Net metering vs gross metering in Pakistan

The difference in one line

Net metering lets your house eat its own solar first and only sends out what is left. Gross metering sends everything out and makes you buy back every unit you use, including the ones your own panels just made.

That single structural difference decides whether a solar system in Lahore pays back in three years or eight. Everything else in this article is elaboration.

How net metering bills you

Your panels feed the house directly. The AC runs off solar, the fridge runs off solar, the water pump runs off solar. Only the surplus flows out through the bi-directional meter and gets recorded in the export register.

The units you never bought from LESCO are the real saving. If your tariff slab is PKR 55 per unit and your panels supply 600 units a month straight into the house, that is PKR 33,000 of electricity you did not purchase. Whatever the utility pays for your exported surplus is a smaller, separate matter.

This is the arrangement that has driven almost every rooftop in Johar Town, Wapda Town and DHA for the last several years.

How gross metering bills you

Under a gross arrangement, a separate generation meter sits between your inverter and everything else. Every unit your array produces is sold to the utility at a fixed feed-in rate. Your house then draws its entire consumption from the grid through the normal meter, at the normal retail tariff.

Nothing is self-consumed, at least not on paper. You are effectively a small independent power producer who happens to live under the panels. The economics depend entirely on the gap between the feed-in rate you receive and the retail rate you pay.

In Pakistan that gap is wide. Retail domestic tariffs in the unprotected slabs sit around PKR 48 to 65 per unit. Buyback rates for exported solar are a fraction of that. Applying that gap to every single unit generated, rather than only to surplus, is what makes gross metering unattractive for a household here.

Side by side

Aspect	Net metering	Gross metering
Solar feeds the house first	Yes	No
Meters required	One bi-directional	Generation meter plus consumption meter
Value of a self-used unit	Full retail tariff avoided	Not applicable
Value of an exported unit	Buyback rate	Feed-in rate on all generation
Best for	Homes with daytime load	Roofs on empty buildings, pure investment
Exposure to tariff changes	Partial	Total
Used by LESCO for homes today	Yes	No

Which one Pakistan actually uses

Domestic rooftop solar in LESCO territory runs on a net arrangement. You apply, you get a bi-directional meter, your export is recorded and credited. The application process and the document set are built around that model.

What has changed is not the meter, it is the value of the export. The older regime let exported units offset imported units close to one for one, which meant a big roof could genuinely wipe out a bill. The 2026 prosumer rules moved to a buyback price well below retail, which is closer in spirit to net billing than to true net metering. The mechanics are unpacked in net metering changes for 2026.

Gross metering shows up periodically in policy discussion as a way to reduce the burden that rooftop solar places on distribution companies. It has not been imposed on domestic consumers, and existing agreements have their own terms. But it is worth understanding what would change if it ever arrived.

The same house under both models

Take a 10 marla home in Model Town with a 5 kW system. Monthly generation around 700 units in a good month. Household consumption 900 units. Of the generation, roughly 480 units are used inside the house during daylight and 220 are exported. Retail tariff assumed at PKR 55, buyback at a much lower rate.

Line	Net metering	Gross metering
Units generated	700	700
Units self-consumed	480	0
Units exported or sold	220	700
Units bought from LESCO	420	900
Cost of purchased units	PKR 23,100	PKR 49,500
Credit for exported units	Small	Moderate
Net monthly outcome	Clearly better	Clearly worse

The arithmetic is blunt. Self-consumption at PKR 55 avoided beats selling at a low feed-in rate, every time, as long as the house is actually using power while the sun is up.

Why this matters to how you build your system

Once you accept that a self-used unit is worth several times an exported unit, the design changes.

• Stop oversizing purely to export. A roof built to dump 400 units a month into the grid is chasing the least valuable unit available.
• Move heavy loads into daylight. Washing machine at 11 am, water pump at 2 pm, iron in the afternoon rather than after Maghrib.
• Add storage so evening consumption comes from your own array rather than the grid. This is the single biggest change in Lahore builds over the past two years, and it is why hybrid systems with batteries now outsell pure grid-tie.
• Size the battery against evening load, not against a marketing number. The method is in battery bank sizing, with hardware pricing in lithium battery prices and the comparison in lithium versus tubular.
• Keep the export connection anyway. Even a modest credit is better than the alternative, which is an inverter throttling itself because it has nowhere to send the extra.

What if the policy shifts again

Honest answer: nobody knows, and anyone telling you they have inside information about the next tariff notification is selling something. What can be said is which builds are exposed and which are not.

A system designed around large exports is exposed. Change the buyback rate and its payback moves by years. A system designed around self-consumption with a battery is barely exposed, because most of its value comes from units that never touch the meter in either direction. That resilience is the practical argument for spending on storage rather than on extra panels beyond your own consumption.

Homes that go fully off-grid sidestep the question altogether, though at a cost that rarely makes sense in a city with a working distribution network. Read the off-grid guide before considering it, and solar without net metering for the middle path.

Questions worth asking your installer

Three of them separate a serious quote from a hopeful one. Ask which buyback rate the payback calculation uses and where that figure comes from. Ask what share of your annual generation the design expects you to consume in the house rather than export, because that share is what actually drives the return. Ask what happens to the numbers if the export rate falls another two rupees a unit. An installer who can answer all three has modelled your house. One who cannot is quoting from a template.

The honest caveat

Net metering is better than gross metering for a Lahore household, but neither is as good as the sales pitch of 2021 suggested. Payback periods have stretched as buyback rates fell. A 5 kW system that once paid back in under three years now takes closer to four for a typical household, and longer for one that is empty all day.

Solar still works here. Tariffs are high, sunlight is abundant for nine months of the year, and hardware is cheaper than it has ever been. What has ended is the era of treating the grid as a free battery. Anyone quoting you a payback based on unit-for-unit offset is working from old numbers, and you should ask them for the calculation in writing.

Run your own figures through the calculator, look at the current picture in is solar still worth it in 2026, and see what real post-solar bills look like in LESCO bill after solar. When you are ready, our net metering and on-grid teams work across Bahria Town, Gulberg and the rest of the city, and you can reach us through contact.