Your Solar Lender Has Seven Days to Send the Payoff Number. In Connecticut, Silence Now Costs It $250.

If you’re selling a house with solar on the roof, or refinancing one, a single piece of paper decides whether you close on schedule. It isn’t the appraisal. It’s the payoff statement from whoever financed the panels.

Ask for it too late, or ask a lender that doesn’t feel like answering, and your closing slides. Connecticut just put a price on the not answering.

Public Act 26-16, the rewrite of Senate Bill 233, takes effect October 1, 2026. Section 10 gives a residential solar lender or lease provider seven days to hand over a payoff statement or transfer documentation after you ask in writing. Miss the window and the company “shall credit the consumer’s account … in the amount of two hundred fifty dollars.” Not a fine paid to the state. A credit paid to you.

Read the definition and you can see who wrote it. The act says a payoff statement means the unpaid balance, including principal, interest, and other charges properly assessed, plus interest on a per diem basis. Somebody on that committee has watched a closing die because the payoff figure expired two days before the table.

It covers leases and power purchase agreements too, which is the harder half. On a lease, the document your buyer needs is the transfer packet, the paperwork that moves your obligations onto them. Most sellers find out that packet exists about nine days before closing.

Here’s what nobody tells you when you sign a solar loan. Everything about that contract is engineered for the day you take the money, and almost nothing about it is engineered for the day you leave.

Your mortgage already has this protection. Federal Regulation Z has required for years that a mortgage payoff statement go out “within a reasonable time, but in no case more than seven business days, after receiving a written request from the consumer.” Connecticut just handed solar borrowers the same clock. Everywhere else, your solar lender has a customer service queue.

Smart law. A deadline with no penalty attached is a suggestion, and lenders read suggestions correctly.

So do this whether you’re in Hartford or Houston. Ask in writing, by email, so the request carries a timestamp. A phone call starts no clock anywhere. Ask about 30 days before your target closing date, not the week of. And ask for the payoff to be good through a date past your closing, with the per diem spelled out, so a two-day delay doesn’t send you back to the queue.

On a lease or PPA, ask for two things in the same email: the transfer packet and the credit requirements your buyer has to meet to assume it. The credit screen is what actually kills these deals, and you want to know the number while you still have time to price it into the sale.

Outside Connecticut you have no $250 stick. You do have your state attorney general’s consumer protection division and the CFPB complaint portal, and a written request with a date on it is what makes either of those useful.

One more thing lands on October 1 for Connecticut homeowners. The cancellation notice on a home solicitation sale, which is what a door-knocked solar contract is, now has to appear in twelve-point boldface with the actual calendar deadline printed in by the seller, not just the phrase “third business day.” You can send the cancellation by email. If you do cancel, the seller has ten days to return your payments and any trade-in, and if it leaves delivered equipment sitting at your house for more than twenty days after you send notice, it becomes yours.

Not in the market yet? Run the numbers before anyone knocks, with our solar calculator and the financing comparison in our solar hub. And before you pick a loan or a lease, read what each of the four financing types does to your appraisal, because that choice is the one that shows up again on the day you sell.

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