No, you can no longer buy a Tesla Solar Roof. On August 20, 2026, Tesla told installers the solar roof tiles were no longer available to order, and tesla.com/solarroof now redirects to Tesla’s solar panel page. Existing systems keep their 25-year warranty, which transfers with the home. Tesla still sells conventional solar panels and Powerwall. For California homeowners who need a roof and solar, a new asphalt roof plus rooftop panels runs roughly $29,000 to $43,000 installed, against roughly $110,000 to $125,000 for the Solar Roof it replaces.
Here is what happened, what it cost, what happens to your warranty, and what to do instead if your roof is due.
Key takeaways
- Tesla stopped taking Solar Roof orders on August 20, 2026, after about 3,000 total US installations in seven years.
- Existing Solar Roof warranties are still valid and still transfer to a new owner. Discontinuing a product does not void coverage.
- Real-world Solar Roof pricing landed near $62 per square foot of roof, roughly $16 per watt, against $2.40 to $3.25 per watt for standard panels in California.
- California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program general market residential battery budget is closed as of August 2026, and the federal Section 25D credit expired December 31, 2025. Model your project on current rules, not 2024 rules.
- Solar shingles still exist. GAF Energy’s Timberline Solar ES2 is the main remaining option, and it makes sense for a narrow set of homes.
Is the Tesla Solar Roof still available?
No. Tesla stopped accepting Solar Roof orders on August 20, 2026. Electrek first reported that Tesla notified third-party installers the tiles were no longer orderable, and The Verge confirmed the product had been pulled. Tesla’s Solar Roof page now redirects to its solar panels page, and Solar Roof was removed from the Energy navigation menu entirely. Internal sources told Electrek that Tesla concluded the product was not financially viable.
What happened, and how we got here
Tesla unveiled the Solar Roof in October 2016 on a Hollywood back lot, using houses borrowed from the Desperate Housewives set. That same year Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion. Elon Musk’s stated target was 1,000 Solar Roof installations per week.
Peak deployment was roughly 20 to 40 roofs per week in 2022, and the estimated seven-year US total is about 3,000 systems. That is more than 95 percent short of the target, and it is the whole story in one number. A product that installs 3,000 units in seven years never reaches the scale that makes it affordable, which means it stays expensive, which means it keeps installing 3,000 units.
How much did the Tesla Solar Roof actually cost?
Industry cost tracking put real-world Solar Roof pricing near $62 per square foot of roof space, or roughly $16 per watt, with an average completed system around $106,000 and quotes reported as high as $200,000. Tesla’s original 2016 promise was about $22 per square foot, pitched as cheaper than a new roof plus conventional panels combined. The gap between those two numbers is why the product is gone.
In 2021 Tesla repriced signed contracts. One widely reported case moved from roughly $72,000 to roughly $146,000. Tesla settled the resulting class action for $6 million in 2023.
Table 1: Installed cost by roof-plus-solar approach, California, 2026
| Approach | Installed cost, 2,000 sq ft roof | Cost per watt | Power density |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla Solar Roof (discontinued) | ~$110,000 to $125,000 | ~$16/W | Not published; roof mixes active and inactive tiles |
| GAF Timberline Solar ES2 shingles | No published price; comparable to a new roof plus panels, at a premium | Not published | ~17 W/sq ft (1.7 kW per roofing square) |
| New asphalt roof + rooftop panels | ~$29,000 to $43,000 | ~$2.40 to $3.25/W for the solar | ~24 W/sq ft |
| New tile roof + rooftop panels | ~$42,000 to $73,000 | ~$2.40 to $3.25/W for the solar | ~24 W/sq ft |
Solar pricing from our own California solar cost guide. Roof replacement ranges are 2026 California industry estimates: asphalt shingle $4.50 to $9.00 per square foot, concrete or clay tile $10 to $26 per square foot. Bay Area projects run at or above the top of both ranges. Solar Roof figures reflect reported real-world pricing, not Tesla list pricing.
The power density column is the one nobody talks about, and it is the quiet reason integrated roofing loses. A solar tile has to be a roofing product first, so part of its surface area is structural rather than photovoltaic, and a Solar Roof mixes active tiles with inactive ones to cover the whole plane. Rack-mounted panels put roughly 24 watts on every square foot they occupy. GAF’s solar shingle puts about 17. Tesla never published a comparable figure, but the same physics applied. On a roof with limited south-facing plane, that difference decides whether you can offset your bill at all.
Tesla Solar Roof vs solar panels: the arithmetic that ended it
For the same amount of electricity, a Tesla Solar Roof cost California homeowners roughly $80,000 more than a new roof plus rooftop panels. Here is the math on a real profile.
