Original research
Solar statistics by state: all 51 jurisdictions on eight measures
One table, eight rankings, and the states whose position depends entirely on which one you read.
Written by HyreSolar Research team Research and analysis
Audited by HyreSolar Research team Data audit and fact check
The finding
Two honest answers to "which state leads on solar"
Both of the sentences below are computed from the same federal filing, in the same year, on the same population of utilities. They disagree because they are measuring different things.
Answer one: count the systems
California. It holds 2,090,983 residential net-metered systems, 41% of every one in the country, and 12,702 MW of the 34,226 MW national total.
On this measure the ranking is close to a ranking of state population. Arizona is second with 317,033 systems and Florida third with 289,774.
The count tells you where the installers are, where the equipment went, and where a national policy change will be felt hardest. It tells you almost nothing about whether solar is normal in the state.
Answer two: count the households
Hawaii. 22.04% of its residential electricity accounts have a net-metered system, roughly one home in 5.
California is second at 14.71%, Nevada third at 10.23%. Hawaii ranks only 13th on the raw system count.
The rate tells you how ordinary the technology has become. It is the measure that answers "do my neighbours have this", and it is the one most state rankings quietly avoid because it demands a denominator.
The eight measures, and exactly what each one counts
Every ranking below is one of these 8. Three of them are counts, meaning a bigger state will usually win. Five are rates, meaning a state can win them at any size, which is where the interesting results live, and where the traps do too.
- Household penetration
- Residential net-metered photovoltaic installations divided by residential electricity accounts, both from the same filing year. A rate, reported by 51 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Systems installed
- The number of residential net-metered installations utilities in the state reported at year end. A count, reported by 51 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Installed capacity
- Residential net-metered photovoltaic capacity in megawatts. Utilities file on both AC and DC bases and EIA does not normalise. A count, reported by 51 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Average system size
- State capacity divided by state system count. The installed fleet average, which lags what is being sold today. A rate, reported by 51 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Battery attachment
- Photovoltaic-paired residential battery installations divided by residential photovoltaic installations. Standalone home batteries are filed separately and excluded. A rate, reported by 47 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Third-party ownership
- Residential installations reported as leased or on a power purchase agreement, divided by all residential installations in the state. A rate, reported by 38 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Residential electricity price
- Residential revenue divided by residential sales, in cents per kilowatt hour. Reproduces the price series EIA publishes itself. A rate, reported by 51 of 51 jurisdictions.
- Consumption per household
- Residential sales divided by residential electricity accounts, in kilowatt hours per year. A rate, reported by 51 of 51 jurisdictions.
Ranks stored in the dataset are computed on all reporting jurisdictions with no floor, so a rank of 1 on a rate can rest on a very small base. The leaderboards further down apply a floor; the tables report the raw rank. Both are labelled.
Where rooftop solar has actually taken hold
The measure that best answers "has solar happened here" is household penetration, and it is brutally uneven. Hawaii sits at 22.04%. Tennessee sits at 0.0027%. The ratio between them is around 8,164 to one, which is a spread you will not find in any other household technology in the United States.
Four jurisdictions are above ten per cent of households: Hawaii (22.0%), California (14.7%), Nevada (10.2%), Arizona (10.1%). Below them the curve falls away fast, 17 of the 51 jurisdictions are still under one household in a hundred.
The colour scale on the map is square-root rather than linear, and that is a deliberate distortion with a reason: penetration spans four orders of magnitude here, and on a linear scale every state except the top four renders as the same pale block. The legend prints the value each shade marks so the compression is visible rather than hidden.
