Original research

Rooftop solar by state: how many American households actually have it

An 11-year, 51-jurisdiction census of net-metered residential solar, computed from federal utility filings.

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

3.55% of US households Net-metered rooftop solar, 2024

5,077,543 residential systems Up from 642,276 in 2014

7.9× growth since 2014 Cumulative installed fleet

The finding

3.55% of American households that buy electricity from a utility had a net-metered rooftop solar system at the end of 2024, 5,077,543 residential systems against 143,144,185 residential electricity accounts. Hawaii is at 22.0% and California at 14.7%; Tennessee is at 0.0027%, a spread of roughly 8,164 to one. Neither the ratio nor the ranking is published by EIA. HyreSolar computes both from the utility filings that contain each half, and publishes the method, the validation and the limitations below.

Key findings

1
3.55% of US households have net-metered rooftop solar
5,077,543 residential systems against 143,144,185 residential electricity accounts at the end of 2024. About one household in 28.
2
The spread between first and last is roughly 8,164 to one
Hawaii is at 22.0%. Tennessee is at 0.0027%, 86 systems across 3,166,103 accounts. No other household technology varies by this much between US states.
3
Two states hold 43% of every system in the country
Hawaii and California between them account for 2,189,401 of 5,077,543 residential net-metered systems.
4
The West has 10.0% adoption; the Midwest has 0.85%
The West holds 61% of America's residential solar on 22% of its households. The regional gap is wider than the gap between most countries.
5
The fleet grew 7.9-fold in eleven years, then stalled
From 642,276 systems in 2014 to 5,077,543 in 2024. But new connections fell 30.6% in 2024, the first large reversal in the series.
6
Average system size rose steadily and is still rising
From 5.38 kW to 6.74 kW across the installed fleet, while the systems being quoted today are larger again.

What this study is, and what it is not

The rooftop solar count on this page is a census, not a survey. It counts every residential net-metered photovoltaic system that a US electric utility reported to the federal government on Form EIA-861 for the years 2014 to 2024. There is no sampling and no modelling in the counts themselves.

It is not a count of all rooftop solar. A system that is not net-metered, because the state never adopted net metering, because the programme closed, or because the household is on a retail buyback plan instead, is reported on a different EIA schedule and is not in these totals. We measure that gap separately, and it is large enough to change how several states should be read, Texas most of all.

The ratio nobody publishes

3.55% of US households with a utility electricity account had net-metered rooftop solar at the end of 2024. Each square represents 1,000 households; 36 of the 1,000 squares are filled. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024. 5,077,543 residential net-metered PV systems ÷ 143,144,185 residential electricity accounts.

Every year, every US electric utility files Form EIA-861. On one schedule it reports how many of its customers have a net-metered solar array. On another it reports how many residential customers it has in total. EIA publishes both. It does not publish the first divided by the second.

That division is the number a homeowner, a journalist and a policymaker all actually want: out of the households on this grid, how many have gone solar? Because both halves come from the same filer, in the same year, on the same form, counting the same kind of thing (a residential electric account) the ratio is like-for-like in a way that dividing solar installations by Census households is not.

We computed it for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, for eleven consecutive years. The national answer for 2024 is 3.55%: about one household in 28. The interesting part is the dispersion.

The national picture

Every jurisdiction gets an equal square. Land area is irrelevant to a per-household rate, and a true-geography map would give the empty West the most ink.

Household rooftop solar penetration, 2024. Share of residential electricity accounts with a net-metered photovoltaic system. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024. Colour uses a square-root scale: penetration spans four orders of magnitude, and on a linear scale 45 states render as one indistinguishable pale block. Legend values mark the true value at each ramp position.

Read down the ramp rather than across the grid. Four jurisdictions (Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona) sit above 10% of households. Nine more clear 3%. Below that the numbers fall away very fast: 17 of the 51 are under 1%, and 3 are under a tenth of one per cent.

