate plus the deferred energy component, and not of the total you pay. Riders like the energy efficiency charge and the natural disaster protection plan rate are in your price and are not in the credit. That is why the export number looks lower than a straight three quarters of your bill rate.

It moves. It moved on July 1 and it moves again on October 1, because both parts of the retail volumetric rate are reset when rates are reset. The percentage is fixed by statute. The thing the percentage is applied to is not. Anyone who quotes you one export rate held flat for twenty years is doing arithmetic we would not sign.

The gap between the two bold rows is the whole reason self consumption matters here. A kilowatt hour you use in the house instead of buying is worth about 37 percent more than the same kilowatt hour sent back. What 75 percent of retail actually costs you works that consequence through for sizing, and why a battery pays for itself between 6 and 9 pm does it for storage.

Where the tiers came from, and what fixes yours

The percentages are in statute, not in a tariff somebody can quietly redraw. NRS 704.7732, added in 2017, sets a credit for each kilowatt hour of excess electricity equal to a percentage of the rate you would have paid for it, and steps that percentage down in four tiers as the state fills up with rooftop systems of 25 kW or less.

Each step down happened when the Commission determined that another 80 megawatts of small net metering capacity had been taken up. There is no tier 5 written anywhere. As of the Commission's August 3 2026 update, Tier 4 holds 755.785 MW of applied for and installed capacity, so the idea that you have to hurry before the programme fills is not true of the tier that is open.

The date that fixes your tier is not the date you sign and not the date of the install. NRS 704.7732 subsection 5 says a customer-generator is deemed to accept the utility's offer on the date a complete application is submitted. NV Energy's handbook then tells you what complete means: an application is considered incomplete until the application fee has been paid, the southern Nevada fee is $189, and if the fee is not received within 30 days of submission the application is cancelled. One unpaid fee and the date you were relying on is gone.

Two older rates still exist for people who got in early, and they are better than yours. NMR-G, for systems installed before December 31 2015, credits one kilowatt hour for every kilowatt hour banked. NMR-A, for southern Nevada systems installed between January 1 2016 and June 14 2017, pays a monetary credit on all exported energy. Both are closed. If you are on one of them, do not touch your system without reading the next section.

What the credit cannot pay for

NRS 704.775 subsection 2 is blunt about this:

The value of the excess electricity must not be used to reduce any other fee or charge imposed by the utility.

NV Energy's NMR-405 page says the same in billing terms. Credits can be applied to future energy consumption charges. They cannot be applied to the basic service charge, to additional meter charges or to local government fees.

So there is a floor under your bill and no array gets beneath it. On Schedule RS the basic service charge alone is $18.00 a month, and on top of your energy charges sit the 5 percent Clark County local government fee and the Universal Energy Charge of $0.00039 per kilowatt hour. How to read your NV Energy bill once you have solar shows exactly where each of those lands on a statement.

The 20 years, and what is actually locked

NRS 704.773 subsection 8 requires the Commission and the utility to let you continue net metering at the location where the system was originally installed for 20 years. The same subsection spells out that continuing includes two things people assume they have to fight for:

• Retaining the tier percentage that applies to you.
• Replacing the originally installed system, as needed, at any time before the 20 years are up.

NV Energy's NMR-405 page repeats the 20 years for Tier 4 in its own words.

So three things are locked: the percentage, the right to net meter at that address, and the right to replace failed equipment without losing either. One thing is not locked, and it is the one that decides the money. The retail rate the percentage is applied to moves every time rates are reset, which the table above shows happening twice this year.

The arrangement is attached to the house, not to you. NRS 704.775 says excess electricity carries forward indefinitely, but you are not entitled to compensation for whatever is left if the system stops operating, if you stop being a customer at that premises, or if you transfer the system to another person. NV Energy puts it more directly: credits are tied to the premise, and if you transfer service to another location or end service, remaining credits are non-transferrable and non-payable.

Practical version. Spend the bank before you list the house, because a winter of banked credit is worth nothing to you on moving day. The buyer, on the other hand, inherits an address that is already on your tier, which is a real and checkable point in a listing. We cover that from the buyer's side in buying a Las Vegas house that already has solar.

Three things that change the arithmetic afterwards

Adding capacity. The handbook is explicit: a system expansion that adds renewable capacity results in a net metering rate change if you are not already on the current rate. Adding only an energy storage system does not. A replacement goes to engineering review to decide whether a closed rate can be kept. If you are on Tier 1, 2 or 3, six more panels can quietly cost you the difference between 95 and 75 percent for the rest of your term. Adding panels changes your net metering rate is the long version.

Going on a time of use plan. NRS 704.775 says carried forward excess must be added back into the same time of use period it came from. Cheap off peak surplus cannot pay for an expensive evening. On NV Energy's time of use plan, summer on peak runs $0.47155 per kilowatt hour from 6:01 pm to 9 pm, June 1 through September 30, against $0.07305 off peak, and no amount of midday banking crosses that line. Time of use with solar is the decision, with the numbers.

Leaving NV Energy's territory. Boulder City, Overton Power District, Valley Electric and the rural co-ops are not NV Energy and none of this page applies to them. Solar when your power company is not NV Energy covers what we have verified so far.

The thing net metering will not answer

From January 2027, southern Nevada bills get a third component: a daily demand charge, priced at $0.14 per kW of the highest 15 minutes of use in a day. NV Energy's own page says the average southern Nevada customer peaks near 3.5 kW, which works out at about $0.49 a day, and puts the average bill effect at $15 to $20 a month with the energy rate cut to compensate. It also says plainly that rooftop solar customers in southern Nevada can expect to see a small increase in their bills.

Net metering credits will not touch it, and the statutes explain why from both directions. NRS 704.775 says the value of your excess electricity must not reduce any other fee or charge imposed by the utility. NRS 704.773 says the utility must not charge a net metering customer a fee different from other customers in the rate class they would belong to without solar. You sit in the ordinary residential class, so a charge levied on that class reaches you, and your export credit is not allowed to offset it.

It is scheduled for January 1 2027 and it is under appeal. A Clark County district court judge allowed it to proceed in May 2026, and Attorney General Aaron Ford said the same week that he would take the case to the Nevada Supreme Court. We keep the daily demand charge and the court case current as it moves.

How to check every number on this page

None of this requires trusting us, and you should not.

1. Go to nvenergy.com/rates, open Southern NV Net Metering Rate Schedule, find Residential Single-Family (RS), and read the line EEC, all kWh, per kWh, NMR-405 (Tier 4). That is your export rate. The archive link on the same page holds the earlier quarters.
2. Open the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada's net metering page for the tier history and the current AB 405 capacity table.
3. Read NRS 704.766 to 704.776 at leg.state.nv.us. The 20 years is 704.773, the monthly period and the carry forward rules are 704.775, and the tier percentages are 704.7732.
4. Log in to MyAccount and compare the last twelve months of your own delivered and exported kilowatt hours against what the tariff says you should have been credited.

If you would rather have somebody do that with you, we will pull your address and tell you which net metering rate it is on, what the current credit rate is on the day we look, and what your roof would actually export in a year. If the answer is that solar does not make sense on your house, we will tell you that instead.

We recheck this page quarterly. Last checked 2026-09-20. If a number here has moved, tell us and we will fix it the same week.