The adoption table: all 51 jurisdictions ranked by household penetration
The first of the two master tables. Each cell carries the value and, after the dot, that jurisdiction's national rank on the measure. Rank 1 is always the largest value.
| State | Residential accounts | Systems · rank | Capacity MW · rank | Household share · rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hawaii | 446,512 | 98,418 · #13 | 531.7 · #14 | 22.042% · #1 |
| California | 14,217,180 | 2,090,983 · #1 | 12,701.6 · #1 | 14.707% · #2 |
| Nevada | 1,311,755 | 134,257 · #8 | 1,020.8 · #7 | 10.235% · #3 |
| Arizona | 3,134,733 | 317,033 · #2 | 2,277.7 · #3 | 10.114% · #4 |
| Colorado | 2,557,732 | 179,751 · #7 | 927.5 · #9 | 7.028% · #5 |
| Connecticut | 1,552,746 | 103,824 · #11 | 800.6 · #11 | 6.687% · #6 |
| New Mexico | 936,098 | 61,209 · #17 | 327.4 · #20 | 6.539% · #7 |
| Massachusetts | 2,924,535 | 189,611 · #6 | 1,304.6 · #6 | 6.484% · #8 |
| Utah | 1,272,861 | 81,115 · #15 | 481.0 · #16 | 6.373% · #9 |
| District of Columbia | 318,780 | 17,780 · #32 | 112.9 · #35 | 5.578% · #10 |
| New Jersey | 3,735,638 | 199,822 · #5 | 1,380.7 · #5 | 5.349% · #11 |
| Maryland | 2,451,753 | 108,428 · #10 | 898.8 · #10 | 4.423% · #12 |
| Rhode Island | 457,383 | 17,321 · #33 | 106.0 · #37 | 3.787% · #13 |
| New Hampshire | 652,608 | 22,503 · #28 | 181.3 · #26 | 3.448% · #14 |
| New York | 7,420,214 | 226,979 · #4 | 1,572.5 · #4 | 3.059% · #15 |
| Delaware | 473,508 | 14,087 · #37 | 108.1 · #36 | 2.975% · #16 |
| Vermont | 323,960 | 9,193 · #40 | 100.2 · #38 | 2.838% · #17 |
| Oregon | 1,868,012 | 52,600 · #20 | 333.5 · #19 | 2.816% · #18 |
| Florida | 10,443,373 | 289,774 · #3 | 2,572.1 · #2 | 2.775% · #19 |
| Idaho | 868,141 | 22,899 · #26 | 148.8 · #29 | 2.638% · #20 |
| Maine | 742,549 | 14,867 · #36 | 121.4 · #34 | 2.002% · #21 |
| Illinois | 5,392,477 | 103,145 · #12 | 798.2 · #12 | 1.913% · #22 |
| Virginia | 3,654,481 | 69,553 · #16 | 513.8 · #15 | 1.903% · #23 |
| Washington | 3,368,978 | 59,235 · #18 | 428.0 · #17 | 1.758% · #24 |
| Montana | 557,432 | 9,151 · #41 | 67.0 · #41 | 1.642% · #25 |
| Louisiana | 2,147,745 | 34,417 · #22 | 187.8 · #25 | 1.603% · #26 |
| South Carolina | 2,581,882 | 40,055 · #21 | 302.0 · #21 | 1.551% · #27 |
| Pennsylvania | 5,534,580 | 81,375 · #14 | 651.3 · #13 | 1.470% · #28 |
| Arkansas | 1,476,944 | 19,146 · #29 | 169.8 · #27 | 1.296% · #29 |
| North Carolina | 5,067,762 | 57,393 · #19 | 424.4 · #18 | 1.133% · #30 |
| Iowa | 1,448,818 | 16,392 · #35 | 136.5 · #30 | 1.131% · #31 |
| Texas | 12,547,863 | 133,501 · #9 | 984.0 · #8 | 1.064% · #32 |
| Missouri | 2,933,914 | 30,022 · #23 | 274.8 · #22 | 1.023% · #33 |
| Wyoming | 286,475 | 2,913 · #44 | 18.5 · #45 | 1.017% · #34 |
| Alaska | 298,397 | 2,706 · #46 | 14.2 · #46 | 0.907% · #35 |
| Oklahoma | 1,878,818 | 16,755 · #34 | 123.6 · #33 | 0.892% · #36 |
| Minnesota | 2,581,180 | 22,621 · #27 | 190.0 · #24 | 0.876% · #37 |
| Wisconsin | 2,843,874 | 18,581 · #31 | 134.6 · #31 | 0.653% · #38 |
| Kansas | 1,317,095 | 8,583 · #42 | 66.1 · #42 | 0.652% · #39 |
| Ohio | 5,142,108 | 27,520 · #24 | 204.6 · #23 | 0.535% · #40 |
| Michigan | 4,516,367 | 23,456 · #25 | 155.4 · #28 | 0.519% · #41 |
| Kentucky | 2,077,215 | 10,069 · #39 | 77.7 · #40 | 0.485% · #42 |
| West Virginia | 866,456 | 3,535 · #43 | 31.5 · #43 | 0.408% · #43 |
