In March 2026, PG&E added a line to every residential bill that most solar quotes still do not mention. It is called the Base Services Charge, it is about $24 a month, and PG&E’s own solar billing page states that it “is not eligible to be offset by monthly generation credits.”
That one sentence changes the arithmetic on every solar proposal in our service area, ours included. It is the reason we rebuilt our savings calculator in August 2026 and stopped showing offset figures in the eighties and nineties. Here is what the charge is, who pays it, and what it does to your numbers.
Rates and rules verified 30 August 2026 against pge.com and PG&E Advice Letter 7846-E.
What is the Base Services Charge, and when did it start?
The Base Services Charge began in March 2026 as part of a wider restructure of PG&E’s residential bill. Most residential customers pay around $24.00 a month. It is calculated per day, so the exact amount moves slightly with the length of your billing period.
It is a fixed charge. It does not rise when you use more electricity or fall when you use less. Unplug everything in the house for a month and you still owe it.
It did not arrive on its own. PG&E paired it with a cut to the per-kilowatt-hour price of roughly 5 to 7 cents for all residential customers. The trade was deliberate: more of your bill is fixed, less is tied to consumption.
One number worth getting straight, because it turns up in a lot of quotes. PG&E’s average bundled residential rate as of 1 March 2026 is 40.6 cents per kWh (Advice Letter 7846-E). That figure includes the fixed charge, spread across an average customer’s kWh. The volumetric rate on its own — the price of the next kilowatt-hour you actually avoid buying — is closer to 36 cents. A proposal that values your production at 40.6 cents is counting the fixed charge twice, once as a saving and once as a charge you still owe. More on the 2026 rate picture in what solar owners actually pay PG&E.
Do solar customers pay it too?
Yes. Every residential customer pays it, solar or not.
If you already have solar, you may have noticed the change on a bill this spring. Before March 2026, a solar customer with a very small net bill paid PG&E’s Minimum Electric Charge. The Base Services Charge replaced it. In PG&E’s words, it “will be approximately $10 more than the monthly Minimum Electric Charge.”
So an existing solar household that used to see a floor of roughly $14 a month now sees roughly $24, about $120 more a year, and nothing about the system on the roof changes that.
This is the most predictable complaint in our business and it is entirely avoidable. If a proposal does not mention the $24 before you sign, you find out on your first post-install bill instead.
Can solar credits offset the base charge?
No. This is the part that matters most, so we will quote PG&E rather than paraphrase:
> “Base Services Charge is not eligible to be offset by monthly generation credits.”
Generation credits are what you earn for power your panels send to the grid. They reduce the energy portion of your bill and do not touch the Base Services Charge.
The consequence is arithmetic, not opinion. If $24 of your bill cannot be offset, then the largest offset any solar system can ever produce is the rest of the bill divided by the whole bill:
| Your current monthly bill | Cannot be offset | Absolute maximum offset |
|—|—|—|
| $100 | $24 | 76% |
| $150 | $24 | 84% |
| $220 | $24 | 89% |
| $300 | $24 | 92% |
Those are ceilings, not forecasts. They assume a system so large it drives the energy portion of your bill to zero, which no sensibly sized system does under current export rules. Real solar-only offsets in our area land closer to 40 to 55 percent of the total bill.
The practical version: no PG&E residential solar system can eliminate 100 percent of your bill. Since March 2026 it is not merely optimistic to promise one, it is impossible. If a proposal shows a $0 PG&E bill, that is the line to ask about. Our FAQ covers the other claims worth questioning, and our savings calculator treats the $24 as non-offsettable, which is why its numbers come out lower than most.
Do CARE and FERA households pay less?
Yes. PG&E charges a reduced Base Services Charge to income-qualified households: around $6.00 a month on CARE, and around $12.00 a month on FERA and for deed-restricted affordable housing.
There is a wrinkle here that runs against intuition. A smaller fixed charge means a higher arithmetic ceiling — on CARE only $6 of your bill is un-offsettable rather than $24. But CARE households also pay discounted energy rates, so the kilowatt-hours your system displaces are worth less and the absolute dollars it saves each year are lower. A higher percentage of a smaller number.
Both are true at once, and which one dominates depends on your usage. If you are on CARE or FERA, tell us at the start and we will run your numbers on your actual rate.
Does the lower per-kWh rate cancel it out for your household?
For some households, yes. For solar households, usually not.
Work the break-even yourself. The volumetric cut was roughly 5 to 7 cents per kWh, and the fixed charge is $24. Divide one by the other: you need to buy somewhere between about 340 and 480 kWh a month from PG&E for the per-kWh savings to cover the new fixed charge. Buy more than that and the restructure left you ahead. Buy less and it left you behind.
Now apply that to a solar home. The entire point of your system is to reduce the number of kilowatt-hours you buy. The better your system performs, the fewer kWh you purchase, and the less of the volumetric discount you collect — while paying the full $24 either way.
Said plainly: the March 2026 restructure is mildly good for high-usage households without solar, and mildly bad for solar owners. It is not a disaster and it does not change whether solar is worth doing for most homes here. But it is a real cost, it is in every proposal we write, and it is one reason our payback figures run longer than the ones you will see elsewhere. More on how we design around a household’s actual usage on our residential solar page.
Does this change whether a battery is worth it?
It changes it less than people expect, because a battery cannot touch the $24 either. Nothing can.
What a battery does is attack the energy portion of the bill — the part solar can reach — by storing midday production and using it in the evening instead of selling it cheaply. That pushes a typical offset from roughly 40–55 percent up to roughly 55–75 percent of the total bill.
Here is the honest version with our own numbers. On a $220 monthly bill, our calculator sizes a 4.5 kW system, saves about $1,105 in the first year, covers about 42 percent of the bill, and pays for itself in about 11.4 years. Add a battery at roughly $15,000 and the payback stretches to around 16 years at that bill level. The battery buys you resilience and a bigger offset; it does not buy you a faster payback until your bill is larger, generally somewhere north of $250 to $300 a month.
We go through that trade in detail in do you actually need a battery with solar in the East Bay, and the broader question of whether the whole thing still pencils in is solar still worth it in Contra Costa in 2026.
Where that leaves you
The $24 is real, no solar system offsets it, and any figure implying a zero bill was either calculated before March 2026 or calculated wrong. The right response is not to abandon solar. It is to size the system against the part of the bill solar can actually reach — which is what our calculator does, using the $24 charge, a 36-cent volumetric rate and no federal tax credit.
—
Want a second opinion on a quote you already have?
We will look at it with you for free, tell you where the numbers are optimistic, and tell you if we think solar is not right for your roof. No pressure, no follow-up campaign. Navjot and Nam do the consultations themselves.
Run your own numbers first, then get in touch.
Singh Solar Couple designs and project-manages residential and commercial solar in Concord and across Contra Costa County. The physical installation is carried out by our licensed contractor partners.