Statistics library

Solar statistics and guides, sourced not aggregated

10 statistics pages built from 11 years of mandatory federal utility filings, plus practical guides on hiring, contracts and what to do when something goes wrong.

Updated September 2026 · Data as of EIA-861 2024 final release

Written by HyreSolar Research team Research and analysis

Audited by HyreSolar Research team Data audit and fact check

55 pages, every figure sourced 10 statistics pages and 45 practical guides

51 jurisdictions covered 50 states and the District of Columbia

11 years of federal filings 2014–2024, final releases only

What this is

This is a library of original statistics on American residential electricity and solar, computed by HyreSolar from Form EIA-861: the annual census every US electric utility is legally required to file. We downloaded the 11 annual releases covering 2014 to 2024, extracted them by script, and derived the ratios and rankings EIA publishes the inputs for but not the outputs of. Ten pages cover adoption, bills, consumption, reliability, metering, storage, demand response and utility ownership, and a growing set of practical guides applies the same sourcing rule to hiring an installer and reading a contract. Every figure states how it was calculated, every page carries its limitations on the page rather than in a footnote, and nothing here is copied from another statistics site.

Where these numbers come from

The six national series the library is built on, 2014–2024. One point per data year. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 final releases. Each panel is scaled to its own range, so the panels show shape and not relative size.

Almost every solar or electricity statistic in circulation is second-hand. A figure appears in a trade report, which took it from a survey of part of the market; a listicle takes it from the trade report; and by the third repetition nobody can say what was counted, in which year, or with what denominator.

Form EIA-861 removes that problem. Filing it is a legal obligation for every electric utility operating in the United States, which makes it a census rather than a sample: there is no sampling error, and no participating-company bias. It records residential sales, revenue and customer accounts; net-metered installations and capacity; batteries paired with them; interval and time-of-use metering; demand response enrolment; efficiency programme savings; system peaks; and IEEE-standard reliability indices, utility by utility, year by year.

What EIA does not publish is the arithmetic between those columns. There is no official figure for the share of households with rooftop solar, for battery attachment, for consumption per account, or for how any of these rank between states. Those are the figures this library computes, and each one is labelled as our calculation rather than presented as a reported statistic.

The check that makes the rest credible is external. Our residential price derivation reproduces EIA's own published price series across 357 overlapping state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh, EIA rounds to two decimals, so that difference is rounding and nothing else. Every consumption, bill and penetration figure in the library is built from the same handled quantities, and inherits that validation.

The ten statistics pages

Each page owns its subject completely and links to the others rather than restating them. The figure on each card is the headline number that page is built around.

Practical guides

Where the statistics pages answer "what is true across the country", these answer "what do I do about it". Same sourcing rule: every figure carries a primary source and a retrieval date, and anything we could not verify is named as unverified on the page.