Take a Fresno home with a 2,000 square foot composition shingle roof that is due for replacement, and about 1,000 kWh of monthly usage on PG&E’s E-TOU-C rate. Call it a 7.2 kW system, which in the Central Valley produces roughly 11,000 kWh a year.
Table 2: Fresno worked example, 7.2 kW system on a 2,000 sq ft roof
| Line item | New roof + panels | Tesla Solar Roof |
|---|---|---|
| Roof replacement (asphalt) | $12,000 to $20,000 | Included |
| Solar (7.2 kW) | $17,280 to $23,400 | Included |
| Total installed | $29,280 to $43,400 | ~$115,000 |
| Annual production | ~11,000 kWh | ~11,000 kWh |
| Federal credit, 2026 purchase | $0 | $0 |
The two columns generate the same electricity. The right column costs roughly $80,000 more to do it. That extra money buys appearance, and appearance is a real thing some homeowners will pay for, but it never bought a single additional kilowatt-hour.
On the savings side, PG&E’s filed E-TOU-C tariff effective June 1, 2026 puts summer peak at 52.24 cents per kWh from 4pm to 9pm and summer off-peak at 39.94 cents, with a baseline credit of 8.14 cents on baseline usage. Payback on the solar portion alone typically lands in the 6 to 9 year range, depending on how much production the household consumes on site rather than exports. Add the roof cost and the package still pencils. At $115,000, nothing pencils.
What happens to your Tesla Solar Roof warranty now?
Your warranty is still valid. Tesla discontinuing the product does not cancel coverage on a system already installed. Per Tesla’s Solar Roof Limited Warranty for the USA, effective May 7, 2026, an installed Solar Roof carries:
- 25 years against defects in design and materials
- 25 years of weatherization coverage, meaning the tiles stay in place and keep wind and rain out
- 25 years of power output coverage, guaranteeing at least 95.0 percent of rated peak power at year 5 and no more than 0.5 percent decline per year after that
- Transferability to any subsequent owner of the home who provides proof of ownership, using the original installation date
Read the weatherization terms closely, because this is where coverage thins out and most write-ups skip it. Years 1 through 10 are covered in full. Starting in year 11, coverage drops to 60 percent of material costs and falls another 4 percent each year after that, and labor is not covered during the prorated period. On a roof, labor is the expensive half.
Two things we would do today if we owned one. Download your warranty PDF and original installation paperwork and store them somewhere you will still find them in 2035. Then understand the risk no warranty document addresses: Tesla has published no commitment on long-term tile supply or trained service crews for a product it no longer sells. Coverage on paper is only as good as the parts and labor available to honor it. If you sell the home, hand the buyer that documentation package. It protects your resale value.
Why the Solar Roof never worked, in plain terms
Four things went wrong, and they compound.
- Proprietary parts never got cheap. Standard modules are a global commodity built at enormous scale. Tesla’s tiles were unique to Tesla and required proprietary manufacturing. At 3,000 lifetime units, no scale ever arrived to bring the cost down.
- Installation was slow and specialized. A rooftop array on a California home is a one to two day install by a crew that does it weekly. A Solar Roof was a full tear-off and rebuild by a small pool of trained crews. Labor cost tracked accordingly.
- The tiles ran hot. Owners reported systems underproducing against Tesla’s estimates, and heat is the likely cause. Cell voltage falls roughly 0.5 percent per degree Celsius, and the airflow gap under an integrated tile is far tighter than under a rack-mounted panel sitting several inches off the deck. That mounting gap is not a design detail. It is free performance.
- Durability reports piled up. Non-solar components warping, and roof underlayment melting under sustained sun exposure.
- The lesson generalizes past Tesla. On a California roof, boring and standardized beats clever and proprietary, because boring and standardized is what you can still get parts and crews for in year 12.
Are solar shingles still an option in California?
Yes, but the field narrowed to essentially one serious product. GAF Energy’s Timberline Solar ES2 is the main remaining nailable solar shingle, at roughly 57 watts per shingle and about 1.7 kW per roofing square, which works out near 17 watts per square foot. Its warranty runs 25 years against defects and 25 years on production, guaranteeing 84.8 percent of rated output at year 25, with wind coverage to 130 mph.
GAF does not publish dollar pricing, and we will not invent one. Treat any firm number you see online as a guess.
A solar shingle still makes sense for a narrow set of California homes:
- Your roof needs replacement anyway, so you are already spending roofing money
- An HOA or a design guideline restricts visible rooftop equipment
- Your roof has usable plane but you value appearance enough to accept lower watts per square foot and a real cost premium
If none of those describe you, standard panels win on every measurable axis. Our full guide to solar roof shingles and what they cost goes deeper on the comparison.
