Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays

Key Takeaway

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Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays comes down to one decoupling. NEPRA notified the Prosumer Regulations 2026 (S.R.O. 251(I)/2026) on February 9, 2026, replacing one-for-one net metering with net billing. New prosumers export at roughly Rs. 10–11.30 per unit while importing at Rs. 37–55+ per unit, contracts run five years instead of seven, and system size is capped at sanctioned load. Agreements signed before February 9, 2026 are grandfathered at the older Rs. 22–27 offset until their seven-year terms expire. Solar still pays — but only when sized for daytime self-consumption.

Introduction

Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays begins with a date and a signature. On February 9, 2026, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority notified S.R.O. 251(I)/2026, ending the decade-old 1:1 offset because rooftop capacity had reached roughly 7,000 MW and was draining distribution company revenue faster than the regulator could reprice it.

This analysis sets out the exact rule changes, the new economics, who keeps their old deal, and how to size a system now. One number drives every decision that follows: exports earn about Rs. 11 per unit while imports still cost Rs. 37–55+ per unit before taxes. For the broader policy and device context, see theverge.pk technology coverage.

The analytical position here is straightforward. The regulations did not kill solar in Pakistan; they killed the practice of using the national grid as a free battery. Consequently, the payback math now rewards self-consumption and penalises oversizing.

About this analysis

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Written by a technology and energy policy reporter who has covered Pakistan’s power sector and NEPRA tariff determinations across multiple annual and quarterly adjustment cycles. The figures and rule descriptions here are drawn from the published text of S.R.O. 251(I)/2026 and NEPRA tariff notifications rather than installer marketing material. Corrections and queries: contact the editorial desk via theverge.pk.

Transparency disclosure

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This article is journalism and general information — not financial, engineering or legal advice. Tariffs and the National Average Energy Purchase Price are revised periodically by NEPRA, so every figure quoted is the rate in force as of November 5, 2026. The publisher has no commercial relationship with solar installers, distribution companies or equipment vendors. Verify current rates with your DISCO before signing a prosumer agreement.

What Actually Changed on February 9, 2026

On February 9, 2026, NEPRA notified the Prosumer Regulations 2026 as S.R.O. 251(I)/2026. The instrument replaced net metering with net billing, cut the standard contract term from seven years to five, abolished the allowance permitting arrays up to 150% of sanctioned load, and introduced a non-refundable concurrence fee of Rs. 1,000 per kW. The published regulations are available through the NEPRA regulatory portal.

The mechanics matter more than the label. Under net metering, exported units offset imported units one-for-one at the full retail tariff, which meant a unit sent out at noon was worth exactly a unit drawn back at 9 p.m. Under net billing those two flows are decoupled: imports are billed at the applicable retail tariff, while exports are purchased separately at the National Average Energy Purchase Price. That decoupling is the entire policy, and every financial consequence described in this article follows directly from it.

Rule	Net Metering (before 9 Feb 2026)	Net Billing (from 9 Feb 2026)
Export compensation basis	Offset against imports at retail tariff	Purchased at National Average Energy Purchase Price
Export rate per unit	Approx. Rs. 22–27	Approx. Rs. 10–11.30
Contract term	7 years	5 years
Maximum system size vs sanctioned load	Up to 150% of sanctioned load	Capped at sanctioned load
Overall capacity ceiling	1 MW	1 MW
Concurrence fee	Not applicable	Rs. 1,000/kW, non-refundable
Licence fee for systems 25 kW or below	Applicable	Withdrawn

The capacity cap closes the door on a specific strategy. Because an array can no longer exceed sanctioned load, the deliberate oversizing that defined 2023–2025 installations is now structurally impossible rather than merely unattractive. The fee structure cuts in two directions: as reported by Pakistan Today, the licence fee was withdrawn for systems of 25 kW or below, while larger systems still pay a one-time Rs. 1,000 per kW licence charge on top of concurrence. The effect is that the new rules bite hardest on commercial prosumers, who carry both the heavier fee load and the larger volume of surplus export.

What Solar Now Actually Pays Under the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026

Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays resolves into three numbers. New prosumers are paid roughly Rs. 10 to Rs. 11.30 per exported unit, they buy grid power back at Rs. 37 to Rs. 55+ per unit before taxes, and that roughly five-to-one gap stretches payback on an export-heavy system to 6–8 years while a system sized to daytime load still recovers its cost in 3–6 years. Specialist coverage from pv magazine tracked the same repricing and its effect on installation demand through 2026.

