The federal tax credit door closed in January. Georgia's rebates didn't.

A homeowner in East Atlanta called us in February. She'd spent most of last year quietly planning her 2026 retrofit — a heat pump replacement, attic insulation, the whole air-sealing package — and waiting for January to flip over so she could claim a full year of the federal 25C tax credit against it. Then she opened the news two days before Christmas and saw the credit was ending January 1. Gone.

Three weeks of holiday plans turned into three weeks of trying to figure out what she'd just lost.

Here's the part nobody told her: Georgia's rebate programs didn't change.

The federal credit that ended was the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit — the 30%, up to $2,000 a year for heat pumps and heat pump water heaters, the kind of thing your accountant claimed on your tax return. It was supposed to run through 2032. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed last summer, pulled the cutoff date forward to the start of this year. If you didn't have your project completed and your equipment placed in service by December 31, 2025, that credit isn't there for you in 2026.

That's the bad news. Most of the noise around home energy credits this spring has been about this exact change.

The bigger pool of money on the table for Georgia homeowners was never the federal credit. It was — and still is — the state-administered rebate programs that came out of the Inflation Reduction Act and are run here by the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority. Two programs, both still funded, both still issuing rebates.

The first is the Home Efficiency Rebate, called HER. HER pays for whole-home work that's projected to cut your energy use by at least 20%. If you qualify as low-to-moderate income, the rebate covers up to 98% of the project cost, capped at $16,000 per household. For everyone else, it covers 50%, capped at $4,000. Air sealing, insulation, ductwork, HVAC, and combinations of those — anything modeled to hit the 20% reduction qualifies. We've been writing HER applications since the program opened and the average household we've worked with this year is leaving the closing meeting with somewhere between $3,500 and $11,000 of state money behind their project.

The second is the Home Electrification and Appliance Rebate, called HEAR. HEAR is structured differently — it's a point-of-sale rebate, applied at the time of purchase, up to $14,000 per household for income-qualified residents. It pays for the electrification side: heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, electric stoves, panel upgrades, wiring, insulation. If you've been driving a gas appliance you've been meaning to convert, this is the money to do it on.

Both of these programs sit on top of Georgia Power's existing rebates. The $150 you get back for the audit itself — still there. The $1,100 Whole House rebate when your post-improvement test-out shows a 20% projected reduction — still there. None of that touched the federal cutoff.

Now, the paperwork on these rebates is not light. HER requires energy modeling on the pre- and post-work conditions, blower door numbers at both ends, BPI-certified work, and a state submission with very specific documentation. We do this paperwork for every ECS client because it's the difference between leaving with a few hundred dollars or eleven thousand. We'll guide you to ensure you are not leaving any rebate dollars on the table. That is part of the service we provide.

The bottom line is that the federal door closed quietly while everyone was on Christmas vacation. The state door is still wide open, the money is still in the program, and for low-to-moderate income households in Atlanta, the rebate stack on a 2026 retrofit is meaningfully bigger than what most homeowners realized was on the table to begin with. If you were planning the project anyway, the math hasn't gotten worse. For a lot of households, it just got better.