96.3% Hiring · Structure Who actually installs your solar? Two of the largest solar companies describe opposite structures in their own SEC filings. Why the answer is company-specific, and how the permit record settles it for your job. Read the guide 0 Hiring · Warranties What a workmanship warranty is worth The only one of your three solar warranties that nobody standardises, regulates or backstops. What the manufacturer documents actually say, and the six questions that test yours. Read the guide Ch. 7 Hiring · Failure When your installer goes out of business What survives, what does not, and what to do in order. The three warranties come apart differently, and Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 are not the same news. Read the guide 3 days Hiring · Your rights Door-to-door solar sales The federal Cooling-Off Rule applies even when you booked the appointment yourself, and Saturday counts. What the seller owes you, and the financing detail that decides which law you are under. Read the guide 15 days Hiring · State law Solar sales regulation by state Two regulatory designs, not one. Texas licenses the seller; Washington names them in the contract and makes them personally liable. North Dakota gives buyers over 65 fifteen business days to cancel. Read the guide 12.8% Hiring · Verification How to verify an installer licence Only four of the 27 states we checked name solar in the licence itself, and in Ohio and Illinois residential solar needs no state licence at all. Why a search that finds nothing usually means you searched wrong. Read the guide 97% Money · Evidence Does solar increase home value? The "$4 per watt" figure comes from one study whose sample is 97% Californian, whose data end in 2013, and which excluded leased systems entirely. What it does and does not support. Read the guide 10-30% Money · Financing "$0 down" solar, and what it costs Nothing down is a statement about the first payment, not the price. The federal regulator found fees baked into loan principal typically run 10 to 30 percent of the cash price. Read the guide 1 month Money · Liens The UCC-1 filing on your solar It secures the equipment, not your house, but it is recorded in the same land records as your mortgage. The deadline your lender already has to clear it, and what to do if they miss it. Read the guide 4 Money · Selling Selling with a solar loan or lease Four ownership structures, four different closings. What has to be subordinated, terminated, assumed or paid off, and the clause that can leave a seller liable after moving out. Read the guide 2027 Money · State tax Solar and property tax Four different mechanisms get called an exemption. California's expires on 1 January 2027, North Carolina excludes 80% rather than all of it, and any New York municipality can opt out. Read the guide 8 states Money · HOAs Solar access rights and HOAs Eight statutes read in full. There is no typical law, fee shifting runs both ways in every state that has it, and four states prohibit the conduct while giving you no remedy at all. Read the guide 53.2% Process · Original data Your first bill after solar It is almost never zero and the reason is structural. We computed the delivery share of a residential bill from federal filings: across 14.7 million customers it is 53.2%. Read the guide 30 days Process · Approvals Permission to operate The utility approval that comes last, and the one tariff that actually defines it: thirty business days from the last of three things, one of which is your city's sign-off. Read the guide 90% Process · The grid Why interconnection takes so long Your system is not waiting on paperwork, it is being tested against the circuit it will join. The actual screens, and which ones your neighbours' systems can make you fail. Read the guide 5 Situations · Buying Buying a house that already has solar Solar on a house you are buying is an asset, a contract, or a liability, and which one depends on documents you should see before you offer. The checklist, and what each answer changes. Read the guide 12 years Equipment · Warranties Panel degradation and your warranty The "0.5% a year" everyone quotes is a median, and the mean is 0.8%. And one warranty measures compliance with a ±3% tolerance against a 0.25% annual cap. Read the guide 10 vs 12 Equipment · Architecture String inverters vs microinverters vs optimizers The headline efficiency comparison is measured at two different boundaries and does not work. The comparison that does is the warranty, and both architectures have the same weakness. Read the guide 23.5% Equipment · Physics Solar panel efficiency It is watts per square metre divided by ten, and nothing else. Two panels of the same wattage make the same power whatever their efficiency ratings say. The higher one is just smaller. Read the guide 75% Equipment · End of life What happens to panels at end of life The EPA says US recycling "is not yet happening on a large scale" and that silicon cells "may be incinerated". One state has legislated a takeback mandate, and it starts in 2031. Read the guide Fixture Situations · Moving Can you take your solar panels when you move? Almost always no, and the reason is a definition. Bolted to the roof they are fixtures, fixtures are part of the real property, and real property conveys with the sale. Read the guide 31 Dec 2025 Policy · Federal tax The federal solar tax credit ended Terminated by statute for expenditures made after 31 December 2025, not phased down. The statutory test is not the one the IRS page paraphrases, and the carryforward survives. Read the guide 4 Jul 2026 Policy · Federal tax Why a lease still gets a federal credit Two credits, two sections, two timetables. Includes the leasing provision that is widely reported as banning the credit for solar leases, set out as enacted text. Read the guide No netting Policy · Export rates Net metering, net billing and buyback Not synonyms. Net metering credits exports at the retail rate; net billing stops netting entirely and credits them at a separate, lower value-of-export rate. Read the guide 1.66× Policy · Rate design Time-of-use rates and solar Panels peak near noon. One filed tariff prices peak from 4 to 9 p.m. every day at $0.55 a kilowatt-hour against $0.33 off-peak, and net billing customers are put on it by requirement. Read the guide 9 years Policy · Legacy If your state ends net metering Grandfathering is real and time-limited. In one successor tariff the legacy period is nine years, excludes the import rate, and belongs to the customer rather than the house. Read the guide ±10% Problems · Diagnosis Producing less than promised The model behind most estimates publishes its own error bars, ±10% annual and ±30% monthly, and defaults to 0% for snow and 0% for ageing. Check the estimate before the hardware. Read the guide 5–15% Problems · Maintenance Does cleaning panels actually pay? Two answers pointing opposite ways. In dry climates rain recovers soiling almost fully. In the humid southeast, laboratory work found sustained losses rain does not clear, caused by fungus. Read the guide 3 Problems · Diagnosis Monitoring shows zero A zero is ambiguous by design. The hardware separates communications from production, and three unrelated failures produce the same display. Only one is a solar problem. Read the guide 0 Problems · Liability Roof leaks after solar installation The code holds solar penetrations to the ordinary flashing chapter. The roofing warranty we read never mentions solar, does not void on bad installation, and excludes flashings outright. Read the guide 4 jobs Equipment · Sequencing Should you re-roof before solar? A national laboratory notes that re-roofing triggers decommissioning, that replacing the system often beats reinstalling it, and that many contractors refuse to warrant reinstalled equipment. Read the guide $0 Problems · Insurance Hail and storm damage: the insurance claim A regulator's worked example: the same $10,000 roof pays $6,000 on replacement cost and nothing at all on actual cash value at twenty years. The hail rating tells you less than it looks. Read the guide 0 Equipment · Storage Home battery chemistry: LFP vs NMC The comparison cannot be made from public documents. One major product's data sheet does not state its chemistry at all. What can be compared matters more anyway. Read the guide 0.33% Additional · Climate Solar in snowy and cold climates Cold-climate systems degrade at a median of 0.33% a year against 0.75 to 1.2% in warm ones. Snow is the real cost, the models underpredict it, and the default assumes it is zero. Read the guide 1,332 Additional · Backup Battery backup or a generator? Federal data attributes at least 1,332 carbon monoxide deaths to portable generators since 2004, with no final federal standard. On the battery side, nobody publishes a run time. Read the guide 160 A Additional · Backup What a critical load panel is The component nobody explains until it appears on a quote. Why whole-home backup is forbidden outright in one manufacturer's guide, and how the circuits actually get chosen. Read the guide 4.5 psf Additional · Structural Solar panel weight and roof loading The 4.5 pounds per square foot figure everyone quotes is one state's amendment, verified against two other editions. What applies everywhere is stricter: your roof must be checked twice. Read the guide 7 ft 6 in Additional · Structures Solar carports and patio covers The code defines this structure explicitly: a 7 ft 6 in minimum clear height, treatment as a roof for fire separation, a prohibition on non-fire-rated panels, and a reduced live load. Read the guide 80% Additional · Siting Shade and solar output A state code and a federal methodology, written for different purposes, both draw the line at 80% of unshaded output. Everything else about shade is contested. Read the guide 10 ft Additional · Siting Ground mount vs roof mount The fire code exempts ground arrays from rooftop setbacks and then imposes a 10-foot brush-free perimeter instead. Siting goes to municipal zoning. Read the guide 2 of 4 Situations · Access Community solar vs rooftop Four state statutes read in full create four different products sharing one name. Two make it unlawful to charge you more than your bill credit is worth. Two do not. Read the guide EV yes Situations · Access Solar when you rent California compels a landlord to approve an electric vehicle charging station. We found no solar equivalent anywhere. What a renter has is a subscription, and only if separately metered. Read the guide 67% Situations · Access Condominiums and shared roofs One state requires a survey that equitably allocates the usable roof area among everyone sharing it. Another lets the board install with no owner vote. Neither says how the electricity is divided. Read the guide 35% Process · Electrical Solar and EV charging A national laboratory held a panel simulated down to 70 amps under its limit while charging a car and running a dryer, cutting peak load 35 percent. Read the guide Listed Equipment · Design Off-grid vs grid-tied One sentence in the code separates them, and it explains why your system goes dark in a power cut. The inverter is listed to disconnect. Read the guide

