An exemption your town has to have adopted
RSA 72:62 provides that each city and town may adopt, under RSA 72:27-a, an exemption from the assessed value for property owners with solar energy systems. The word is may, not shall.
That makes it a local option rather than a statewide entitlement. A homeowner in one New Hampshire town can receive it while a homeowner a few miles away, on identical equipment, receives nothing.
The statute also sets no amount. Each municipality that adopts the exemption decides how much value to exempt, so the benefit varies between adopting towns as well as between adopting and non-adopting ones.
Roughly two thirds of New Hampshire municipalities have adopted it, which is a majority but leaves a substantial minority where it does not apply.
Finding out where your town stands
Ask your town or city assessing office directly whether the municipality has adopted the RSA 72:62 exemption, what amount it exempts, and what application and deadline apply.
That is a single phone call and it produces a definitive answer. Do not take the question to an installer working a statewide script, because the answer is genuinely municipal.
If your town has adopted it, ask what documentation the assessor wants, typically an itemised cost breakdown and a description of the installed equipment, and get that from your installer.
Ask whether the adopted exemption covers battery storage. Coverage generally extends to panels, inverters, racking, wiring and storage, but since each municipality sets its own terms, that is worth confirming locally.
If your town has not adopted it
This is one of the few incentives an individual homeowner can actually do something about, because adoption happens at town meeting.
The route is a warrant article. Contact your selectboard or town administrator and request that RSA 72:62 adoption be placed on the warrant for the next town meeting.
A petitioned warrant article is the alternative if the selectboard does not put it forward, and typically requires a modest number of signatures from registered voters, on the order of twenty-five.
Timing matters. Town meeting happens once a year, so the practical question is whether waiting for a vote fits your project timeline, and the honest answer for most households is that it does not. Build the arithmetic without the exemption if your town has not adopted it.
The pieces that remain, kept separate
The 30 percent federal Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, so a cash or loan purchase receives no federal tax credit, and New Hampshire has no state income tax credit or rebate.
Section 48E survives at 30 percent for third-party owners under leases and power purchase agreements, so ask what a provider claims and what reaches you in the rate.
Include the RSA 72:62 property tax exemption only if you have confirmed with your own assessing office that your municipality has adopted it and at what amount.
Then add Net Metering 2.0 at the partial credit rate, the absence of sales tax, and the electricity you stop buying at roughly 24 to 27 cents per kWh.