| Georgia | 4,815,501 | 18,612 · #30 | 128.8 · #32 | 0.387% · #44 |
| Indiana | 3,056,216 | 11,045 · #38 | 96.0 · #39 | 0.361% · #45 |
| Nebraska | 905,415 | 2,807 · #45 | 22.5 · #44 | 0.310% · #46 |
| Mississippi | 1,340,459 | 1,789 · #47 | 9.8 · #47 | 0.134% · #47 |
| South Dakota | 433,548 | 469 · #48 | 3.6 · #48 | 0.108% · #48 |
| North Dakota | 397,839 | 81 · #50 | 1.0 · #49 | 0.020% · #49 |
| Alabama | 2,398,172 | 76 · #51 | 0.9 · #50 | 0.003% · #50 |
| Tennessee | 3,166,103 | 86 · #49 | 0.6 · #51 | 0.003% · #51 |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Sorted by household share, highest first. "Residential accounts" is the denominator: residential electricity customers reported by every utility serving the state.
Figures labelled HyreSolar analysis are computed by us from the EIA source files named below. EIA publishes the inputs; it does not publish these ratios or rankings.
The states that change identity when you change the measure
Take each jurisdiction that reports all 8 measures, find its best rank and its worst, and subtract. That number (call it the rank spread) is a measure of how much the answer depends on the question.
Hawaii is the widest at 50 places, followed by Tennessee at 50 and California at 49. Hawaii is first in the country on household penetration and residential electricity price, and last on consumption per household. Both facts have the same cause: electricity there is expensive, so households buy less of it and generate more of their own.
Tennessee is the mirror image. It ranks 51st of 51 on household penetration and 1st of 47 on battery attachment. That second number is real arithmetic on a real filing, and it is also nearly meaningless, for reasons the floor section below sets out.
At the other end sit the states where the measure barely matters. North Carolina moves only 19 places across all 8; Nevada moves 20, Pennsylvania 20. These are the genuinely middling states, and a single-measure ranking describes them accurately by accident.
Rank spread: the ten most measure-dependent jurisdictions
| State | Best rank | On | Worst rank | On | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hawaii | #1 | Household penetration | #51 | Consumption per household | 50 places |
| Tennessee | #1 | Battery attachment | #51 | Household penetration | 50 places |
| California | #1 | Systems installed | #50 | Consumption per household | 49 places |
| Louisiana | #1 | Consumption per household | #48 | Residential electricity price | 47 places |
| Colorado | #5 | Household penetration | #51 | Average system size | 46 places |
| Massachusetts | #1 | Third-party ownership | #47 | Consumption per household | 46 places |
| Rhode Island | #5 | Residential electricity price | #48 | Consumption per household | 43 places |
| New Mexico | #7 | Household penetration | #49 | Average system size | 42 places |
| New York | #4 | Systems installed | #46 | Consumption per household | 42 places |
| Maine | #8 | Residential electricity price | #49 | Consumption per household | 41 places |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Where a jurisdiction ties for best or worst, the measure listed is the first of the 8 in table order.
38 of the 51 jurisdictions rank in the national top ten on at least one of these 8 measures. Almost any state can be written up as a solar leader if you are allowed to pick the measure afterwards.
