How much does SEAI grant admin actually cost a solar installer per job?

What the paperwork actually is

For anyone outside Ireland reading this, here's the shape of it.

The SEAI Solar Electricity Grant pays up to €1,800, calculated at €700 per kWp for the first 2 kWp and €200 per kWp for the next 2 kWp. The SEAI EV Home Charger Grant is €300, reduced from €600 in January 2024. Both are applied for by or through the installer, and both come with conditions the installer is effectively responsible for policing.

The sequence on a solar job runs roughly: check eligibility, submit the grant application, wait for approval, install, arrange the post-works BER assessment, submit the Declaration of Works, and the grant is then paid to the homeowner.

Buried in that are the traps. Approval must be in place before works begin, and starting early is the single most commonly cited reason applications fail. There are eight months to complete the works and submit documentation once approved. Only one grant is available per MPRN, so a property that's already claimed can't claim again. Eligibility runs on build date — the property must have been built and occupied before 1 January 2021. And a post-works BER assessment has to be arranged, carried out and uploaded by a third party whose diary you don't control.

None of that is difficult. All of it is remembering, done by a business whose staff are on roofs.

Where the money actually goes

Three places, and only one of them is obvious.

The hours. Someone checks eligibility. Someone submits the application. Someone rings the customer three times for a document. Someone books the BER assessor. Someone chases the assessor. Someone files the Declaration of Works. Count the touches on your last ten jobs — most firms are surprised.

The rework. A rejected or delayed application rarely gets billed to the customer. The homeowner was promised €1,800 off, the installer got a step wrong, and the installer swallows it. That's not an admin cost, that's a margin event, and it doesn't show up anywhere in your accounts as anything other than a slightly worse month.

The small jobs. This is the one worth sitting with. An EV charger install is often €800 to €1,500 of work carrying a €300 grant. If the grant admin takes ninety minutes across three people, the paperwork is consuming a large share of the gross margin on that job. The grant was halved in 2024. The admin wasn't.

Run this on your own numbers: total the hours your team spends on grant admin in a month, cost them at a loaded rate, and divide by jobs completed. Then split it by job type. Solar and EV will look completely different, and that difference should change how you price EV work.

Why "we're careful about it" isn't a system

Because carefulness is a person, and people are on site.

Grant admin has the exact profile of work that fails under load: it's non-urgent until it's catastrophic, it's invisible while it's going wrong, and it peaks at the same time as install volume. Solar enquiries surge from spring and the install schedule follows, which means the busiest month is also the month with the most open applications, the most BER assessments to arrange and the fewest spare hours to do any of it.

That's not a diligence problem. Any process that depends on a busy person remembering an eight-month deadline will fail eventually. The only question is how expensive the failure is.

What to do about it

Gate the install date on the approval reference. No approval number, no date in the diary. Hard rule, enforced by the system rather than by a conversation. This single change removes the most expensive failure mode in the whole process.

Make grant status a field on the job, not a note in someone's head. Not applied, applied, approved, installed, BER booked, BER done, DoW submitted, paid. Eight states. Anything sitting in one state too long shows up on a list without anyone hunting for it.

Automate the document chase. The customer needs to supply things. Sending that request once and hoping is how jobs stall. A short automated sequence — request, reminder at day three, reminder at day seven, escalate to a call task at day ten — collects the same documents with none of the human effort and a much better hit rate.

Book the BER assessor when you book the install, not after it. The assessment is a third-party diary. Treating it as an afterthought is how a completed install sits for six weeks waiting on someone else's calendar.

Run a deadline report weekly. Approved applications, days elapsed, days remaining against the eight-month window. Two minutes to read, and it makes an expired grant essentially impossible.

Price EV work with the admin in it. If the paperwork on a charger install costs you an hour, that hour belongs in the price. Most installers price the labour and the parts and treat the admin as free. It isn't.

If jobs are stalling earlier than this — between the survey and the order — read why solar quotes stall between survey and order. If the underlying problem is that nobody can see what state any job is in, start with how to track jobs from enquiry to commissioning.

Where OrderWolf fits

We build the gate and run the chase. Grant status as a tracked stage on every job, the customer document sequence firing automatically, the deadline report landing in your inbox weekly, and live margin tracking that shows what a job actually made after the admin rather than what it was quoted at — which for EV work is often a genuinely uncomfortable first look.

With GEV, our Irish flagship client, the team recovered roughly 2.5 admin hours per person per day over a three-month deployment, and the B2C close rate went from 45% to 70%. Results from one installer — yours will depend on your job mix, your volume and where you're starting from.

We work with one installer per region in EV and solar, so availability is limited by area.