Solar panels on apartments and shared roofs in Malta

Most homes in Malta are not detached houses with a roof that unambiguously belongs to them. If you are weighing up solar in a flat, you are really facing two separate questions. One of them has a published answer. The other does not, and this article is explicit about which is which.

Planning is usually the easy part

The REWS Manual of Procedures (version 1, 24 November 2025) states that rooftop photovoltaic installations are permitted development under DNO Class 1(iv) of S.L. 552.08. Where the installation complies with DC15, no notification is required — this follows guidance G26. The panels must not exceed the roof height limit.

The Manual does not draw a distinction between the roof of a villa and the roof of an apartment block. The class is about rooftop PV. So the planning route for a block of flats in Sliema is, on the face of it, the same as for a terraced house in Żejtun: if the installation is DC15-compliant and stays within the height limit, it is permitted development.

Scheduled buildings and older conservation-area properties

There is a tighter rule for two categories: scheduled buildings, and buildings more than 75 years old within conservation areas. For these, the installation must sit within the building envelope and must not rise above the parapet. That catches a great many older apartment conversions in Valletta, the Three Cities, Mdina, the Rabat and Birkirkara cores, and Victoria in Gozo.

The practical consequence is a yield one. Tilt frames that lift panels clear of a low parapet are off the table, so arrays end up laid closer to flat. On PVGIS figures for Malta, a south-facing array at 32 degrees returns 1,668 kWh/kWp while a flat array returns 1,476 kWh/kWp — about 11% less per kWp installed. East-facing gives 1,376 and west-facing 1,393. Gozo south-facing gives 1,677. On a small roof shared with water tanks, washing lines and a stairwell head, that difference decides whether a system is worth building at all. Our free roof planner is built around measuring the usable area before anyone quotes.

Who the 2026 grant let apply

The Guidelines for Applicants for the 2026 RES scheme set eligibility that matters a great deal to anyone in a flat:

• Malta resident, aged 18 or over
• Owner, emphyteuta or long lessee of the property
• A residential-tariff bill issued within the previous 12 months
• No landlords and no businesses
• No grant received for a similar system since 2010
• PV larger than 1 kW; battery larger than 2 kWh
• REWS-registered equipment, grid-connected
• System kept five years; ten-year installer warranty
• Part A submitted before purchase, offer letter valid eight months, then installation, then Part B with the fiscal receipt

So a tenant could not apply, and neither could a landlord wanting to fit panels on a rented flat. An emphyteuta or a long lessee could. The grant and the grant-free feed-in tariff were mutually exclusive — you chose one route.

The published rates were 65% of eligible cost for PV plus a hybrid inverter, capped at €3,000 per system and €645/kWp; and 75% for batteries, capped at €6,000 and €600/kWh.

The scheme is closed. Applications closed on 12 September 2026, and battery options B and C closed at Part A stage on 13 July 2026. A further round has been announced, but it has not been detailed — no opening date, no rates, no eligibility criteria have been published. Treat every grant figure above as a record of what the 2026 round paid, not a prediction of what a future round will pay.

The route that does not need a grant

For systems under 40 kWp, the grant-free feed-in tariff is €0.15/kWh for 20 years. The grant-assisted tariff was €0.105/kWh in 2025 and the 2026 rate is unconfirmed.

This matters more in a flat than in a house. Flats are often small, often empty during the working day, and often have less roof than they have demand. A high proportion of generation is exported rather than self-consumed, which makes the export rate the dominant number in the arithmetic.

Set it against Enemalta's residential bands, which include 5% VAT and step up with cumulative annual consumption:

A low-consumption flat sitting in the 0.1047 band earns more by exporting at €0.15 than it saves by self-consuming. A household running air conditioning hard enough to reach 0.3420 or 0.6076 gains far more from using its own generation on site — which is the case where a battery changes the answer, and where our battery guide is the place to start. You can run your own consumption through the savings calculator.

What the sources do not settle: who owns the roof

Nothing in the Manual of Procedures or the REWS scheme documents tells you whether you are entitled to put anything on the roof of your block. Specifically, our sources do not cover:

• whether the roof or the airspace above it was conveyed with your flat, retained by the developer, or left in common ownership
• what consent, if any, the other owners or the condominium administrator must give
• how a shared roof is divided between several units, and whether each unit can hold a separate connection and its own feed-in agreement
• what happens to the installation, and to a 20-year feed-in contract, when a flat is sold

The Condominium Act (Cap. 398) is the obvious place these answers live, and it is not yet in our sources, so we are not going to summarise it from memory. A planning class that says "permitted development" is not permission from your neighbours.

A sensible order of operations

1. Pull the deed. Establish who owns the roof and the airspace, with a notary if the wording is not obvious.
2. Check the condominium rules for works on common parts, and get whatever consent they require in writing.
3. Confirm whether the building is scheduled or over 75 years old in a conservation area — that sets the parapet constraint.
4. Measure the usable roof area, after tanks, access and shading, with our roof planner.
5. Model the economics on your own bill, then decide between the grant-free feed-in tariff and waiting for a further grant round that has not been detailed.

For Gozo, add delivery to the sequence: every panel, inverter and battery crosses on the ferry, and that shows up in lead times rather than in yield — the Gozo PVGIS figure of 1,677 kWh/kWp is marginally better than Malta's 1,668.

How our installers are checked is set out at CheckYourSolar, and a free roof survey will tell you what will physically fit. Neither of those resolves the ownership question. Only your deed does.