Solar permit statistics: U.S. residential installs by state

Most solar market statistics measure installed capacity or utility interconnections. Permits are the earlier, more local signal — the moment a specific home committed to a specific project. This page publishes what ScoutStack’s permit database shows about U.S. residential solar permitting: 4,586,606 residential solar permits across 1,154 counties, of which 347,293 were issued in the past 12 months. All figures were derived on August 17, 2026 from our production database — the same records our customers sell against — and the methodology is at the bottom.

Residential solar permits by year

Permitting roughly doubled between 2019 and 2022, peaked in 2023, and has fallen since: down 28% in 2024, and a further 8% in 2025.

Two honest caveats on the shape of this curve. First, our jurisdiction coverage has grown over time, so the early years understate activity more than recent years do — the true 2015 number is higher than the tracked one by more than the true 2025 number is. Second, permits lag sales by weeks and lead installation by weeks to months, so this curve sits between the two numbers the industry usually argues about.

Residential solar permits by state

The 15 states with the most tracked residential solar permits over the past 12 months. California alone is about 42% of the tracked national total. Median project value is the declared valuation on permits issued since January 2024 — a floor on real contract prices, since many jurisdictions only require the construction value.

States outside this table aren’t necessarily small solar markets — several (New Jersey and most of New England, for example) are simply under-covered in our permit ingestion today, so we exclude them from ranking claims rather than publish a misleading number. See methodology.

The 10 busiest counties

Tracked residential solar permits issued in the past 12 months. Six of the top ten are in California; Dallas County, not a Sun Belt cliché, is fifth.

The bankruptcy overhang: 405,005 orphaned permits

Of the 4.59 million residential solar permits in our database, 405,005 — about one in eleven — were pulled by an installer that has since gone bankrupt. Every one of those is a homeowner with a system (or a half-finished project) and no company behind it. That population is the basis of the orphaned solar systems opportunity and the bankrupt-installer datasets our customers work.

Methodology

• Source. ScoutStack’s production permit database: 120M+ building permits of all types across 2,456 U.S. counties, ingested from permitting jurisdictions and refreshed continuously. Solar figures on this page cover the 1,154 counties where the database contains residential solar permits.
• What’s counted. Permits classified as solar installations on residential properties, deduplicated to one record per permit (a permit that changes status over time counts once). Commercial, agricultural, and utility-scale projects are excluded.
• Dates. Year buckets use the permit issue date. Records without a usable issue date (0.26% of residential solar rows) are excluded from time-series tables. “Past 12 months” is August 1, 2025 through August 17, 2026.
• Coverage. Not every U.S. jurisdiction publishes permits, and we don’t ingest every one that does. All counts are floors on true activity, and coverage differs by state — which is why the state table ranks only states where our coverage is materially complete.
• Valuations. Median “project value” is the median declared valuation on permits with a non-zero value, issued January 2024 or later. Jurisdictions differ in what value they require; treat medians as conservative.

Derived August 17, 2026. If you spot something that looks wrong, tell us — we’d rather correct a number than defend it.

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