Household solar penetration, all 51 jurisdictions, 2024

#	State	Residential solar systems	Residential electricity accounts	Share of households	Avg. system size	Residential price
1	Hawaii	98,418	446,512	22.04%	5.40 kW	42.86¢
2	California	2,090,983	14,217,180	14.71%	6.07 kW	31.97¢
3	Nevada	134,257	1,311,755	10.23%	7.60 kW	15.00¢
4	Arizona	317,033	3,134,733	10.11%	7.18 kW	14.91¢
5	Colorado	179,751	2,557,732	7.03%	5.16 kW	14.92¢
6	Connecticut	103,824	1,552,746	6.69%	7.71 kW	28.75¢
7	New Mexico	61,209	936,098	6.54%	5.35 kW	14.20¢
8	Massachusetts	189,611	2,924,535	6.48%	6.88 kW	29.35¢
9	Utah	81,115	1,272,861	6.37%	5.93 kW	12.22¢
10	District of Columbia	17,780	318,780	5.58%	6.35 kW	17.71¢
11	New Jersey	199,822	3,735,638	5.35%	6.91 kW	19.34¢
12	Maryland	108,428	2,451,753	4.42%	8.29 kW	17.86¢
13	Rhode Island	17,321	457,383	3.79%	6.12 kW	28.65¢
14	New Hampshire	22,503	652,608	3.45%	8.06 kW	23.40¢
15	New York	226,979	7,420,214	3.06%	6.93 kW	24.43¢
16	Delaware	14,087	473,508	2.98%	7.67 kW	16.57¢
17	Vermont	9,193	323,960	2.84%	10.90 kW	21.90¢
18	Oregon	52,600	1,868,012	2.82%	6.34 kW	14.70¢
19	Florida	289,774	10,443,373	2.77%	8.88 kW	14.14¢
20	Idaho	22,899	868,141	2.64%	6.50 kW	11.52¢
21	Maine	14,867	742,549	2.00%	8.16 kW	24.29¢
22	Illinois	103,145	5,392,477	1.91%	7.74 kW	15.87¢
23	Virginia	69,553	3,654,481	1.90%	7.39 kW	14.41¢
24	Washington	59,235	3,368,978	1.76%	7.23 kW	11.90¢
25	Montana	9,151	557,432	1.64%	7.32 kW	12.66¢
26	Louisiana	34,417	2,147,745	1.60%	5.46 kW	11.73¢
27	South Carolina	40,055	2,581,882	1.55%	7.54 kW	14.23¢
28	Pennsylvania	81,375	5,534,580	1.47%	8.00 kW	17.77¢
29	Arkansas	19,146	1,476,944	1.30%	8.87 kW	12.32¢
30	North Carolina	57,393	5,067,762	1.13%	7.39 kW	14.13¢
31	Iowa	16,392	1,448,818	1.13%	8.33 kW	13.40¢
32	Texas	133,501	12,547,863	1.06%	7.37 kW	14.94¢
33	Missouri	30,022	2,933,914	1.02%	9.15 kW	12.91¢
34	Wyoming	2,913	286,475	1.02%	6.36 kW	12.47¢
35	Alaska	2,706	298,397	0.91%	5.24 kW	24.82¢
36	Oklahoma	16,755	1,878,818	0.89%	7.38 kW	12.24¢
37	Minnesota	22,621	2,581,180	0.88%	8.40 kW	15.45¢
38	Wisconsin	18,581	2,843,874	0.65%	7.24 kW	17.18¢
39	Kansas	8,583	1,317,095	0.65%	7.70 kW	14.15¢
40	Ohio	27,520	5,142,108	0.54%	7.44 kW	15.99¢
41	Michigan	23,456	4,516,367	0.52%	6.63 kW	19.30¢
42	Kentucky	10,069	2,077,215	0.48%	7.71 kW	12.79¢
43	West Virginia	3,535	866,456	0.41%	8.91 kW	15.07¢
44	Georgia	18,612	4,815,501	0.39%	6.92 kW	14.08¢
45	Indiana	11,045	3,056,216	0.36%	8.69 kW	14.77¢
46	Nebraska	2,807	905,415	0.31%	8.03 kW	11.53¢
47	Mississippi	1,789	1,340,459	0.13%	5.50 kW	13.39¢
48	South Dakota	469	433,548	0.11%	7.75 kW	12.86¢
49	North Dakota	81	397,839	0.0204%	12.59 kW	11.51¢
50	Alabama	76	2,398,172	0.0032%	11.45 kW	15.18¢
51	Tennessee	86	3,166,103	0.0027%	6.95 kW	12.42¢

All 51 jurisdictions, ranked. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024.