Metric	Figure (as of November 2026)
Export buyback rate for new prosumers	Rs. 10 – 11.30 per unit
Retail import tariff range (before taxes)	Rs. 37 – 55+ per unit
Delivered cost per unit including taxes and surcharges, upper slabs	Up to approx. Rs. 70 per unit
Grandfathered offset rate for pre-February 2026 agreements	Approx. Rs. 22 – 27 per unit
Payback period, system sized to daytime self-consumption	3 – 6 years
Payback period, export-oriented oversized system	6 – 8 years
Contract term for new prosumer agreements	5 years

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Because the buyback is pegged to the National Average Energy Purchase Price rather than the retail tariff, every exported unit now recovers roughly one-fifth of what the same unit costs to purchase back after sunset. As a result, exported generation has stopped being a store of value and become a discounted sale to the distribution company.

That inversion changes behaviour rather than technology. The objective is no longer to maximise annual generation but to maximise the overlap between generation and consumption, which drives demand for load-shifting — running tube wells, air conditioning, laundry and EV charging inside daylight hours — and for battery storage, because storage now competes against an Rs. 11 export rate instead of an Rs. 27 one.

The tax-inclusive picture reinforces the point. With surcharges and taxes applied, delivered grid electricity reaches roughly Rs. 70 per unit in upper consumption slabs, which means behind-the-meter consumption remains the highest-value use of a rooftop array anywhere in Pakistan.

Why NEPRA Pulled the Plug: 7 GW of Rooftop Solar and Rs. 101 Billion in Lost Sales

NEPRA ended net metering because registered rooftop capacity grew roughly 37-fold — from 190 MW in FY2020 to approximately 7,000 MW by mid-2026 — cutting grid electricity sales by 3.2 billion units in FY2024 alone and costing distribution companies around Rs. 101 billion in revenue, according to financial reporting by Business Recorder and capacity figures carried by The Express Tribune.

Three forces caused that surge, and each independently shortened payback:

• Grid electricity tariffs rose roughly 140%, collapsing solar payback periods
• The rupee depreciated about 75%, raising the value of avoided imported-fuel generation
• Global solar panel prices fell roughly 60%, cutting upfront capital cost
• Net-metering capacity grew from 190 MW in FY2020 to approximately 7,000 MW by mid-2026
• Grid sales fell by 3.2 billion units in FY2024, costing DISCOs around Rs. 101 billion
• Fixed IPP capacity payments shifted roughly Rs. 0.9 per kWh onto non-solar consumers

Together those three drivers made rooftop solar arguably the best-returning household investment in the country, which is precisely why adoption outran the regulation. The deeper problem sits in the capacity-payment structure, a recurring theme in our digital policy and regulation analysis. Pakistan’s grid carries fixed capacity payments to Independent Power Producers regardless of how many units are actually sold. Therefore when solar owners stopped buying units, the fixed cost did not disappear — it was reallocated across the remaining customer base, raising the average tariff by roughly Rs. 0.9 per kWh for non-solar households. Stated plainly: net billing is a cross-subsidy correction, not an anti-solar measure.

Who Is Grandfathered In — and Who Loses Protection

Consumers holding valid net-metering agreements signed before February 9, 2026 are grandfathered and continue to offset units at roughly Rs. 22–27 per unit until their seven-year agreements expire. That protection exists because Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif intervened to block the draft regulations’ retroactive rate cut after sustained public backlash, as reported by Dawn.

• Agreement signed and valid before 9 February 2026: grandfathered at approximately Rs. 22–27 per unit offset for the remainder of the seven-year term
• Application submitted but concurrence granted after 9 February 2026: net billing applies
• Grandfathered system expanded after 9 February 2026: added capacity falls under net billing
• Entirely new installation in 2026: five-year contract, export at roughly Rs. 10–11.30 per unit, size capped at sanctioned load
• Off-grid or purely behind-the-meter system with no export: outside the prosumer regime, no concurrence required

The expansion trap deserves attention, because it catches exactly the households that did best under the old regime. If a grandfathered prosumer adds capacity after February 9, 2026, that incremental capacity falls under net billing. As a result, a household expanding from 10 kW to 15 kW ends up operating two different compensation regimes on one roof, which materially reduces the return on the additional panels and often makes storage the better use of the same budget.

Grandfathering is a reprieve with a timer, not a reversal — because every protected agreement expires on a known date, the entire grandfathered fleet migrates onto net billing between now and 2033, which is the long-run meaning of Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays.

How to Size a Solar System for Net Billing in 2026

Size the array to your daytime load rather than your total monthly units, because exports now earn roughly one-fifth of what imports cost. Match generation to the hours you actually consume, confirm the array does not exceed sanctioned load, and treat any export as a bonus rather than the business case.