Reading the spread map
Plotted geographically the spread has no obvious pattern, which is itself the finding. Rank disagreement is not a coastal phenomenon or a sunbelt phenomenon. It happens wherever one variable is extreme (a very high price, a very small fleet, a tariff that pushes ownership one way) and it is invisible on any single-measure map.
Who leads each measure, with and without the floor
The middle two columns are the raw leaderboard, every reporting jurisdiction, no minimum. The right-hand columns re-run the same ranking over the 39 jurisdictions with at least 10,000 systems. On the three counts the two are identical by construction. On the five rates, three of them change hands.
| Measure | Leader, no floor | Value | Leader, 10,000+ systems | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Household penetration | Hawaii | 22.04% | Hawaii | 22.04% |
| Systems installed | California | 2,090,983 | California | 2,090,983 |
| Installed capacity | California | 12,701.6 MW | California | 12,701.6 MW |
| Average system size | North Dakota | 12.59 kW | Missouri | 9.15 kW |
| Battery attachment | Tennessee | 39.53% | Michigan | 18.40% |
| Third-party ownership | Massachusetts | 57.2% | Massachusetts | 57.2% |
| Residential price | Hawaii | 42.86¢ | Hawaii | 42.86¢ |
| Consumption per household | Louisiana | 14,422 kWh | Louisiana | 14,422 kWh |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Rank 1 is the highest value in every row, including price and consumption, where "leading" is not a compliment.
Why rates carry an inclusion floor and counts do not
The inclusion floor is the single decision that most changes a state solar ranking, and it is almost never disclosed. Ours is 10,000 systems, applied to rates only.
- A count is a fact about the state. It needs no floor.
Alabama has 76 residential net-metered systems. That is not a fragile estimate: it is the number, and ranking it last is correct. Systems, capacity and the household denominator are all totals, so every jurisdiction belongs in those rankings at whatever size it is.
- A rate is a ratio, and a small denominator makes it unstable.
Battery attachment in Tennessee reads 39.53%: the highest in the country. It is 34 batteries against 86 systems. One utility filing a single unusual programme moves that figure by tens of percentage points, and it describes a fleet smaller than a single suburban subdivision.
- The same problem produces the biggest average system in America.
North Dakota tops the average-size ranking at 12.59 kW, from 81 systems and 1.0 MW. With a fleet that small, a handful of large agricultural or commercial-adjacent installations classified as residential set the state average. Applied over 10,000+ systems the leader becomes Missouri at 9.15 kW, which is a number about ordinary houses.
- 10,000 is a judgement, and we say so.
It admits 39 of 51 jurisdictions, enough to keep every state with a real residential market and enough to exclude the ones where a rate is arithmetic rather than evidence. A different analyst could pick a different number and get a slightly different leaderboard. What they should not do is pick one and not mention it.
- Do not apply the floor to a count and call it a ranking of states.
Dropping small jurisdictions from a systems or capacity table does not stabilise anything; it just deletes states from a list they belong on. The floor exists to protect ratios, not to tidy tables.
- Do not read a floored leaderboard as the complete picture.
The floored battery leader, Michigan at 18.40%, is the right answer to "where do households with solar usually also have storage". It is the wrong answer to "which state reports the highest attachment rate", which remains Tennessee. Say which question you asked.
The characteristics table: all 51 jurisdictions, alphabetical
The second master table covers the five measures that describe what solar looks like in a state rather than how much of it there is. This one is sorted alphabetically because it is a lookup table, not a league table: the ranks are in the cells.
