Three business days, and the drawings that earn them
Rooftop solar in Columbus needs a plan-review permit. The city states that plan approval is emailed back within 3 business days of a complete emailed submission, which is a fast and unusually specific commitment.
What makes a submission complete is the part worth knowing before you choose an installer. An Ohio-registered engineer or architect has to submit stamped drawings showing the roof can carry the array, and a separate electrical permit is pulled by a city-registered electrical contractor. So two credentialed parties are involved beyond the sales conversation, and both have to be lined up before the clock starts.
Ask any company how they produce the stamped structural drawings, whether that cost sits inside the quoted price or is added later, and which city-registered electrical contractor pulls the electrical permit. A firm that installs in Columbus regularly will answer immediately. One that does not may treat the engineering stamp as a detail to sort out after a deposit, which is where a three-day review turns into a three-week wait.
The districts where you need approval first
Columbus layers historic and design-review districts onto standard zoning. Downtown, German Village and Italian Village all require a Certificate of Appropriateness from the area commission before a rooftop solar permit can be submitted to the city.
Note the sequence: the certificate comes first, not alongside. In those districts the design conversation has to start with what the commission is likely to approve, because a proposal that fails there never reaches the plan review that would otherwise be finished in three days. Placement on a rear plane or a less visible roof is usually the difference.
That is on top of any private deed restriction or condominium association rule you might separately face, which the city does not administer. If you are in one of these areas, ask your installer whether they have taken a project through your area commission, and treat a vague answer as information.
Ohio net metering is set utility by utility
Ohio requires its large investor-owned utilities to offer net metering under Public Utilities Commission of Ohio rules, so excess power your panels send to the grid is credited against what you draw at other times. The important qualification is that the terms are not uniform across the state.
AEP Ohio, Duke Energy Ohio, FirstEnergy Ohio and AES Ohio each set their own credit rates and true-up schedules under PUCO oversight. In Columbus the utility is AEP Ohio, so the figures that matter to you are AEP Ohio's, and a statewide summary or a national solar calculator will not tell you what they are.
Ask your installer to confirm the current AEP Ohio tariff for your address in writing before the system is sized, including the credit rate and the true-up schedule. The true-up in particular is worth understanding, because it determines what happens to credit you have accumulated but not used, and that is what decides whether building beyond your own consumption is worth anything.
Who controls the roof
Columbus has 425,182 housing units, and single-detached houses are the largest category at 44.3 percent. Those give an installer a full roof to design around and put the decision entirely in the owner's hands, subject to the district rules above.
A combined 32.0 percent of units sit in buildings of 5 or more apartments, split between 19.7 percent in buildings of 5 to 19 units and 12.3 percent in buildings of 20 or more. In all of those the roof belongs to the landlord or the condominium association rather than the resident, a homeowner permit is not the right instrument, and an array on the building normally offsets a building account rather than an individual apartment.
Single-attached row house and townhouse-style units are 10.2 percent, and those often share a roofline with the neighbouring unit. Establishing which roof plane is yours, and where the boundary and fire separation sit, is a survey question that should be settled before a design is drawn.
Output, and what a 2026 project actually costs
The planning figure for Columbus is about 1,227 kWh a year for every kW installed. It is derived from satellite irradiance data with a standard performance ratio applied rather than measured on local roofs, so use it to decide whether to pursue quotes and let the site survey produce the number that goes into a contract.
Orientation, pitch, shade and usable area decide what a particular roof does. Since the permit package already requires an engineer or architect to certify that the structure can carry the array, this is a good city in which to have the roof's condition assessed properly at the same time. If the covering is near the end of its life, ask what removing and reinstalling the array would cost when the roof is replaced, and whether doing the roof first is the cheaper order.
On money, the 30 percent federal 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 2026 purchase in Columbus cannot claim it, and any quote or online calculator that still includes it is describing a year that has closed. If you take a lease or a power purchase agreement rather than buying, the provider may claim the business version under Section 48E and pass part of that value through in the rate, which is a question for the provider and a tax advisor rather than an assumption to build into your budget.