The order of the following steps matters, because sanctioned load is a hard regulatory ceiling and checking it after the financial modelling wastes the modelling.

1. Pull twelve months of bills and separate daytime consumption from evening and night consumption
2. Confirm your sanctioned load with your DISCO, because the array cannot legally exceed it
3. Size the array to cover daytime load plus a small margin, not total monthly units
4. Shift controllable loads — pumps, air conditioning, laundry, EV charging — into generation hours
5. Model payback using the avoided import tariff for self-consumed units and roughly Rs. 11 for exported units
6. Price storage separately against the avoided import tariff, not against the export rate
7. Budget the non-refundable Rs. 1,000/kW concurrence fee and the five-year contract term into the business case
8. Apply for concurrence only after the final design is fixed, since capacity is tied to the approved agreement

Settlement under net billing depends entirely on accurate bidirectional metering, because imports and exports are now priced differently and must therefore be measured separately rather than netted. Measurement-standards practice published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology illustrates why verified meter accuracy is a prerequisite for any such mechanism: under a 1:1 offset a small metering error cancelled out, whereas under a five-to-one price spread the same error produces a real billing difference.

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Storage is the one component the new rules make more attractive. Because the export rate sits near Rs. 11 while the import rate runs Rs. 37–55+, the value of a stored unit is now the avoided import cost rather than a forgone export credit worth Rs. 22–27. Consequently battery payback has improved sharply under net billing, even as total system returns fell.

The Equity Problem the Regulations Were Written to Solve

Registered net metering in Pakistan concentrated among higher-income consumers in the best-served distribution areas, which means the cross-subsidy flowed upward — from households enduring unreliable supply to households experiencing almost none of the outages.

An October 2026 study by researchers from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and the University of Oxford found registered net metering clustered in LESCO and IESCO territory, areas reporting near-zero load shedding and close to full bill recovery, while unregistered, off-grid solar dominated poorer, outage-prone areas where the binding constraint was reliability rather than price.

The causal chain is clean. Because grandfathered prosumers were compensated at retail-equivalent rates, the fixed network and capacity costs they stopped covering were redistributed to consumers who could not afford a rooftop array in the first place. Therefore the regressive outcome was built into the tariff design, not into solar technology — a distinction the public debate largely collapsed.

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The counter-argument is serious and should not be dismissed. Critics note that net billing weakens the strongest demand-side response Pakistan has ever generated, and that an Rs. 11 buyback discourages precisely the daytime generation that would otherwise displace expensive peaking plant. That tension is unresolved, and resolving it depends on data quality as much as on policy — which is itself a governance question, since how data standards shape regulatory reporting determines whether DISCO sales figures and registered capacity growth through FY2027 can actually settle the argument.

Limitations of This Analysis and the Alternatives Worth Considering

The buyback rate is tied to the National Average Energy Purchase Price, and the retail tariff is revised through quarterly and annual adjustments. Therefore every figure in this article is a November 2026 snapshot rather than a fixed rate. Payback ranges depend on consumption profile, roof orientation, equipment quality and installer pricing, so individual results vary widely. Implementation also differs by distribution company, because concurrence processing times and sanctioned load records are not uniform across LESCO, IESCO, K-Electric and the rest.

Several developments would change the conclusion: a reduction in the retail tariff, a restoration of a higher buyback rate, or a sharp fall in storage prices would each shift the self-consumption calculus. Tracking those revisions systematically — much as automated data analysis pipelines handle recurring data releases — is more reliable than relying on a single quoted rate, so re-check NEPRA notifications before committing capital.

Alternatives to a grid-tied prosumer system

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• Hybrid system with storage and minimal export — captures the full avoided import tariff and avoids the Rs. 11 buyback entirely
• Fully off-grid system — suitable where outages are severe and grid reliability is the binding constraint rather than cost
• Zero-export grid-tied system — no concurrence fee or prosumer agreement, but surplus daytime generation is simply curtailed
• Load-shifting and efficiency upgrades first — cheaper per unit saved than adding panels in many households
• Deferral — wait for the next NEPRA tariff and purchase-price determination before sizing the array

Frequently Asked Questions

Is net metering finished in Pakistan for good?

Yes, for new applicants. NEPRA replaced it with net billing on February 9, 2026 through S.R.O. 251(I)/2026, and no new one-for-one offset agreements are being issued. Agreements valid before that date survive until their seven-year terms expire. That is the practical meaning of Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays.

What is the new solar buyback rate in Pakistan in 2026?

Roughly Rs. 10 to Rs. 11.30 per unit, pegged to the National Average Energy Purchase Price. That compares with a retail import tariff of Rs. 37 to Rs. 55+ per unit before taxes. Because the rate moves whenever NEPRA revises the purchase price, verify it with your DISCO at the time of application rather than relying on a quoted figure.