Figures labelled HyreSolar calculation are computed by us from the EIA source files named below. EIA publishes the inputs; it does not publish these ratios.

The top of the table is a different country

How the leaders got there, 2014–2024. Each panel is the state’s own household penetration path, scaled to its own maximum, compare the shape of the curve, not the height of the fill. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861. Note the difference in shape. Hawaii added 2.5 and 1.8 percentage points of household penetration in 2015 and 2016, then never more than 1.4 in any year since: the state closed retail net metering to new customers in October 2015. The mainland leaders show no equivalent break.

Hawaii’s household penetration is 6.2× the national rate. More than one household in 5 has a net-metered array. There is no other US state where rooftop solar is close to that normal.

California is second at 14.7%, and its scale is what makes the national numbers move: 2,090,983 systems, 41% of the entire US fleet. When California’s market changes, the national series changes with it, which is exactly what happened in 2024.

Below those two, Nevada (10.2%) and Arizona (10.1%) form a second tier, both sun-rich western states with large single utilities. Then a cluster of Northeastern states, Connecticut, Massachusetts, arrive by an entirely different route: modest sunshine, expensive electricity, and two decades of state incentive programmes.

Where rooftop solar has effectively not happened

At the other end, the numbers stop looking like a market at all. Tennessee reported 86 net-metered residential solar systems across 3,166,103 residential electricity accounts. Alabama reported 76 across 2,398,172.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to misreport. It does not mean those states have no rooftop solar. It means they have almost none under net metering. In Tennessee, 97% of reported residential PV capacity sits outside net metering entirely, because the Tennessee Valley Authority runs distributed generation through its own programmes rather than a net metering tariff.

The absence being measured here is a policy absence, not a physical one, and that is the more interesting finding. Sunshine is not the constraint: Tennessee and Alabama receive more annual solar irradiance than Connecticut, which is at 6.7%.

The ten lowest-penetration jurisdictions

State	Residential solar systems	Residential accounts	Share of households	Residential price	Non-net-metered PV (MW)
Tennessee	86	3,166,103	0.0027%	12.42¢/kWh	18.0
Alabama	76	2,398,172	0.0032%	15.18¢/kWh	3.7
North Dakota	81	397,839	0.0204%	11.51¢/kWh	0.1
South Dakota	469	433,548	0.1082%	12.86¢/kWh	0.3
Mississippi	1,789	1,340,459	0.1335%	13.39¢/kWh	2.1
Nebraska	2,807	905,415	0.3100%	11.53¢/kWh	0.7
Indiana	11,045	3,056,216	0.3614%	14.77¢/kWh	9.2
Georgia	18,612	4,815,501	0.3865%	14.08¢/kWh	2.5
West Virginia	3,535	866,456	0.4080%	15.07¢/kWh	0.0
Kentucky	10,069	2,077,215	0.4847%	12.79¢/kWh	2.4

HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024. The final column shows residential PV capacity reported outside net metering: a dash means the state does not appear among the twenty largest for that measure, not that the figure is zero.

Four regions, four different markets

Where the systems are. Residential net-metered solar systems by census region, 2024. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024. Regions follow US Census Bureau definitions.

Aggregated to census regions, the picture is starker than the state table suggests. The West holds 61% of every residential net-metered solar system in the United States while containing 22% of its households. Its household penetration, 10.0%, is 12 times the Midwest’s 0.85%.

The Northeast is the interesting case. It has 3.7% adoption on the worst solar resource in the country and the second-highest electricity prices, at 22.48¢/kWh. The South, with far better sunshine and 14.18¢/kWh power, sits at 1.45%.

Regional summary

Region	States	Systems	Share of US systems	Household penetration	Avg. size	Residential price	Added in 2024
Northeast	9	865,495	17.0%	3.71%	7.18 kW	22.48¢	107,405
Midwest	12	264,722	5.2%	0.85%	7.87 kW	15.38¢	54,304
South	17	835,056	16.4%	1.45%	7.96 kW	14.18¢	101,873
West	13	3,112,270	61.3%	10.00%	6.19 kW	20.05¢	264,360

HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024. Census Bureau regional definitions; the District of Columbia is counted in the South.