What we recommend instead if you need a roof and solar
Roof first, then panels sized to your actual load, then storage. In that order, and all under one contract if you can manage it, because a re-roof after a solar install means paying to remove and reset the array.
Three California-specific rules govern the math in 2026, and getting any of them wrong will make your project look better on paper than it performs.
The federal residential credit is gone. The Section 25D credit expired December 31, 2025. The IRS states plainly that the credit is not available for property placed in service after that date. If you buy a system in 2026, model it at zero federal credit. One nuance worth raising with your tax professional rather than settling from a blog: the IRS page keys expiration to placed in service, while the statute keys it to expenditures made, which matters if you paid in 2025 and were installed in 2026. Third-party owned systems, meaning leases and PPAs, sit under a different section of the code and can still access a commercial credit. Our California solar tax credit guide tracks what is left.
You are on the Net Billing Tariff. Every California homeowner who applied for interconnection on or after April 15, 2023 takes service under CPUC’s Net Billing Tariff, commonly called NEM 3.0. Exported energy is compensated at hourly avoided-cost values that CPUC describes as usually lower than the retail rate, though they can rise above retail on late summer evenings. There is no single published average export rate, and any installer quoting you one is estimating. What matters practically: exporting is worth much less than it was under NEM 2.0, so the value now comes from consuming your own production, which is what a battery is for.
The general market SGIP battery rebate is closed. As of the SGIP program tracker on August 23, 2026, the Small Residential Storage general market budget sits at Step 7 and is closed, at what was a $150 per kWh rate. Equity Resiliency at $1,000 per kWh is also closed. The only residential paths still accepting applications run through the Residential Solar and Storage Equity budget under AB 209, which is open in publicly owned utility territories and waitlisted elsewhere. A lot of 2026 quotes still show an SGIP line item. Ask any installer to show you the current program status before you accept a number that includes it.
Put those three together and the shape of a good California project in 2026 is clear: right-sized solar, a battery to capture the value the Net Billing Tariff took away, and a roof that will outlive the array. See our guides to battery storage options and roofing, or compare installers in our best solar companies in California roundup.
Tesla Solar Roof FAQ
Is the Tesla Solar Roof still available? No. Tesla stopped taking orders on August 20, 2026 and removed the product from its website. Tesla continues to sell conventional solar panels and the Powerwall 3.
How much did a Tesla Solar Roof cost? Real-world pricing landed near $62 per square foot of roof, roughly $16 per watt, with an average system around $106,000. Quotes as high as $200,000 were reported. The original 2016 promise was about $22 per square foot.
Are Tesla solar roofs worth it? They were not, on cost per watt. A new roof plus rooftop panels delivered the same electricity for roughly $80,000 less on a typical California home. The Solar Roof’s advantage was appearance, which is a legitimate reason to pay more but was never worth that spread.
What are the drawbacks of Tesla solar shingles? Cost, lower watts per square foot than rack-mounted panels, heat-related underproduction, slow specialized installation, and reported issues with warping components and melting underlayment. Now add discontinuation risk on parts and service.
What is the lifespan of a Tesla Solar Roof? Tesla’s warranty runs 25 years on defects, weatherization, and power output, guaranteeing at least 95.0 percent of rated peak power at year 5 with no more than 0.5 percent annual decline after. Physical roof life should exceed that.
Do Tesla solar roofs qualify for tax credits? Not for a 2026 purchase. The federal Section 25D residential credit expired December 31, 2025. Historically, only the active solar tiles qualified, never the inactive roofing tiles. Talk to a tax professional about any 2025 expenditure with a 2026 installation date.
What happens to my Tesla Solar Roof warranty now that the product is discontinued? It stays in force and it still transfers to a new owner with proof of home ownership. Note that weatherization coverage prorates after year 10, starting at 60 percent of material costs in year 11 and dropping 4 percent annually, with no labor coverage in that period.
Can I still get replacement tiles for a Tesla Solar Roof? Tesla has not published a commitment on long-term tile supply or service crews. Warranty claims should still be honored, but we recommend owners collect their warranty documentation and installation records now rather than later.
Get a straight answer on your roof
If your roof is aging and you were considering a solar roof, the decision just got simpler. We will look at your roof plane, your utility, your actual usage, and tell you honestly whether shingles or standard panels fit, including when the answer is to wait.
Get a personalized quote in 2 minutes, or see where we work across California. If you are shopping around, our Fresno installer roundup shows how to compare bids without getting talked into a bigger system than you need.
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