| State | Average size · rank | Battery rate · rank | Third-party owned · rank | Price · rank | kWh per household · rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 11.45 kW · #2 | — | — | 15.18¢ · #21 | 13,718 · #4 |
| Alaska | 5.24 kW · #50 | — | — | 24.82¢ · #6 | 6,939 · #44 |
| Arizona | 7.18 kW · #32 | 3.26% · #13 | 34.1% · #10 | 14.91¢ · #26 | 12,899 · #8 |
| Arkansas | 8.87 kW · #7 | 0.24% · #39 | 0.2% · #30 | 12.32¢ · #44 | 12,580 · #11 |
| California | 6.07 kW · #44 | 10.58% · #6 | 32.0% · #11 | 31.97¢ · #2 | 6,039 · #50 |
| Colorado | 5.16 kW · #51 | 0.72% · #31 | 17.7% · #18 | 14.92¢ · #25 | 8,091 · #37 |
| Connecticut | 7.71 kW · #18 | 0.65% · #32 | 53.8% · #3 | 28.75¢ · #4 | 8,335 · #35 |
| Delaware | 7.67 kW · #21 | 0.02% · #43 | 26.7% · #13 | 16.57¢ · #17 | 10,928 · #24 |
| District of Columbia | 6.35 kW · #41 | — | 3.2% · #24 | 17.71¢ · #15 | 7,672 · #41 |
| Florida | 8.88 kW · #6 | 1.08% · #28 | 13.5% · #19 | 14.14¢ · #33 | 13,250 · #5 |
| Georgia | 6.92 kW · #35 | 2.12% · #19 | 2.2% · #25 | 14.08¢ · #35 | 12,888 · #9 |
| Hawaii | 5.40 kW · #48 | 18.24% · #3 | 21.8% · #16 | 42.86¢ · #1 | 5,938 · #51 |
| Idaho | 6.50 kW · #39 | 2.03% · #20 | 0.0% · #35 | 11.52¢ · #50 | 11,326 · #21 |
| Illinois | 7.74 kW · #17 | 0.03% · #42 | 47.0% · #6 | 15.87¢ · #19 | 8,317 · #36 |
| Indiana | 8.69 kW · #8 | 5.69% · #9 | 0.0% · #36 | 14.77¢ · #27 | 10,814 · #25 |
| Iowa | 8.33 kW · #10 | 0.13% · #41 | — | 13.40¢ · #36 | 9,987 · #31 |
| Kansas | 7.70 kW · #20 | 0.02% · #44 | 1.0% · #27 | 14.15¢ · #32 | 10,508 · #27 |
| Kentucky | 7.71 kW · #19 | 4.73% · #10 | — | 12.79¢ · #40 | 12,558 · #12 |
| Louisiana | 5.46 kW · #47 | 0.01% · #45 | 0.3% · #29 | 11.73¢ · #48 | 14,422 · #1 |
| Maine | 8.16 kW · #12 | 0.37% · #37 | 8.9% · #20 | 24.29¢ · #8 | 6,601 · #49 |
| Maryland | 8.29 kW · #11 | 0.49% · #34 | 54.6% · #2 | 17.86¢ · #13 | 11,146 · #23 |
| Massachusetts | 6.88 kW · #37 | 1.33% · #27 | 57.2% · #1 | 29.35¢ · #3 | 6,836 · #47 |
| Michigan | 6.63 kW · #38 | 18.40% · #2 | 0.2% · #32 | 19.30¢ · #12 | 7,419 · #43 |
| Minnesota | 8.40 kW · #9 | 0.39% · #36 | — | 15.45¢ · #20 | 8,548 · #34 |
| Mississippi | 5.50 kW · #46 | 0.61% · #33 | — | 13.39¢ · #37 | 13,871 · #2 |
| Missouri | 9.15 kW · #4 | 2.53% · #16 | 0.0% · #37 | 12.91¢ · #38 | 12,007 · #17 |
| Montana | 7.32 kW · #29 | 2.24% · #18 | — | 12.66¢ · #41 | 10,226 · #29 |
| Nebraska | 8.03 kW · #14 | 0.36% · #38 | — | 11.53¢ · #49 | 11,477 · #19 |
| Nevada | 7.60 kW · #22 | 2.34% · #17 | 36.2% · #8 | 15.00¢ · #23 | 11,154 · #22 |
| New Hampshire | 8.06 kW · #13 | 3.19% · #14 | 25.7% · #14 | 23.40¢ · #9 | 7,428 · #42 |
| New Jersey | 6.91 kW · #36 | 0.80% · #30 | 51.4% · #4 | 19.34¢ · #11 | 7,949 · #38 |