Eleven years of the national fleet

US household rooftop solar penetration, 2014–2024. Share of residential electricity accounts with a net-metered photovoltaic system. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861. Each point is a data year, not an interpolation.

The cumulative fleet grew from 642,276 systems in 2014 to 5,077,543 in 2024: a 7.9-fold increase, and a rise in household penetration from 0.50% to 3.55%.

Average system size rose over the same period from 5.38 kW to 6.74 kW. That is the size of the installed fleet, which is dominated by systems sold years ago; it is not the size of a system being quoted today, and the two are routinely confused. We separate them here.

Residential electricity prices rose over the same eleven years from 12.52¢/kWh to 16.48¢/kWh, a 32% increase in nominal terms. Whether that is what drove adoption is a question we test directly, and the answer is more equivocal than the industry usually admits.

The national series, 2014–2024

Year	Cumulative systems	Added that year	Capacity (MW)	Avg. size (kW)	Household share	Residential price
2014	642,276	—	3,453	5.38	0.50%	12.52¢
2015	958,850	316,574	5,357	5.59	0.74%	12.65¢
2016	1,321,277	362,427	7,627	5.77	1.01%	12.55¢
2017	1,626,283	305,006	9,487	5.83	1.23%	12.89¢
2018	1,911,892	285,609	11,357	5.94	1.43%	12.87¢
2019	2,283,702	371,810	13,863	6.07	1.69%	13.01¢
2020	2,661,029	377,327	16,433	6.18	1.95%	13.15¢
2021	3,157,429	496,400	19,929	6.31	2.28%	13.66¢
2022	3,788,427	630,998	24,668	6.51	2.71%	15.04¢
2023	4,549,601	761,174	30,571	6.72	3.22%	16.00¢
2024	5,077,543	527,942	34,226	6.74	3.55%	16.48¢

HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861. “Added that year” is the change in the cumulative count, which is the closest measure of new connections this survey supports, see Methodology.

And then 2024 broke the trend

Additions to the fleet fell from 761,174 in 2023 to 527,942 in 2024: a fall of 30.6%, the largest in the eleven-year series. Roughly half of the national decline is one state.

Read the slowdown analysis →

What explains the variation, and what does not

The obvious candidate is price: solar displaces retail electricity, so expensive electricity should mean more solar. Across all 51 jurisdictions the correlation between residential price and household penetration is r = 0.677. Remove Hawaii and California and it falls to r = 0.319.

We tested five other candidate explanations against the same cross-section. None performs better, and two run in the opposite direction to intuition, states where households consume more electricity have less solar, and states with worse grid reliability have less of it too.

The variable that plainly does explain the table is policy: whether a state runs a functioning net metering tariff, whether an incentive exists that a household or a third-party owner can claim, and whether interconnection completes. That is not something this dataset can score, which is why we present it as the reading of the evidence rather than as a measured result. The full correlation analysis is here.

Candidate explanations, tested

Variable	Correlation with household penetration	Excluding Hawaii and California	Direction
Residential price (¢/kWh)	r = 0.677	r = 0.319	Moderate positive
Households on a time-varying tariff (%)	r = 0.182	r = 0.191	Weak positive
Interval (AMI) metering penetration (%)	r = 0.028	r = -0.11	None
Outage minutes per customer (SAIDI)	r = -0.205	r = -0.255	Weak negative
Annual consumption per household (kWh)	r = -0.462	r = -0.329	Moderate negative
Average system size (kW)	r = -0.369	r = -0.295	Weak negative

Pearson correlation across 51 jurisdictions, 2024. HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861.

These are descriptive correlations on a single-year cross-section of 51 units. They control for nothing and establish no causation. They are published in full (including the ones that go the wrong way for the industry’s usual story) because reporting only the flattering coefficient is how a correlation table becomes an advertisement.

The grid context most solar analysis leaves out

Two facts from the same federal form change how the table above should be read. First, 83.8% of US residential electricity meters are now interval (AMI) meters, 123,758,084 of 147,612,180. Interval metering is the precondition for any hourly export-credit tariff: a state cannot run net billing without it. The infrastructure for the tariff regime that replaced net metering in California and Hawaii is now installed almost everywhere.

