Four tiers, and you are joining the fourth
The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada describes four net metering tiers. Tier 1 credited 95 percent of the retail rate and closed in August 2018. Tier 2 credited 88 percent and closed in June 2019. Tier 3 credited 81 percent and closed in June 2020. Tier 4 credits 75 percent of the retail rate, is currently open and has no capacity limit.
New customers must enroll in Tier 4. There is no queue to join and no capacity limit to race against, which removes the urgency that surrounded earlier tiers, but it also means 75 percent is the number your project has to work at.
That is well below one-to-one, and it means the standard framing of net metering, where an exported kilowatt hour offsets one you buy later at the same price, does not describe your arrangement. Exports are worth less than the electricity you buy.
Ask any installer whether their savings projection uses 75 percent of the retail rate for exported energy. A model built on one-to-one crediting, or copied from an older Nevada template, will overstate your return.
Twenty years, attached to the address
Customers who sign up under any tier will keep it for a period of 20 years at the location where the net metering system was originally installed. Note the wording: the tier attaches to the location, not to you.
That has two consequences. If you sell, the arrangement is part of what the house comes with, which is worth documenting for a buyer alongside the permits and interconnection paperwork. And if you move to another Nevada address and install again, you are joining whatever tier is open then rather than carrying yours with you.
It also means a twenty-year savings projection is not entirely speculative on the export side, which is genuinely unusual. The credit percentage is fixed for the term, so the uncertainty sits in retail rates rather than in the arrangement itself.
Ask your installer to state plainly what the projection assumes about retail rates over those twenty years, since 75 percent of a moving number is still a moving number.
How the credits behave, and what that means for sizing
When your system produces more than you use in a billing period, the excess is pushed back onto the grid. You earn credits for it, those credits are recorded on your electric bill, and they are automatically applied in the next billing period in which you consume more than you produce.
So credits do carry forward and get used, which softens the seasonal mismatch. What they do not do is convert an exported kilowatt hour into a full retail one, because the credit was earned at 75 percent.
That is why electricity you consume as it is generated is worth more here than electricity you export. Ask your installer to model the self-consumed share explicitly and to value the remainder at 75 percent of retail rather than at retail.
It also makes free habits worth something. Running laundry, dishwashing and any vehicle charging in daylight, and pre-cooling the house while production is strong, raises the share you consume rather than export, and costs nothing to change.
The tier you join, and the federal credit that ended
New Nevada customers must enroll in Tier 4, which credits excess energy at 75 percent of the retail rate. Tier 1 credited 95 percent and closed in August 2018, Tier 2 credited 88 percent and closed in June 2019, and Tier 3 credited 81 percent and closed in June 2020.
Customers keep their tier for a period of 20 years at the location where the net metering system was originally installed. That is a long commitment attached to a property rather than to a person, and it is worth understanding before you sign.
Because a neighbour who installed in 2018 or 2019 is on a materially better tier than you can join, their reported payback is accurate for their project and is not a guide to yours. That is not them being misleading, it is a different arrangement entirely.
On the federal side, the 30 percent Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, so a cash or loan purchase now receives no federal credit. Section 48E survives at 30 percent for third-party owners under leases and power purchase agreements, so ask any such provider what they claim and what of that value reaches you, and confirm with a tax advisor.