What 11 years of filings show

Seven national measures, indexed to 2014 = 100. The right-hand figure is the multiple by 2024. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861. Prices are nominal. Indexing is ours; EIA publishes the levels, not the index.

Indexing the national series to 2014 = 100 puts the pieces of the library in proportion. Residential solar systems multiplied roughly 8-fold over the period while the number of metered American households grew by 11%, which is why household penetration moved as far as it did.

The measures that did not move are as informative. Average installed system size rose from 5.38 kW to 6.74 kW: the fleet average changes slowly because it is dominated by systems installed years ago. Residential electricity prices rose 32% in nominal terms, from 12.52¢ to 16.48¢ per kWh.

Third-party ownership grew faster than the fleet as a whole, from 163,702 systems to 1,474,863, and now covers 29.1% of the residential fleet. Which of these lines a reader cares about depends on the question, and each has its own page.

The library in numbers

10 Statistics pages, rebuilt annually against the same URLs One shared dataset, so no two pages can disagree

51 Jurisdictions in every state-level table 50 states plus the District of Columbia, none dropped

357 State-years validated against EIA’s published price series Maximum difference 0.005¢/kWh, rounding

143,144,185 US residential electricity accounts in the denominator EIA-861 2024, counted across filing Parts A, B and D

The standards this library holds itself to

The standards below are not aspirations. Each is a rule that has changed something on a page in this section, usually by removing a figure someone would have liked to publish.

Primary sources only
Every statistic is traced back to the body that produced it, and where the source file is downloadable we download it rather than cite someone quoting it. No figure appears here because other sites repeat it.
A calculation is labelled as a calculation
Ratios, rates, ranks and correlations that we derive are marked as our analysis wherever they appear. Nothing computed here is dressed up as an officially reported statistic, and nothing reported by EIA is claimed as ours.
Nothing is typed by hand
Every number in every sentence, table and chart is read from one machine-written dataset at build time. A figure in a paragraph and the same figure in the table below it are the same expression, so they cannot drift apart between updates.
The method is published in full, not summarised
Each page names its source files, its inclusion rules, its exclusions and the exact arithmetic, including the double-counting trap in restructured markets that misstates the national price by more than a cent if handled naively.
Limitations sit on the page
Every page carries a limitations section, and where a finding depends on a reporting quirk or an outlier it is said in the finding itself rather than left for a reader to discover.
Absence is reported, not smoothed
Where a utility filed nothing we show nothing rather than assuming zero, and where a series moves oddly because of reclassification rather than reality we flag it rather than adjusting it away.
A metric that fails a plausibility check is withheld
Two columns in this dataset (battery energy capacity, and energy sold back to the grid) imply figures no residential product could produce, or cover too few installations to mean anything. Both are in wide use elsewhere. We publish the diagnostic and withhold the metric.
No causal claim a cross-section cannot carry
Correlations are reported as correlations, with their confounders named. Where an association is strong and its cause is unidentified (price against consumption is the clearest case) the page says so instead of implying the convenient direction.

Citing and reusing this work

What you may do

Quote the figures, reproduce the tables and republish the charts, in journalism, research, teaching or commercial work. The underlying data is a public US government dataset, and the analysis on top of it is published to be used.

We ask for attribution to HyreSolar and a link to the specific page a figure came from. The link matters more than the credit: several figures here carry conditions that change what they mean, and those conditions live on the page.

The citation form we suggest: HyreSolar, "[page title]", analysis of US EIA Form EIA-861 2024, retrieved 2 September 2026.