Second, only 11.1% of residential customers are on a time-varying tariff, 15,832,411 households nationally. This matters for every solar payback calculation ever published, because solar economics run on the marginal rate a household pays, not the average. For 88.9% of American households there is no time-varying marginal rate to model, and the average price is a reasonable proxy. In California, where 36% of households are on one, it is not.

Metering and tariff context, ten highest-adoption states

State	Household solar	AMI meter share	On a time-varying tariff	Outage minutes (SAIDI)
Hawaii	22.04%	95.0%	4.5%	383
California	14.71%	86.6%	36.1%	285
Nevada	10.23%	96.0%	1.3%	159
Arizona	10.11%	93.4%	39.1%	84
Colorado	7.03%	92.5%	47.2%	257
Connecticut	6.69%	21.7%	4.6%	153
New Mexico	6.54%	28.4%	0.9%	273
Massachusetts	6.48%	10.4%	0.2%	104
Utah	6.37%	86.4%	0.3%	115
District of Columbia	5.58%	99.5%	0.0%	33

HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861 2024, Advanced Meters, Dynamic Pricing and Reliability schedules. National medians: AMI 83.8%, time-varying tariff 11.1%, SAIDI 297 minutes.

How to use this data, and how not to

Do compare states on the household share, not the system count
California has 24 times more systems than Nevada and a lower share of households than Hawaii. The count measures the size of a state; the share measures how normal solar is in it.
Do state the year
These are 2024 figures from the final EIA-861 release. The 2025 early release exists and shows a partial set of filers; using it produces a spurious collapse.
Do say “net-metered” when you quote the low states
Writing that Tennessee “has almost no rooftop solar” is wrong. Writing that it has almost none under net metering is right, and is the more interesting claim.
Do not add this to a capacity figure
This counts systems, not megawatts, and net-metered systems only. It cannot be combined with a state total that includes utility-scale solar farms.
Do not read the ranking as a forecast
A state near the bottom with a functioning tariff can move quickly. Massachusetts nearly doubled its annual connections in a year when the country fell by a third.
Do not treat the denominator as households
It counts residential electricity accounts. A master-metered apartment building is one account for many homes, so penetration is somewhat overstated in states with a lot of that stock.

Methodology

Source and coverage

US Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, annual files for 2014 through 2024, downloaded as the published ZIP archives on 2 September 2026. EIA-861 is a mandatory census of US electric utilities collected under the Federal Energy Administration Act; it is not a sample, and utilities are legally required to respond.

The 2024 file is the final release. The 2025 early release exists and was downloaded, but covers only a partial set of filers (841 utilities against 1,004) and is excluded from every figure on this page.

Numerator

Residential photovoltaic net-metering installations from the Net Metering schedule, summed across all utilities filing for a state. Territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands) are reported on a separate sheet and excluded throughout.

EIA’s own adjustment rows, filed under utility number 99999 where EIA imputes for non-response, are retained: they are part of EIA’s published state total, and dropping them would produce a number that does not reconcile with EIA’s own aggregates.

Denominator

Residential customers from the Sales to Ultimate Customers schedule. This required care. EIA files restructured-market service in two halves: Part B is a competitive supplier’s energy sale and Part C is the incumbent utility’s delivery of that same electricity to the same household. Counting both double-counts the household. We sum Parts A, B and D only.

The size of that trap: summing all four parts understates the 2024 national residential price by 1.12¢/kWh and inflates the customer count by roughly 15 million.

Validation

The same Part handling produces the average residential price. We derived it for every state-year and compared it against EIA’s own published price series. Across all 357 overlapping state-years the maximum absolute difference is 0.005¢/kWh, EIA publishes to two decimal places, so that is rounding and nothing else. The national 2024 figure reproduces exactly at 16.48¢/kWh.

We publish this check because it is the evidence that the Part handling above is right, and because the same handling produces the denominator of every penetration figure on this page.

Handling of the source files

The workbooks are not consistent across years and every inconsistency silently produces wrong output if ignored. Sheet names change four times. Some years carry a title row above the header block; the 2025 early release adds a leading annotation column. The count measure is called “Customers” in 2014–15 and “Installations” from 2016. The 2019 Sales workbook inserts a “Short Form” column before the residential block, shifting every measure one place right. PG&E is filed under two different spellings, so grouping by utility name splits its series in half.

