Your Band A Bill vs Solar: What ₦225 per kWh Costs Over Five Years

A Band A household using 15.8kWh a day spends ₦1.21M–₦1.3M a year on electricity, or ₦6.03M–₦6.49M over five years. A solar system that covers that same load is ₦5.67M – ₦9.66M installed, once.

What Band A actually charges

Band A customers are paying ₦209–₦225 per kWh in 2026 (NaijaSabi — electricity tariff bands 2026, read September 2026). Band A is defined by a service promise of at least 20 hours of supply a day — that promise is the entire justification for the higher rate.

The gap between the promise and the experience is why this page exists. If you are getting 20 hours, you are buying expensive but functioning electricity. If you are paying Band A and still running the gen, you are paying twice for one service, and the arithmetic below understates your case considerably.

Five years of bills, by household

Four real loads from our sizing pages. The daily kWh figure is computed from the appliances in each one — the same numbers that drive the quotes — so you can open any row and see exactly what is plugged in.

Grid cost = daily kWh × tariff × 365, at ₦209–₦225 per kWh. Solar prices from Nigerian vendor listings, last checked September 2026. Both columns are held flat — no tariff rises, no equipment price changes.

Reading that table honestly

Two things jump out, and only one of them is the one solar companies like to talk about.

The first: for the smaller households, five years of Band A bills and a solar system cost broadly similar money, and the solar system is still standing at the end of it. The second, which matters more: for a household that is only buying grid units and getting them reliably, solar is not a money-saving purchase on a five-year view. It becomes one on a ten-year view, because the panels and the lithium are still working while the meter keeps running. We set out that longer sum, including the parts that go against solar, in is solar worth it in Nigeria.

What changes the picture completely is the generator. Petrol is by a distance the most expensive electricity in Nigeria — several times the Band A rate per kWh. Any household running a gen for the hours the grid is missing is displacing spend at that rate, not at the tariff rate, and that is the case where the arithmetic stops being close.

The hybrid case, which is what most people should actually do

Going fully off-grid is a choice to buy a much bigger battery so you never touch the DisCo again. It is expensive, and for most Band A customers it is the wrong optimisation. The sensible build is hybrid: the inverter runs the house from the panels by day, from the battery through the evening, and lets the grid carry the load and top up the battery when it is there.

That is what our Standard tier is: roughly 6 hours of backup rather than a full night and day of it. The bill does not go to zero — it goes to the hours you could not cover, which for most homes is the largest single reduction available for the money. Anyone quoting you a system on the promise that your NEPA bill disappears is either selling you a much bigger battery than they have costed, or is going to disappoint you in month two.

What happens when tariffs move again

Every figure in the table above is a snapshot. Tariffs in Nigeria have moved repeatedly and in one direction. The useful way to think about it is that a solar system converts a variable cost you do not control into a fixed cost you have already paid — which is why the case for it strengthens every time the rate is reviewed, without anything about the solar changing.

We are not going to predict the next review, and we would treat anyone who does with suspicion. We will update this page with the new rate when it happens, and the table will recompute itself, because the tariff is a constant in one file rather than a number typed into an article.

The caveat we will not bury

Solar removes the part of your bill you size for. If you size for lights, fans and a fridge, the AC still comes off the meter. That is not a flaw; it is often the correct trade, because the AC is the load that doubles the price of the whole system. But it means the honest promise is “a much smaller bill” and not “no bill”, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between a happy customer and a complaint thread.

Work out which of your loads you actually want off the grid before you talk to anybody about price. The calculator is built for exactly that: tick appliances, watch the number move, and see what each one costs you in system size. If you are in Lagos or Abuja, the local pages cover what installation looks like there.