The federal solar credit is gone, the 60-day HOA clock is not
The federal solar credit is gone, the 60-day HOA clock is not
2026-09-15 · Oregon · Compliance
Every federal tax credit that helped an Oregon owner pay for rooftop solar or an association pay for common-area EV charging has now expired. The Oregon statutes obliging boards to permit both are untouched.1
What ended, and exactly when
Public Law 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025, terminated four credits on four different triggers. The trigger differs by section, which is where people get this wrong:
- Section 25D, Residential Clean Energy Credit — rooftop solar and battery storage. “The credit will not be allowed for any expenditures made after December 31, 2025.” The test is when the expenditure was made.
- Section 25C, Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit — “The credit will not be allowed for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025.” Placed in service, not purchased.
- Section 30C, Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit — EV charging equipment. “The credit will not be allowed for any property placed in service after June 30, 2026.”
- Section 30D, New Clean Vehicle Credit — “The credit will not be allowed for any vehicle acquired after September 30, 2025.”
All four dates have now passed.
What did not change
ORS 94.778, unamended since 2017: a provision in a planned community's declaration or bylaws prohibiting an owner from installing or using solar panels is “void and unenforceable as a violation of the public policy to protect the public health, safety and welfare of the people of Oregon” — subject to the board's power to impose “reasonable size, placement or aesthetic requirements.”2
ORS 94.762 for planned communities and ORS 100.627 for condominiums: an association may not prohibit a compliant electric vehicle charging station, and must approve a complete application within 60 days or give a written statement of reasonable conditions within that period.
The obligation on Oregon boards to permit these installations survives entirely. Only the federal money to pay for them is gone.
The EV charging deadline an association may have already missed
Section 30C was the one that mattered to associations as entities rather than to owners as individuals, because common-area charging is an association capital project.
An association had until June 30, 2026 to place the property in service. Anything energised on July 1 or later gets nothing.
Note also that section 30C was already geographically limited to eligible census tracts — non-urban or low-income — which excluded a large share of suburban Portland-metro addresses even before the cutoff. Many Oregon associations that assumed they had a credit available never did.
What remains is the statutory duty with no subsidy attached. An Oregon board receiving a complete EV charging application has 60 days to approve it or state reasonable conditions in writing, and the cost of any common-element work now falls entirely on the association or the applicant. Our Oregon EV charging page covers what a complete application looks like and what conditions are reasonable.
What is left at the state level
One programme, and one procedural change.
Senate Bill 827, chapter 230, Oregon Laws 2025, effective January 1, 2026, expanded the Oregon Solar and Storage Rebate Program to cover energy storage paired with previously installed solar. That is directly useful to an Oregon owner who put panels up years ago and now wants a battery — and it pairs with ORS 94.778, which voids the covenant that would stop them.
House Bill 4029, chapter 11, Oregon Laws 2026, effective June 5, 2026, requires solar energy contractors and installers to hold a licence appropriate to the scope of work. For an architectural committee reviewing an owner's solar application under ORS 94.778, the installer's licence is now a checkable fact, and one a board can reasonably ask about.
Why the cost shift matters to boards specifically
Because it changes the shape of the applications arriving.
Through 2025, an owner installing solar had a federal credit softening the cost, which made it easier to absorb a board's conditions — a different panel layout, a screened placement, a more expensive mounting system. From 2026 the owner pays the whole cost, and a condition that adds materially to it is a condition they are more likely to contest.
The statute gives boards room here that they do not have elsewhere. ORS 94.778(3)'s “reasonable size, placement or aesthetic requirements” is a broad carve-out, and it is a markedly more permissive standard than the one the Legislature wrote for fire-hardened materials in 2026 — where a governing-document provision is void if it has “the practical effect of prohibiting” hardened materials or requires materials that “cost substantially more than other fire-hardened building materials of similar quality,” with a 90-day deemed-approval clock behind it.
A board is operating two different regimes on the same roof. Our Oregon solar rights page sets out the solar side.
One more thing that did not change
The FCC's over-the-air reception devices rule, 47 CFR §1.4000, has not been amended since April 10, 2023. It preempts “any private covenant, contract provision, lease provision, homeowners' association rule or similar restriction, on property within the exclusive use or control of the antenna user” that impairs installation, maintenance or use of covered antennas — and since 2021 that expressly includes equipment used “to receive or transmit fixed wireless signals…including a hub or relay antenna.”3
A restriction impairs if it “unreasonably delays or prevents installation, maintenance, or use,” “unreasonably increases the cost,” or “precludes reception or transmission of an acceptable quality signal.”
Fixed wireless is how a great deal of rural and exurban Oregon gets broadband, and the 2021 hub-and-relay expansion is the part many association rules have not caught up with. The rule still does not reach true common areas — roofs and exterior walls owned by the association remain the board's to control.
What to watch next
Whether Oregon fills the gap. The state's own rebate programme is the only remaining subsidy, and demand for it will now include everyone who would otherwise have used section 25D. Watch the 2027 session, and watch the Public Utility Commission's AR 688, a rulemaking to update the net metering and small generator interconnection rules, which has not yet formally opened.
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