What is the difference between net metering and net billing?

Net metering offsets exported units against imported units one-for-one at the retail tariff; net billing decouples the two and buys exports at a lower wholesale rate. The consequence is decisive: under net billing the grid no longer functions as a free battery, therefore returns are determined by how much generation you consume on site rather than by how much you generate.

Will my existing net metering agreement be changed retroactively?

No. Agreements valid before February 9, 2026 are grandfathered at approximately Rs. 22–27 per unit for the remainder of the seven-year term, because Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif blocked the draft’s retroactive rate cut following public backlash. Note the exception: any capacity added after the cutoff date falls under net billing rules.

Is rooftop solar still worth it in Pakistan after the 2026 rules?

Yes, when sized for self-consumption. Right-sized systems pay back in 3 to 6 years, while export-heavy systems take 6 to 8 years. The driver is the delivered grid price: with taxes and surcharges, electricity reaches roughly Rs. 70 per unit in upper slabs, therefore each self-consumed unit saves several times what an exported unit earns at Rs. 11.

How large a system can I install under the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026?

Up to your sanctioned load, with an overall ceiling of 1 MW. The previous allowance permitting arrays up to 150% of sanctioned load was abolished, which means oversizing for export is no longer permitted. Check your design against the DISCO’s sanctioned load record before applying, because concurrence is tied to that figure.

What fees apply to a new prosumer application in 2026?

A non-refundable concurrence fee of Rs. 1,000 per kW. The licence fee was withdrawn for systems of 25 kW and below, while larger systems pay a one-time Rs. 1,000 per kW licence fee in addition to concurrence. As a result, commercial installations carry the heavier regulatory cost under the 2026 regime.

Do batteries make more sense now than before?

Yes, materially. Storing a unit now displaces an Rs. 37–55+ import rather than forgoing an Rs. 22–27 credit, and the export revenue given up is only about Rs. 11. Consequently the value of each stored unit rose sharply under net billing, even though total system returns fell relative to the old framework.

How long do new prosumer contracts last?

Five years, down from seven. The shorter horizon reduces certainty beyond year five, therefore financial models should assume the business case is recovered within the contract term rather than spread across the panels’ 25-year service life. Treat generation after year five as upside rather than as the basis for the investment.

Conclusion

The regulations corrected a cross-subsidy that had grown to roughly Rs. 101 billion in a single financial year, and they did so by removing the grid’s role as a free battery. Because the fixed capacity payments owed to Independent Power Producers did not fall when rooftop generation rose, those costs landed on non-solar households at roughly Rs. 0.9 per kWh. Therefore the technology is unaffected by the change; only the business model was repriced.

One action follows for anyone installing in 2026: size the array to daytime load, confirm sanctioned load with your DISCO before finalising the design, and price any storage against the avoided import tariff rather than against the Rs. 11 export rate. Export revenue should be the last line in the model, not the first.

Pakistan’s Net Metering Is Gone: Inside the NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026 and What Solar Now Actually Pays describes a durable repricing rather than a temporary setback — plan on the new arithmetic holding. Read more from theverge.pk for continuing analysis of energy, telecom and digital policy in Pakistan.

References

1. National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) — primary regulatory source for the text of the NEPRA (Alternative and Renewable Energy) Prosumer Regulations, 2026, notified as S.R.O. 251(I)/2026 on February 9, 2026. https://nepra.org.pk/
2. Dawn — national daily reporting on the draft regulations, the public backlash and the Prime Minister’s intervention preserving grandfathering for pre-February 2026 agreements. https://www.dawn.com/
3. pv magazine — specialist solar trade press coverage of Pakistan’s transition from net metering to net billing and the effect on installation demand through 2026. https://www.pv-magazine.com/
4. Business Recorder — financial reporting on the 3.2 billion unit decline in grid sales in FY2024 and the associated Rs. 101 billion distribution company revenue shortfall. https://www.brecorder.com/
5. The Express Tribune — reporting on net-metering capacity growth from 190 MW in FY2020 to roughly 7,000 MW by mid-2026 and on 2026 retail tariff levels. https://tribune.com.pk/
6. Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and University of Oxford — joint study, October 2026, on the concentration of registered net metering among higher-income consumers in well-served distribution areas. https://pide.org.pk/
7. Pakistan Today — reporting on the February 2026 fee structure, including the withdrawal of the licence fee for systems of 25 kW or below. https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/
8. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — reference for metering accuracy and measurement-standards practice relevant to bidirectional export measurement. https://www.nist.gov/

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