The Smart Export Guarantee Explained

Any solar electricity you generate but don’t use at home doesn’t just disappear, it’s exported to the grid, and under the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG), your supplier has to pay you for it.

How it works

SEG replaced the old Feed-in Tariff in 2020. Unlike the Feed-in Tariff, which paid a fixed rate for years regardless of who you were with, SEG is a competitive market: every electricity supplier above a certain size must offer at least one export tariff, and you’re free to shop around for the best rate, including switching to a different supplier for exports only than the one that supplies your import electricity.

What rates actually look like

SEG rates vary a lot by supplier and tariff type, roughly:

Tariff type	Typical rate
Basic/flat export tariff	3p to 5p per kWh
Standard market-rate tariff	15p to 20p per kWh
Agile/dynamic export tariff	Varies by half-hour, can spike well above 20p per kWh at peak demand

A typical 4kWp system might export somewhere around 1,500 to 2,500kWh a year (depending on how much you use at home versus generate), which at an average 13p/kWh rate works out to roughly £195 to £325 a year in export income on top of the savings from using your own generation directly.

Getting the most from it

• Shop around annually. You don’t have to take your electricity supplier’s export tariff by default, compare rates the same way you’d compare import tariffs.
• A smart export meter is required. You’ll need a meter capable of half-hourly export readings to qualify for most tariffs, your installer or supplier can confirm this is fitted.
• Weigh export income against a battery. Every kWh you store and use yourself instead of exporting saves you the full import rate (often 25p to 30p+), usually worth more than the export payment. SEG income matters most for the generation you can’t use yourself, see our battery guide for how that trade-off plays out.
• Know that your rate is protected, but only your rate. Ofgem requires SEG tariffs to pay above zero even as wholesale prices increasingly go negative at midday. See our negative electricity prices explainer for why that’s happening and what it means for tariff choice.

Bottom line

SEG won’t make or break your solar payback on its own, but it’s a genuine ongoing income stream on top of your direct usage savings, and it’s worth actively shopping for rather than defaulting to whatever your supplier offers. It adds up nationally too: Octopus alone paid out £99.2m to over 400,000 households on its export tariff between August 2025 and July 2026, an average of £244 per home, for 825 GWh fed back to the grid. Get matched with vetted installers to get your system quoted, then compare SEG tariffs once it’s live.

Frequently asked questions