Allowed in every zoning district, and no screening required
The City of Durham states that solar panels and other photovoltaic systems are allowed as an accessory use in all zoning districts. There is no district where a residential rooftop array is a use you have to argue for, which settles a question that consumes a surprising amount of time elsewhere.
For roof-mounted installations on single and two-family homes, screening is not required. That matters more than it sounds. Screening requirements are how a jurisdiction quietly makes rooftop solar expensive or ugly, and Durham has declined to impose them on ordinary homes.
The practical consequence is that your design can be driven by production rather than by concealment. Orientation, pitch and shading decide output, and in Durham you are free to optimise for them on a single or two-family home rather than trading output away to hide the array.
None of that removes the permits. North Carolina requires both a building permit and an electrical permit from the local authority having jurisdiction, and Durham publishes a Solar Photovoltaic system permitting checklist through the City-County Building and Safety Department. Ask your installer to work from that checklist and agree in writing who files each permit.
Historic areas: a Minor Certificate, and the roof surface matters
In Durham historic areas, roof-mounted panels require a Minor Certificate of Appropriateness where their street visibility is minimized. That is a comparatively light-touch route, and the phrase to notice is street visibility, because it tells you what the review is actually weighing.
There is a second condition that is easy to miss and expensive to discover late. Panels must also not create damage to a historic roof surface, such as slate or terra cotta. This is not an aesthetic judgement, it is a physical one about what mounting hardware does to a covering that cannot simply be patched.
If your home has a slate or tile roof, raise it in the first conversation with any installer rather than the last. Mounting on those coverings is a specialist job, the hardware differs from what is used on asphalt shingles, and an installer whose experience is entirely on shingle roofs may not be the right choice regardless of price.
That roof type has a second consequence under state rules. The North Carolina inspection procedure for residential rooftop solar requires a North Carolina registered design professional to seal the structural design when the roofing material is of a type other than asphalt shingles or metal, so a slate or tile roof brings an engineering requirement with it.
Settle the roof before the array
Panels outlast most roof coverings, so a covering within a few years of replacement should be replaced first rather than paying later to remove and reinstall the array. That is the single most common avoidable cost in residential solar and it is entirely within your control at the quoting stage.
Ask how many layers of asphalt shingles your roof carries, because the state inspection procedure requires a sealed structural design when a roof has more than one layer. A second layer you did not know about turns into an engineering requirement and a change order.
The same procedure applies when the weight of the PV system exceeds three pounds per square foot. Ask your installer what the finished system weighs per square foot and whether a sealed structural design is included in the price or billed separately, so that two quotes can be compared on the same basis.
Then deal with shading. Durham's mature tree cover is one of the better things about living there and one of the harder things about rooftop solar, so ask for a shading assessment covering the whole year rather than an impression formed during the site visit.
Duke changed the rules, and so did Washington
Durham is served by Duke Energy, and Duke Energy no longer offers legacy flat retail net metering to new residential solar customers. New customers are placed on time-differentiated net-metering or bridge rate options instead, so the value of your generation now depends on when it happens rather than only on the annual total.
Ask your installer which specific rate option they have modelled, and to show the same system under the alternatives available to you. Then ask Duke directly which options a new residential solar customer can choose between at your address and what the differences amount to across a full year rather than a sunny month.
The federal position has changed as well. The 30 percent residential tax credit under Section 25D applied through December 31, 2025 and is not available for a purchased home system placed in service after that date. A quote or calculator that still applies it is describing an earlier year, and combined with the utility change a published payback figure can be wrong in two directions at once.
If you take a lease or a power purchase agreement rather than buying, the provider may claim the business version of the credit under Section 48E and reflect part of that value in the rate offered, so ask what they claim and what reaches you and confirm with a tax advisor. North Carolina's exclusion of most of the added assessed value of a residential solar system from property tax still applies and needs no application.