| New Mexico | 5.35 kW · #49 | 0.18% · #40 | 7.7% · #21 | 14.20¢ · #31 | 7,849 · #39 |
| New York | 6.93 kW · #34 | 1.76% · #23 | 36.3% · #7 | 24.43¢ · #7 | 6,854 · #46 |
| North Carolina | 7.39 kW · #25 | 0.43% · #35 | 0.2% · #31 | 14.13¢ · #34 | 12,184 · #16 |
| North Dakota | 12.59 kW · #1 | 0.00% · #46 | — | 11.51¢ · #51 | 12,344 · #14 |
| Ohio | 7.44 kW · #24 | 5.98% · #8 | 3.8% · #23 | 15.99¢ · #18 | 10,146 · #30 |
| Oklahoma | 7.38 kW · #27 | 1.90% · #21 | 1.4% · #26 | 12.24¢ · #45 | 12,949 · #7 |
| Oregon | 6.34 kW · #42 | 1.64% · #24 | 7.2% · #22 | 14.70¢ · #28 | 10,582 · #26 |
| Pennsylvania | 8.00 kW · #15 | 1.60% · #25 | 31.8% · #12 | 17.77¢ · #14 | 9,806 · #32 |
| Rhode Island | 6.12 kW · #43 | 6.67% · #7 | 35.5% · #9 | 28.65¢ · #5 | 6,802 · #48 |
| South Carolina | 7.54 kW · #23 | 1.88% · #22 | 20.2% · #17 | 14.23¢ · #30 | 12,605 · #10 |
| South Dakota | 7.75 kW · #16 | 0.00% · #47 | — | 12.86¢ · #39 | 11,925 · #18 |
| Tennessee | 6.95 kW · #33 | 39.53% · #1 | 0.0% · #38 | 12.42¢ · #43 | 13,843 · #3 |
| Texas | 7.37 kW · #28 | 2.72% · #15 | 24.1% · #15 | 14.94¢ · #24 | 13,154 · #6 |
| Utah | 5.93 kW · #45 | 10.65% · #5 | 0.9% · #28 | 12.22¢ · #46 | 9,290 · #33 |
| Vermont | 10.90 kW · #3 | — | 49.0% · #5 | 21.90¢ · #10 | 6,884 · #45 |
| Virginia | 7.39 kW · #26 | 1.00% · #29 | 0.1% · #34 | 14.41¢ · #29 | 12,388 · #13 |
| Washington | 7.23 kW · #31 | 4.35% · #11 | 0.2% · #33 | 11.90¢ · #47 | 11,465 · #20 |
| West Virginia | 8.91 kW · #5 | 17.06% · #4 | — | 15.07¢ · #22 | 12,320 · #15 |
| Wisconsin | 7.24 kW · #30 | 1.54% · #26 | — | 17.18¢ · #16 | 7,742 · #40 |
| Wyoming | 6.36 kW · #40 | 4.09% · #12 | — | 12.47¢ · #42 | 10,361 · #28 |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. An em dash means the jurisdiction filed nothing on that schedule, battery attachment is reported by 47 jurisdictions and third-party ownership by 38. Ranks are out of the reporting set, not out of 51.
A blank is absence of a filing, not a zero. Several of the states showing an em dash on third-party ownership certainly have leased systems in them; what they do not have is a utility that broke the number out.
The states with the most solar install the smallest systems
Plot average system size against household penetration and the line slopes down. The correlation across all 51 jurisdictions is -0.369, and it survives removing the two extreme adopters (-0.295 across the remaining 49).
The mechanism is not mysterious once you see the consumption ranking beside it. Hawaii is last of 51 on kilowatt hours per household at 5,938 a year; California is 50th at 6,039. A system is sized to a load, and mild-climate households with expensive electricity have small loads. Meanwhile Louisiana tops consumption at 14,422 kWh and sits 26th on adoption.
