Bills and rebates
The battery discount falls every six months to 2030. The date you install picks your number.
The federal battery discount is paid in certificates, and the number of
certificates a battery earns per kWh is set by something called the STC Factor.
Until this year it stepped down once a year. Regulation amendments finalised in February and in
force since 1 May 2026 changed that to twice a year, and faster.
The department has published the whole schedule out to 2030, and it runs from
8.4 in the first four months of 2026 down to 2.1 in the second
half of 2030. The rule that decides which one you get is short:
The discount that you are entitled to is determined by the STC Factor on the date the battery
is installed.
Most questions about the Cheaper Home Batteries Program come down to one thing a household actually controls: when to install. That question used to have a vague answer. It now has a published one, because the department has set out the certificate rate for every six month period to the end of 2030.
What changed, and when
The department states the mechanism plainly:
On 5 February 2026, amendments to the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Regulations 2001 were
finalised. Two changes to the program came into effect on 1 May 2026.
The first change is the one that puts a clock on the decision. The STC Factor,
which determines the number of STCs a system is entitled to create per kWh of useable
capacity
, was adjusted to decline more frequently (every 6 months)
and to
decline at a higher rate.
The second change was the size taper, which sets the proportion of the factor that applies to each band of installed capacity. We covered that when it landed, in the arithmetic of the tiered discount, and it is unchanged by anything here. The two work together: the taper decides how much of the factor your kWh earn, and the schedule below decides what the factor is on the day.
The published schedule
| Year | Period | Amended STC factor | Fall from the period before |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | January to April | 8.4 | baseline |
| 2026 | May to December | 6.8 | 19% |
| 2027 | January to June | 5.7 | 16% |
| 2027 | July to December | 5.2 | 8.8% |
| 2028 | January to June | 4.6 | 12% |
| 2028 | July to December | 4.1 | 11% |
| 2029 | January to June | 3.6 | 12% |
| 2029 | July to December | 3.1 | 14% |
| 2030 | January to June | 2.6 | 16% |
| 2030 | July to December | 2.1 | 19% |
Year, period and factor are Table 1 of the department’s Cheaper Home Batteries Program page, reproduced in full. The fall column is our arithmetic on those published figures, rounded to two significant figures.
Read down the last column and the shape is not a smooth glide. The steps are uneven, between 8.8 and 19 per cent, because the factors are published to one decimal place and a 0.5 step is a bigger proportion of a small number than of a large one. The overall move is easier to state: 8.4 to 2.1 is a fall of exactly three quarters across five years.
Why a smaller number is not automatically a worse deal
The obvious reading is that the subsidy is being cut. That is not what the department says it is doing, and the distinction matters if you are trying to decide anything.
The stated purpose of the adjustment is that the discount remains at around 30% for a range
of batteries across battery sizes
and that the discount aligns with falling battery costs
over time
. In other words the certificate count is meant to fall because battery
prices are expected to fall, holding the percentage roughly steady. On the department’s own
framing, a household installing in 2029 at a lower factor is meant to be getting about the same
proportion off a smaller bill.
So the schedule is an indexation assumption as much as a budget decision, and that is the part worth watching. The 30 per cent is an aim, not a guarantee. The factor is fixed in regulation and steps down on the calendar whatever the market does; battery prices are not. If prices fall as assumed, the deal holds. If they fall more slowly than the factor does, the real discount shrinks, and nothing in the schedule adjusts for that on its own.
That is our reading rather than the department’s, and it is built on the two statements quoted above. We are not forecasting battery prices and we would not publish a number if we did.
What this means for a decision
Three things follow, and only the first is certain.
The installation date is the trigger, not the order date, the quote or the deposit.
The department ties entitlement to the date the battery is installed
. A job quoted in one
period and installed in the next earns the later, lower factor, and that is a scheduling question
worth asking an installer directly rather than assuming.
Waiting never increases the certificate count. Under a published schedule that only steps down, there is no future period that pays more per kWh than today. That is the opposite of the usual advice on technology purchases, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
But waiting may still be right, because the certificate count is not the price. If a battery costs meaningfully less next year, a smaller discount on a smaller number can leave you better off. We cannot tell you which way that lands, and anyone who tells you with confidence is forecasting a hardware market. What you can do is get the two numbers for your own case rather than reasoning about percentages: the department points to the REC Registry small generation unit STC calculator for the certificate side.
What this page is, and is not
This is the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program only, read from the department’s own program page on 30 August 2026. It is not financial advice, and it does not price a battery: the dollar value of a certificate moves with the market and we have deliberately not converted the factor into dollars, because that figure would be out of date before it was useful.
State and territory schemes are separate and are not covered here. The department notes that
the program is intended to complement other Commonwealth, state and territory incentives
and that people could be eligible for support under multiple schemes
, with eligibility to
be checked with the relevant government. The eligibility conditions on the product and the
installer are a different question again, and we have written about
which links in that chain are actually compulsory.
The schedule is what the regulations currently provide. Regulations can be amended, as they were in February 2026, so a factor for a period years away is a stated intention and not a promise. We will update this page if the table changes.
Sources
- Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Cheaper Home Batteries Program, read 30 August 2026: the 5 February 2026 amendments and the 1 May 2026 commencement, the two changes, Table 1 in full, the installation-date rule, the stated aims, the size taper bands, and the complementarity with state and territory schemes.
- Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Eligibility information for the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, read 30 August 2026: the program eligibility conditions referred to above.
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