Columns are therefore addressed by a (group, measure, sector) header tuple with year-tolerant synonyms, never by position, and utilities are keyed on EIA utility number, never on name.

Reproducibility

Every figure and every mark on every chart on this page is generated from the source workbooks by script, not typed. A number in a sentence and the same number in the table below it cannot disagree, and next year’s release updates the whole study by re-running one script. If you want to check a number, the input is a public EIA download and the arithmetic is stated above.

Limitations

Net metering only

Residential PV outside net metering is on a different schedule and is excluded here. Nationally that is 2,031 MW. In Texas it is 64% of reported residential capacity, so the Texas row in the table above should not be read as the Texan rooftop solar market. Measured by state here.

Stock, not flow

EIA asks how many net-metered customers a utility has, not how many it connected. Annual additions are computed by differencing the stock, so a utility reclassifying accounts or failing to file appears as an addition or a loss. Vermont’s 2024 count falls by 664; we report it rather than smoothing it.

Accounts, not homes

The denominator counts residential electricity accounts. A master-metered apartment building is one account for many households, so penetration is somewhat overstated in states with a large master-metered multifamily stock, and the effect is not uniform across states.

Ownership is invisible in the count

A leased system and an owned system are one installation each. Nationally 29.0% of these systems are third-party owned, and the share ranges from under 1% to over half depending on the state. Ownership is on a separate sheet and analysed separately.

AC and DC capacity are mixed

EIA records a Type field of AC or DC per utility filing, and utilities do not all report on the same basis. State capacity totals therefore mix the two, and DC ratings run typically 15–25% above AC for the same array. This affects the average-size column, not the installation counts or the penetration ratio.

One year of cross-section for the correlations

The correlation table is a single-year cross-section of 51 units. It controls for nothing (not income, housing stock, solar resource, roof suitability or incentive design) and supports no causal claim. A fixed-effects panel across all eleven years would be a stronger design; we hold the panel and intend to run it.

Terms used on this page

Net metering: A tariff under which electricity a household exports to the grid is credited at or near the full retail rate, effectively running the meter backwards. It is the arrangement this study counts.
Net billing: The successor arrangement in several states, under which exports are credited at an avoided-cost value well below the retail rate. Systems on net billing still appear in this data as net-metered installations.
Residential electricity account: One metered residential customer of a utility, as reported on EIA-861. The denominator of every penetration figure here.
Installed fleet: Every system currently connected, accumulated since the technology arrived. Distinct from systems sold in a given year, which is a much smaller and more modern population.
AMI: Advanced metering infrastructure: an interval meter that records consumption hourly or sub-hourly and reports it back to the utility. The precondition for time-varying tariffs and for hourly export credits.
SAIDI: System Average Interruption Duration Index: the average number of minutes a customer was without power during the year. Used here only to test grid reliability as an explanation for adoption.
Third-party ownership (TPO): A lease or power purchase agreement in which the system on the roof is owned by a company rather than the household. Counted as one installation like any other.

Citation, reuse and corrections

How to cite this study

Full citation. HyreSolar Research, “Rooftop solar by state: how many American households actually have it”, September 2026. Analysis of US Energy Information Administration Form EIA-861, 2014–2024. Available at https://hyresolar.com/research/rooftop-solar-by-state/

In text. “according to a HyreSolar analysis of federal utility filings” — with a link to this page.

In a chart or table. “Source: HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 (2024)”.

What you may reuse

The underlying data is a public US government dataset and carries no restriction. The analysis, rankings, derived ratios and charts on this page are ours, and you are welcome to reproduce them — including the charts — for editorial, academic and non-commercial purposes with attribution and a link to this page.

We ask for the link rather than a bare mention because the methodology and the limitations live here. A figure quoted without them is easy to misread, and several of the numbers on this page carry conditions that change what they mean.

Who produced this

The HyreSolar research desk. We do not attach an individual byline to these studies, because the work is a scripted analysis of a public federal dataset rather than an authored opinion, and a personal byline would imply a kind of authorship that is not what happened here. What is accountable instead is the method: the source files are named, the arithmetic is stated, the extraction is scripted, and the validation is published.