Consumption per household correlates with penetration at -0.462, in the same direction. Price runs the other way at 0.677: the strongest single relationship in the set, though it weakens to 0.319 once the two outlier states come out, which is a warning about how much of that correlation is two data points doing the work.
None of this is a causal claim. It is a description of which state characteristics travel together, offered so that a reader looking at a size ranking understands why the top of it is full of states with very little solar. Consumption has its own page: electricity consumption by state.
The leaders are not all moving the same way
A rank is a snapshot. The eight small charts below run each leading jurisdiction's household penetration across the whole 2014–2024 series, each on its own vertical scale so the shape is readable rather than the height.
Two shapes appear. Hawaii bends: it rose steeply through the middle of the last decade and has flattened since, and its curve carries a visible dip after retail net metering closed to new applicants there. California climbs almost linearly and then softens at the end of the series. Nevada and Arizona are still in the steep part.
Reading these panels as forecasts would be a mistake, several of the bends are tariff events rather than market events, and the tariff itself is the subject of our net metering page. What the panels do establish is that "high adoption" is not one condition. Some of these states are saturating and some are accelerating, and the rank table cannot tell them apart.
Four regions, and the one that is not where you would guess
Grouped into census regions the pattern is stark. The West sits at 10.00% of households and holds 61.3% of all US residential systems on 22% of its households. The Midwest sits at 0.85%: a gap of about 12 to one.
The interesting row is the Northeast. It has the worst solar resource of the four regions and the second-highest penetration, 3.71%, ahead of the South at 1.45%. It also carries the second-highest regional electricity price at 22.48¢ against 14.18¢ in the South. Sunshine loses to tariff design, and it loses clearly.
Regional average system size runs the other way again: 7.96 kW in the South and 7.87 kW in the Midwest against 6.19 kW in the West. The regions with the least solar install the largest systems, which is the state-level relationship reappearing one level up.
Regional detail
| Region | Jurisdictions | Residential accounts | Systems | Added in 2024 | Household share | Average size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| West | 13 | 31,124,306 | 3,112,270 | 264,360 | 10.00% | 6.19 kW |
| Northeast | 9 | 23,344,213 | 865,495 | 107,405 | 3.71% | 7.18 kW |
| South | 17 | 57,706,815 | 835,056 | 101,873 | 1.45% | 7.96 kW |
| Midwest | 12 | 30,968,851 | 264,722 | 54,304 | 0.85% | 7.87 kW |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. "Added in 2024" is the change in the cumulative reported count between filings, not a separate installation survey.
The West added 264,360 systems in 2024 (more than the other three regions combined) while already holding the highest share. Concentration is still increasing.
Three ways a state solar ranking goes wrong
Mixing net-metered and total capacity. Every figure on this page counts net-metered residential solar only. 2,031 MW of US residential photovoltaic capacity is filed on a different schedule with no installation count attached, and in Texas that is most of the fleet. A table that quietly adds the two, or that compares a net-metered count against a total-capacity figure from another source, is not measuring one thing.
Comparing a rate on an unstated base. Battery attachment, average size and third-party ownership are all ratios reported by fewer than all 51 jurisdictions, and the raw leaders on two of the three sit on fleets of under a hundred systems.
Treating accounts as households. The denominator throughout is residential electricity accounts. A master-metered apartment block is one account covering many homes, so penetration is somewhat overstated in states with a lot of that housing stock and the effect is not evenly distributed.
Methodology
Source and vintage
US Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, annual files 2014 through 2024, retrieved as published ZIP archives on 2 September 2026. Filing is a legal obligation for US electric utilities, so this is a census of the industry rather than a survey of it: there is no sampling error to quote, and there is no panel of respondents that could drift.
The 2024 figures come from the final release. EIA also publishes an early release for the following data year covering a partial set of filers; it is excluded from every number here, because a partial filer set renders as a market collapse.
