More than 507,000 Australian households have installed a home battery under the federal Cheaper Home Batteries program, Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said in Sydney on Friday.
The announcement was made at a solar and battery installer in Castle Hill, in the postcode with more installations under the program than any other in the country. The program has been running since July 2025.
It pays about 30 per cent of the installed cost of a small-scale battery system connected to rooftop solar, for households, small businesses and community organisations. The discount is delivered through the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, which means the money reaches the customer as a price reduction applied by the retailer or installer rather than as a payment from government.
“Australian households have led the world on rooftop solar, and now they are leading the world on home batteries too," Albanese said.”
Bowen said the program was doing what the government said it would do. "Cheaper Home Batteries is doing exactly what we said it would do: helping households cut bills, store cheap solar and take control of their energy use," he said.
The program was announced with a costing of $2.3 billion. In December 2025 the government expanded it to an estimated $7.2 billion over four years. Uptake is the reason: the scheme has no cap on the number of installations, so the cost follows demand.
Rohan Best, a senior lecturer in economics at Macquarie University, examined the first five months of installations and found the money was going into larger systems than most homes need. Writing in December 2025, he reported that about 146,000 batteries had been installed by 3 December at a cost of about $749 million, that the average system installed was more than 22 kilowatt hours at a cost of roughly $18,000, and that more than 80 per cent of installations were above 10 kilowatt hours. He put the size that suits most households at 5 to 6 kilowatt hours.
Because the discount is a proportion of the system price rather than a flat amount, a household that buys a 22 kilowatt hour battery receives roughly twice the public subsidy of one that buys 11 kilowatt hours. Systems above 100 kilowatt hours are ineligible, and systems between 50 and 100 kilowatt hours are discounted on the first 50 kilowatt hours only. The discount rate is set to decline each year to 2030.
The government says more than three quarters of the batteries have gone into outer suburban and regional communities. The seats it named as having the strongest uptake are Hume, Mitchell, Greenway and Macquarie in New South Wales, Wright in Queensland and Mayo in South Australia. Castle Hill, where Friday's announcement was held, is in Mitchell.
There are now 8,846 accredited battery installers, roughly double the number when the program began. About one in three Australian households have rooftop solar.
The scheme runs to 2030. Neither the Prime Minister nor the energy minister put a figure on what it will cost by then, and the $7.2 billion estimate has been in place since December, before installations passed the half million.
