An exciting renewable milestone has been reached. More than half a million Australian homes have installed a home battery since 1 July 2025, when the Cheaper Home Batteries Program rolled out.
This milestone belongs to Australian homeowners, the installers who kept pace with the demand, and a federal policy that did exactly what it set out to do, and more. As Australia's leading provider of automated battery plans, we've had a front row seat to this battery boom, and it's been a joy to see it take off.
What is the Cheaper Home Batteries Program?
The Cheaper Home Batteries Program launched on 1 July 2025 under federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. The premise was a plan for renewables that made it easier for homeowners to buy a home battery, which is only a good thing for the renewables transition.
Uptake outpaced every forecast. The government responded by nearly tripling the funding to $7.2 billion and doubling the original 2030 target from one million batteries to two million.
For the full breakdown of how the program works, see our explainer.
Before the rebate: a slow build
Home batteries were not new when the Cheaper Home Batteries Program launched. Growth had been building steadily for years - just nowhere near the pace we have seen since.
In 2022, Australians installed 47,100 new residential battery systems. Growth continued in 2023, with 57,000 new systems installed. By 2024, the last full year before the rebate, installs hit another record of 72,500 systems. Combined with everything installed before 2022, that brought Australia's total number of residential batteries ever installed to just over 320,000 by the end of 2024, with a further six months of installs still to come before the rebate launched in July 2025.
Even with that steady climb, overall uptake stayed low. CER's data shows around 10 per cent of new solar installs in 2024 included a battery and, when the rebate launched, the federal government's figures showed one in three Australian homes had solar, but only one in 40 had a battery.
What the rebate changed
The numbers moved differently once the rebate began. SunWiz reported 221,000 residential batteries installed across the 2025 calendar year, a jump of about 205 per cent in a single year.
When you look at the rebate's first 12 months, the shift is sharper again. More than 457,000 batteries were installed nationally - an increase of more than 500 per cent. Growth that had taken Australia's entire history to build, has now been more than doubled within a single year.
Why you should care
More batteries in more homes means a grid that can run on stored sunshine at 7pm instead of expensive gas. Solar floods the grid during the day, when most people are not using much power. A battery lets a household store that cheap, clean energy and use it later, when demand spikes and the grid would otherwise lean on gas to fill the gap. The more households doing this, the less strain there is on the grid right when demand peaks in the evening.
That’s a pretty significant shift, as a battery is a big decision and a genuine investment, even with the rebate. But it has gone from a niche upgrade to something a growing number of everyday households are choosing, in the same way solar did a decade earlier. Most owners save on their bills simply by using stored solar in the evening, and Amber customers can go further, earning money by selling that stored energy back to the grid when prices spike.
The impact of renewables is already showing up in power bills. The International Energy Agency's mid-year report found Australia's wholesale electricity prices fell around 30 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026.
The year in batteries
Half a million installs later, the national picture is even bigger than the rebate alone. Add in pre-rebate installs, and roughly 1 in 14 Australian houses now has one, more Australians live in a battery-powered home right now than live in Canberra.
The rebate itself is already 25 per cent of the way to the government's 2030 target of two million. It's a global story too. Chris Bowen shared that despite America's population being 12 times larger, Australia has installed more home battery capacity in a single year than the US has in its entire history.
Some of the strongest growth has come from postcodes across the country. Chris Bowen marked the 500,000 milestone this morning from Castle Hill, in Sydney's Hills District. It's now the postcode with the highest number of Cheaper Home Batteries installed anywhere in the country. It's a reminder that this isn't just a story about outer suburbs and new-build estates. Established communities have taken to batteries in a big way too. It also reflects a wider pattern: a good share of the growth landed in outer suburbs and growing regional communities rather than city centres.
CER's most recent published data, current to 30 June 2026, revealed New South Wales led the country overall, with more than 150,000 installs since the rebate began, roughly one in every three batteries installed nationally. This is followed by Queensland and Victoria.
We've felt this shift ourselves too. Amber's own battery customer base has grown five times over since the rebate launched, and 80 per cent of new sign-ups are now battery owners. We're also automating more home batteries than any other provider in the areas we service, and closing in on our own milestone of 100,000 customers overall.
What's next
If you're one of the half a million households that installed a battery since 1 July 2025, or one of the Australians with one already, we want to thank you. You're already taking some pressure off the grid at peak times. If you're exporting or sharing power back, you're doing even more, by helping to build a grid that's more resilient and affordable for everyone, including the people who don't have a battery yet.
500,000 isn't a finish line - it's the start of many exciting milestones. Reaching 25 per cent of the government's two million battery target in just over a year alone puts Australia on track to hit the target by 2030. The next few years should look a lot like the last one, more households joining in, more batteries getting smarter and a grid leaning further into cheap, stored solar instead of gas.
Curious what a battery could mean for your own home? Get a personalised quote or run the numbers with our ROI calculator.