What we ask you not to do

Do not present a figure computed here as an EIA statistic. EIA publishes the inputs; the ratios and rankings are ours, and conflating the two misattributes any error in our arithmetic to a federal agency.

Do not drop the qualifier. "Net-metered" is doing real work in every adoption figure, "per account" in every consumption figure, and "installed fleet" in every battery figure. A number quoted without them describes something else.

If you find an error, tell us rather than working around it. Corrections are made on the page with a dated note, never silently, and the correction is worth more to us than the original figure was.

Questions

What is Form EIA-861?

The annual census of US electric utilities run by the US Energy Information Administration. Every utility operating in the United States is legally required to file it, reporting sales, revenue, customer counts, net metering, storage, metering technology, demand response, efficiency programmes, system peaks and reliability indices. Because filing is mandatory it is a census rather than a survey, which is why it can support state-level figures that a sample cannot.

How often is this library updated?

Once a year, when EIA publishes the final release for a new data year, historically in about October of the following year. The current data year is 2024, retrieved 2 September 2026. Every page is regenerated from the new dataset against the same URL, so a bookmarked figure updates rather than going stale. Early releases are deliberately excluded: they cover only part of the filer population and would show a false collapse in every national total.

Why do your figures differ from other solar statistics sites?

Usually because of the denominator or the scope. Household penetration here divides net-metered residential installations by residential utility accounts from the same filing, so both cover identical customers; figures built on Census housing units or on survey samples will differ. Scope matters as much: 2,031 MW of residential solar is reported outside net metering and is excluded from every adoption count here, which is stated rather than quietly absorbed.

Can I get the underlying data?

The source is public: EIA publishes Form EIA-861 as annual ZIP archives at the link in the sources list below, and anyone can download the same files we did. What we add is the extraction and the arithmetic, both of which are described on each page in enough detail to reproduce or refute. If a specific derived table would be useful to you, ask.

Written and audited by

HyreSolar Research

Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking

We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the statute, the tariff, the code section, the federal filing or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it. Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. That rule has cost us whole sections, and it is the reason the rest can be trusted.

160: primary sources read and cited
220: figures with a retrieval date
115: federal and state government sources
66: researched pages published

How this desk works

Primary sources only. Statutes from the legislature’s own publishing system, federal data from the agency that collects it, code text from the adopted edition, manufacturer claims from the data sheet. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we go and read the source.
Every figure carries its provenance. A named document and the date we retrieved it, so you can check it and so you know how old it is. Retrieval dates are not decoration: an EIA rate from May is a different fact from an EIA rate from August.
We publish what we could not verify. Every research page carries a section naming the things we tried to establish and could not, and why. A paywalled standard, a state website that refused the request, a manufacturer that publishes no figure at all.
We separate measurement from modelling from our own reasoning, and label which is which on the page. A laboratory measurement, an assumption inside a modelling tool and our own inference are three different kinds of claim and they are never presented as one.
We do not sell solar, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favourable mention. Nobody buys a position on this site.

Data as of EIA-861 2024 final release. Authorship on this site is organisational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.

Sources & retrieval dates

US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Net Metering (annual files, 2014–2024) — Utility-level net-metered installations, capacity and PV-paired batteries by state and customer sector. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Sales to Ultimate Customers (annual files, 2014–2024) — Residential revenue, sales and customer counts by utility and state. The basis for price, bill and consumption figures. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector — EIA’s published price series, used to validate our derivation. Agreement across all 357 overlapping state-years is within 0.005¢/kWh. Retrieved 2 September 2026.

From the national picture to your own roof

A library of averages tells you what the country does. Whether solar pays where you live depends on your tariff, your consumption and your roof, which is what the calculators are for.

Open the payback calculator Read the studies

HyreSolar is an independent analysis and matching service. We are not an installer, lender or utility. When a reader asks to be introduced, installers may pay us a referral fee. That fee never buys ranking, scores or placement in research. Our editorial policy sets out the rules.