HyreSolar is an independent analysis and matching service. We are not an installer, a lender or a utility, and no installer pays for placement, ranking or mention in this research. See the editorial policy.

How this study is built

Annual Form EIA-861 workbooks for 2014–2024 are downloaded from EIA and parsed by script into a single dataset. Every figure on this page — in the prose, in the tables and in every mark on every chart — is read from that dataset at build time. Nothing is typed by hand.

That is not a stylistic preference. It means a number in a sentence and the same number in the table beneath it cannot drift apart, a chart cannot disagree with its own caption, and next year's EIA release updates the entire study by regenerating one file rather than by someone editing 4,000 words and hoping they caught every instance.

The workbooks are not consistent between years — sheet names change, header rows move, a measure is renamed, a column appears in one year only, and one large utility is filed under two different spellings. The extraction addresses columns by their header meaning rather than their position, and keys utilities on their EIA number rather than their name, because every one of those inconsistencies silently produces wrong output if ignored.

Corrections

If you find an error, tell us and we will fix it on the page with a dated note rather than silently. That includes disagreements about method: the inputs are public and the arithmetic is stated, so the argument can be had on the evidence.

Update schedule

EIA publishes final Form EIA-861 data for a year in approximately October of the following year. This study is rebuilt against the new release and republished at the same URL, so links do not break and the accumulated citations stay attached to the current numbers.

Questions

What percentage of US homes have solar panels?

At the end of 2024, 3.55% of US households with a utility electricity account had a net-metered rooftop solar system, 5,077,543 systems against 143,144,185 residential accounts (HyreSolar calculation from EIA-861). That is about one household in 28. Counting rooftop solar outside net metering would raise this somewhat; EIA reports 2,031 MW of such capacity but no household count for it.

Which state has the most rooftop solar?

By count, California, with 2,090,983 residential net-metered systems, 41% of the national total. By share of households, Hawaii, at 22.0% against California’s 14.7%. The two measures answer different questions and it is worth saying which one you mean.

Which state has the least?

Tennessee, at 0.0027% of households, 86 net-metered residential systems. But this is a policy artefact: 97% of the state’s reported residential PV capacity sits outside net metering, because TVA runs distributed generation through its own programmes.

Why is this different from other “solar by state” rankings?

Most rankings use installed capacity in megawatts, which is dominated by utility-scale solar farms and says nothing about households. This one counts residential systems and divides by the households that could have had one, using the two halves of the same federal form so the numerator and denominator are consistent.

Does sunshine explain the ranking?

Not on its own. Several of the lowest-penetration states receive more annual solar irradiance than the Northeastern states in the top ten. The variable that tracks the table is policy, whether a functioning net metering tariff, a claimable incentive and a working interconnection process exist together.

How current is this data?

It is the 2024 data year, from EIA’s final release. EIA-861 final data for a year is typically published in October of the following year, so 2024 is the most recent complete national picture available. We update this page against the same URL when the next release lands.

What is the margin of error?

There is none in the conventional sense, because this is a census rather than a sample, every US electric utility is required to file. The uncertainty is different in kind: non-response and reclassification between years, which EIA partly corrects with its own adjustment rows, and the coverage limits set out in the limitations section.

Can I use this data?

Yes. The analysis is ours, the underlying data is public, and we ask only for a link to this page as the source of the calculation. The methodology section states everything needed to reproduce or challenge it, and the extraction scripts are documented.

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 capacity, installations and energy sold back by state and customer sector, plus PV-paired battery capacity and installations from 2023. Downloaded as the published annual ZIP archives. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Sales to Ultimate Customers (annual files, 2014–2024) — Utility-level residential revenue, sales and customer counts by state, used to derive the average residential price and to count the households a state actually meters. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Distributed Generation that is not Net Metered (2024) — Residential photovoltaic capacity served under buyback, feed-in and utility-owned arrangements rather than net metering. Capacity only; this schedule collects no installation count. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
US EIA, Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector — EIA’s own published state price series, used only to validate our derivation. Agreement across all 357 overlapping state-years is within 0.005¢/kWh, i.e. EIA’s own rounding. Retrieved 2 September 2026.

Working out whether solar makes sense on your roof

State averages do not price a specific house. Our payback model uses your utility rate, roof and usage.

Open the payback calculator What solar costs

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.