Research in progress
Solar lease contract terms study
Part one: how much of the market now signs a lease or PPA. Part two, the contract teardown, is being collected.
Status
Solar Lease Contract Terms Study is an original HyreSolar dataset built from named public sources, with the method and a downloadable file.
Leases and PPAs are back: 52% of new residential systems at SCE and 41% at PG&E were third-party owned in 2025, up from 29% and 22% in 2023.
More households are therefore signing 20- to 25-year contracts whose escalators and buyout terms they rarely compare.
The contract-terms half of this study needs a sample of executed agreements; no public dataset of them exists. Until we have collected and coded at least 50, this page reports only the market-share half and makes no claim about typical escalator rates.
The return of the lease
Third-party ownership fell steadily through 2023 as loans and cash purchases took over. The Net Billing Tariff reversed that: with exports worth less, the economics favored bundling a battery, raising upfront cost, and lease and PPA providers could still claim the commercial 48E credit that households lost when 25D ended on 31 December 2025.
Third-party-owned share by utility and year
| Year | PG&E | SCE | SDG&E |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 45.3% | 52.7% | 29.5% |
| 2017 | 29.5% | 41.6% | 22.4% |
| 2018 | 28.2% | 41.2% | 20.9% |
| 2019 | 28.8% | 43.5% | 25.7% |
| 2020 | 28.5% | 39.9% | 31.1% |
| 2021 | 23.9% | 34.8% | 23.8% |
| 2022 | 22.5% | 29.7% | 21.1% |
| 2023 | 21.7% | 29.2% | 20.1% |
| 2024 | 39.2% | 48.7% | 38.6% |
| 2025 | 41.4% | 51.6% | 36.0% |
Field “Third Party Owned” on each interconnection record. HyreSolar calculation from California DG Stats Interconnected Project Sites (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E), retrieved 22 October 2026.
Method and what is still missing
Market share (published)
Residential PV rows in the DG Stats Interconnected Project Sites file, grouped by approval year; share with Third Party Owned = Yes.
Contract terms (not yet published)
Planned: escalator rate, term, buyout schedule, transfer and removal clauses, coded from executed lease and PPA contracts that homeowners share with identifying details removed. Minimum sample before publication: 50 contracts from at least 5 providers. Until then, use the escalator calculator on your own contract.
Embed this finding
Paste this snippet into any page or CMS that accepts HTML. It carries the figure, the underlying source and a link back to the method, so the number travels with its conditions.
<figure style="border:1px solid #ddd;padding:12px;margin:0;font:15px/1.5 system-ui,sans-serif">
<p style="margin:0 0 6px"><strong>52% of new residential solar at SCE and 41% at PG&E was leased or on a PPA in 2025.</strong></p>
<figcaption style="font-size:13px;color:#555">Source: <a href="https://hyresolar.com/research/tpo-contract-teardown/">HyreSolar, Solar lease market share, California</a> (California DG Stats Interconnected Project Sites (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E), retrieved 22 October 2026).</figcaption>
</figure>Charts on this page may be reproduced with the same attribution. The rows behind them are in interconnection-timelines.csv.
Citation, reuse and corrections
How to cite this study
Full citation. HyreSolar Research, “Solar lease contract terms study (part one: market share)”, October 2026. Analysis of California DG Stats Interconnected Project Sites (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E), retrieved 22 October 2026. Available at https://hyresolar.com/research/tpo-contract-teardown/
In a chart or table. “Source: HyreSolar analysis of California DG Stats interconnection data (2026)”.
Reproducing it
Download the zip from the DG Stats downloads page, then run docs/research-data/cadgstats/extract_cadg.py from this site’s repository. The summary rows are in interconnection-timelines.csv. The raw file (1.3 GB unzipped) is not mirrored here.
What you may reuse
The source file is public. Our derived medians, charts and tables may be reproduced with attribution and a link to this page (CC BY 4.0).
Corrections and updates
Errors are corrected on the page with a dated note. DG Stats refreshes its file monthly; we rebuild this study at least annually at the same URL.
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Sources & retrieval dates
Weighing a lease against buying?
Run both against your bill before you sign.
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