Solar Lease vs. Buying Solar Panels: What Actually Makes Sense in Westchester and the Boroughs

The right answer to “should I lease or buy?” depends less on solar and more on your ZIP code. A homeowner in Yonkers and a homeowner in Queens can look at the same roof and the same Con Ed bill and reasonably land on different choices. Here’s why.

Search solar lease vs buying solar panels and you’ll get a hundred generic comparisons written for the whole country. None of them account for the two things that decide this question in Con Edison territory: the price of the electricity you’re replacing, and which New York incentives are attached to owning the system rather than just hosting it. Since 2017 we’ve walked through this decision with homeowners from Mount Vernon to Staten Island, and the pattern is consistent enough to put in writing.

Why the lease-vs-buy math is different in Con Ed territory

Nationally, electricity averages about 14¢ per kilowatt-hour. In Westchester and the five boroughs, Con Edison customers average around 38¢/kWh — some households in White Plains and Riverdale see 52¢ on summer bills. Roughly two-thirds of that is the delivery charge, which runs about twice the supply charge and rises regardless of how the wholesale power market behaves. Con Ed has raised rates about 8% a year on average, which turns a $300 bill today into roughly $444 in five years.

That matters for the lease-vs-buy decision because both options replace the same expensive electricity. Whichever way you go, a typical $300 Con Ed bill becomes about $150 to $180 a month in combined solar and grid costs, with the only remaining Con Ed line being the ~$20 basic service fee for staying connected. The difference between leasing and buying isn’t whether you save — it’s who keeps the incentives, how the payment behaves over 20 years, and what happens when you sell the house.

What “lease” and “buy” mean here

Leasing (or a PPA)

A third party owns the panels on your roof. You pay a fixed monthly amount (a lease) or pay per kilowatt-hour produced (a power purchase agreement). You put nothing down, the owner handles maintenance and monitoring, and you get the lower bill. What you don’t get: the system’s incentives. The NY-Sun rebate and the state tax credit go to the owner, not you, because you don’t own anything. Most leases also include an annual payment escalator, and when you sell the home the buyer has to take over the contract.

Buying with $0 down

This is what the majority of State Solar customers in Westchester and NYC actually do. A solar loan covers the system, you own it from day one, and the monthly loan payment is typically lower than your current Con Ed bill. Because you own the panels, you receive the incentives: the installer applies the NY-Sun Megawatt Block rebate at the point of sale, you claim the New York State solar tax credit (25% of cost, up to $5,000, as a direct credit), and the system’s added value is exempt from your property assessment for 15 years. Once the loan is paid off, the electricity is yours at no monthly cost for the rest of the panels’ 25+ year life. (Cash and loan buyers can also claim the federal tax credit; leasing customers can’t.)

The borough factor: NYC’s abatement changes the answer

If your home is in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, or Manhattan, there’s an incentive that Westchester doesn’t have and that only owners can use: the NYC Solar Property Tax Abatement. It returns 30% of the installed cost as a credit against your property taxes, spread over four years. On a $30,000 system in Bayside or Canarsie, that’s $9,000 back — stacked on top of the state credit and the NY-Sun rebate.

A lease forfeits that entirely. That’s why, in the five boroughs, ownership wins for nearly every homeowner who has the property tax bill to apply it against. We rarely recommend a lease inside city limits unless there’s a specific reason the abatement can’t be claimed.

The Westchester factor: where leasing still gets a fair hearing

Outside the city — Yonkers, New Rochelle, Scarsdale, Tarrytown, Peekskill, and the rest of Westchester — there’s no NYC abatement, so the ownership advantage narrows to the state credit, the rebate, the property tax exemption, and the fact that a loan payment ends while a lease payment doesn’t. That’s still a meaningful gap, but it’s smaller, and it leaves room for a lease to make sense in a few real situations:

• You don’t have state tax liability to absorb the credit. The 25% credit offsets New York income tax; retirees or households with low taxable income may not be able to use all of it. (It can carry forward, so this is a smaller issue than it sounds, but it’s worth checking.)
• You want zero responsibility for the equipment. Modern panels need almost no maintenance and carry 25-year warranties, but some homeowners simply prefer that someone else owns the problem.
• You’re planning to move within a few years. Both options transfer, but a paid-down or paid-off owned system is a straightforward asset at closing; a lease requires the buyer to qualify for and accept the contract.

A quick way to decide

Start with your address. In the five boroughs, buying almost always wins because of the abatement. In Westchester, buying usually wins, but a lease is a legitimate choice if you can’t use the tax credit or you value hands-off simplicity above the long-term numbers. In either place, the outcome you’re avoiding is the same one: staying on a Con Ed bill that’s climbing 8% a year with nothing to show for it.

Whichever way you lean, the numbers should come from your actual bill and your actual roof, not a national average. That’s the free analysis we run for every homeowner in Westchester, NYC, and the surrounding New Jersey and Connecticut towns — and we’ll tell you plainly if a lease is the better fit for your situation.