Rooftop solar's $6.3 billion credit ended. Its No. 2 installer didn't survive the year.

The federal Residential Clean Energy Credit — 26 U.S.C. §25D, a 30% credit against the cost of a homeowner's solar, battery, or geothermal system — no longer exists.▸ Public Law 119-21, the reconciliation act known as the One Big Beautiful Bill and signed July 4, 2025, ended it for any installation completed after December 31, 2025. The IRS's own guidance is explicit that the cutoff runs on completion date, not payment date: a system paid for in 2025 but finished in January 2026 gets nothing.

Tax year 2023 was the credit's last full year running at the scale the Inflation Reduction Act had set it to.▸ According to IRS Statistics of Income data for that year, 1,246,440 returns claimed a combined $6,337,122,000 in Residential Clean Energy Credit. Solar dominated the spending behind it: of the $23.9 billion in underlying equipment costs reported across every technology the credit covered, $20.6 billion — 86% — was for solar electric property alone.

The IRS breaks out the underlying equipment costs behind the credit by technology, even though the credit amount itself is only published as a single combined total.▸ Solar electric systems account for the large majority of that spending — six times more than geothermal heat pumps, solar water heating, fuel cells, battery storage, and small wind combined.

That concentration is why the credit's repeal fell hardest on one industry: residential solar installation.▸ Nationally, Wood Mackenzie projected installation volume would fall roughly a third in 2026 compared with 2025 — the year the subsidy that made those systems pencil out for millions of households disappeared.

Freedom Forever was the country's second-largest residential solar installer in 2025, with 6.1% of the national market, according to Wood Mackenzie — behind only Sunrun's 12.7%.▸ The company told trade press in August 2025 that it employed more than 3,000 people. By February 2026, its own policy director told Reuters the company had exited ten state markets and cut about 20% of its staff. Its financing partner, Mosaic — a solar lender that had itself filed for bankruptcy in June 2025 — could no longer backstop the installer network Freedom Forever depended on.

On April 15, 2026, Freedom Forever filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (Case No. 26-10522), listing $500 million to $1 billion in liabilities against $100 million to $500 million in assets.▸ Its largest disclosed creditor was Mosaic, owed more than $114 million. That same morning, about 1,600 employees across the country were locked out with no paycheck and no timeline for back pay — more than half the workforce the company had claimed eight months earlier. Two proposed class actions filed in the bankruptcy court since allege the company skipped the 60-day notice required under the federal WARN Act.

Nine business days before the filing, the Texas Attorney General had named Freedom Forever in a state initiative targeting "fraudulent and deceptive" sales practices among solar installers — a separate thread from the bankruptcy, but one more sign of an industry under strain on multiple fronts at once as its main subsidy expired.

Figures on the credit cover only tax year 2023, the most recent year the IRS has published; more recent claims exist but aren't yet tabulated. Freedom Forever's workforce figures come from the company's own public statements and from reporting on its bankruptcy filing, not from an audited headcount — the case remains open in Delaware bankruptcy court.