How a state row is built
Utilities file by utility, not by state, and many operate across state lines, so every measure here is an aggregation of utility records tagged to the state of service, not a state-level figure EIA publishes. Systems and capacity come from the Net Metering schedule, residential sector only. Accounts, revenue and sales come from Sales to Ultimate Customers.
Rates are computed at the state level from state totals, never as an average of utility rates. Arizona's penetration is all reported systems in Arizona divided by all reported accounts in Arizona; it is not the mean of its utilities' individual penetration figures, which would let a tiny co-op count as much as the largest investor-owned utility in the state.
The eight ranks in the tables are precomputed once in the dataset and read by every page in this library, which is why no two of our pages can disagree about which jurisdiction is third on anything.
The restructured-market trap
In states with retail competition, EIA files one household's service in two halves: the competitive supplier's energy sale and the incumbent utility's delivery of that same electricity. The two carry identical megawatthours. Summing sales and customers across every filing Part double-counts them, and the resulting national residential price comes out 1.12¢/kWh too low.
We sum revenue across all Parts, and sales and customers across Parts A, B and D only. The test of that handling is external: it reproduces EIA's own published residential price series across all 357 overlapping state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh, which is the width of EIA's own rounding. Since the same customer counts form the denominator of every penetration figure on this page, that check is not only about price.
Ranking rules
Rank 1 is the largest value on every measure without exception, including price and consumption per household. We considered inverting those two so that rank 1 always meant "best" and rejected it: "best" is a judgement about a reader's situation, not a property of a dataset, and a table where the direction changes column by column is a table that will be misread.
Ranks are computed over the jurisdictions reporting the measure. A rank of 1 out of 47 on battery attachment and a rank of 51 out of 51 on penetration are not on the same scale, and the tables name the reporting count so the two are not read as equivalent.
Ties are broken by the underlying unrounded value. Where two jurisdictions genuinely tie in the source data, the dataset assigns them consecutive ranks in state-code order; no result on this page turns on such a case.
Limitations
Net-metered only, and that is not a small caveat. 2,031 MW of residential photovoltaic capacity sits on the Non-Net-Metered Distributed Generation schedule, which collects megawatts and no installation count. There is therefore no honest way to produce a corrected household penetration figure, and we do not attempt one. The size of that gap, state by state →
Capacity bases are mixed. Utilities report photovoltaic capacity on AC or DC bases and EIA does not normalise. This affects average-system-size comparisons between states more than it affects any national total, and it is the reason the size ranking should be read as a broad grouping rather than a precise order.
Two measures have partial coverage. Battery attachment was first collected for the 2023 data year, so 2024 is the second year it exists at all, and 4 jurisdictions did not file it. Third-party ownership is missing for 13. Both gaps are shown as absent rather than filled.
Nothing here is generation. EIA-861 records installed capacity, not output. A kilowatt in Arizona and a kilowatt in Maine do not produce the same electricity in a year, and no figure on this page should be converted into production, savings or bill offset.
Stock, not flow. Annual additions are derived by differencing a stock survey. If a utility reclassifies customers or fails to file in a given year, the difference shows up as an addition or a loss that never happened on a roof.
Corrections and reuse
Every number above is produced from the source workbooks by script and inserted into this page as a variable; none is typed by an author. That is the property that keeps the prose and the tables in agreement, and it is what makes a correction cheap: a fix lands once in the extraction and propagates everywhere.
The underlying data is a public US government dataset and the ranking is ours. Reuse it with attribution and a link back to this page, which is where the coverage counts, the floor and the caveats live. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it here with a dated note rather than quietly.
Questions
Which state has the most solar power?
Which state has the least solar?
Why does this page rank on eight measures instead of one?
What is the minimum system count and why does it exist?
Are these figures all rooftop solar in each state?
Does more sunshine explain the state ranking?
How current is this, and how often does it change?
Can I reuse the full table?
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.
Your state is a row. Your roof is not.
A ranking tells you what is normal where you live. Sizing a system takes a specific roof, a specific bill and a specific tariff.
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.