Statistics
Solar energy statistics: every figure from federal data, sourced and dated
US residential solar in numbers, from the mandatory annual census of American electric utilities.
Written by HyreSolar Research team Research and analysis
Audited by HyreSolar Research team Data audit and fact check
The headline
These solar energy statistics come from named public datasets, each with its source and retrieval date, and are free to cite.
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 systems against 143,144,185 residential electricity accounts, totalling 34,226 MW.
Every statistic on this page is computed by HyreSolar from Form EIA-861, the mandatory annual census of US electric utilities, rather than copied from another site. Where a figure is a ratio EIA does not publish, it is labeled as our analysis and the arithmetic is stated.
Where these numbers come from, and what that changes
Many solar statistics pages are aggregations. A figure is taken from a trade report, which took it from a survey, which sampled a subset of the market, and by the time it reaches a listicle nobody can say what it counted or when.
These 50 are computed from Form EIA-861, which every US electric utility is legally required to file. It is a census, not a sample. We downloaded the 11 annual releases, extracted them by script, and derived the ratios EIA does not publish itself.
The check that matters: our residential price derivation reproduces EIA’s own published price series across 357 state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh, EIA rounds to two decimals, so that is rounding and nothing else. That is the evidence the extraction is right, and it is why the ratios built on the same handling can be trusted.
The national picture, statistics 1 to 10
5,077,543 systems against 143,144,185 residential accounts. About one household in 28. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024.
The count every utility reported at year end 2024. EIA-861.
Residential net-metered photovoltaic capacity, 2024. EIA-861.
Capacity divided by system count across the whole installed fleet, not the size of a system quoted today, which is larger. HyreSolar analysis.
Residential customer accounts, counted across filing Parts A, B and D to avoid double-counting restructured markets. EIA-861.
Residential revenue divided by residential sales. Reproduces EIA’s published figure exactly. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861.
$1,707 a year. Revenue divided by customers. HyreSolar analysis. Bills by state →
Residential sales divided by residential customers. HyreSolar analysis. Consumption by state →
Reported on a separate EIA schedule and missing from most solar statistics. EIA-861.
From 642,276 systems to 5,077,543. HyreSolar analysis.
State extremes, statistics 11 to 20
More than one home in 5. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024.
And holds 41% of every residential solar system in the country, 2,090,983 of 5,077,543.
The only other jurisdictions above 10% of households.
Not an absence of solar but an absence of net metering: the Tennessee Valley Authority runs distributed generation through its own programs.
No other household technology varies this much between US states. HyreSolar analysis.
Rooftop solar remains a minority technology almost everywhere.
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024.
Followed by Arizona (317,033) and Florida (289,774).
On 22% of its households. Regional penetration: 10.0%.
The widest regional gap in the data. Full state ranking →
Growth and the 2024 reversal, statistics 21 to 28
Down from 761,174 the year before. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861.
The only previous falls were 2017 and 2018, and 2024 is larger than both together.
California, following its April 2023 net billing tariff change.
Inflated by systems pulled forward before California’s grandfathering deadline.
The sharpest fall in the series is not the lowest level in it: a distinction the coverage we read misses.
A 7.1-fold increase in eleven years.
The installed fleet average, which lags the size of systems being sold today.
From 13¢ to 16¢ per kWh, in nominal terms.
What the annual flow looks like
The cumulative curve above is smooth. The annual flow underneath it is not, and it is the flow that tells you what the market is doing right now.
Batteries and storage, statistics 29 to 34
297,550 of 5,077,543. The installed-fleet rate, not the share of new sales, which is far higher. HyreSolar analysis.
Roughly 221,123 of 297,550.
Among states with at least 10,000 systems. HyreSolar analysis.
The leaders are, without exception, states where exporting stopped paying retail value.
Storage tracks tariff design far more closely than it tracks how much solar a state has.
The columns were added for the 2023 data year, so 2023 and 2024 are the entire series. Full battery analysis →
Who owns it, statistics 35 to 39
1,474,863 systems are leased or on a power purchase agreement rather than owned by the household. HyreSolar analysis.
5.5% against 1.4%. HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 Utility Data joined to Net Metering.
18,189,014 customers, 244,668 systems. Co-op analysis →
The concentration is structural, not preferential.
Set by state incentive design, not household preference.
The grid behind it, statistics 40 to 50
123,758,084 of 147,612,180. The precondition for any hourly export tariff. Smart meter analysis →
15,832,411 households. Solar economics run on the marginal rate, and for the other 88.9% there is no time-varying marginal rate to respond to.
7.5% of all metered households, 36× the number with a solar battery. Demand response analysis →
EIA-861 Demand Response schedule.
SAIDI, IEEE standard, including major event days. Outage analysis →
The difference is storms. EIA-861 Reliability.
SAIFI, IEEE standard, with major event days.
Equal to 0.69% of all residential sales. EIA-861 Energy Efficiency.
Against a winter peak of 970,925 MW. Read as a floor rather than a total: West Virginia reports 10 MW across 866,456 accounts (12 watts per account against a national median of 7,533) which is a filing failure, not a measurement. EIA-861 Operational Data.
Which is why a net-metering-only ranking misreads several states badly.
The single largest measurement gap in US solar statistics.
The national series, 2014–2024
| Year | Systems | Added that year | Capacity (MW) | Avg. size | Household share | Residential price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 642,276 | — | 3,453 | 5.38 kW | 0.50% | 12.52¢ |
| 2015 | 958,850 | 316,574 | 5,357 | 5.59 kW | 0.74% | 12.65¢ |
| 2016 | 1,321,277 | 362,427 | 7,627 | 5.77 kW | 1.01% | 12.55¢ |
| 2017 | 1,626,283 | 305,006 | 9,487 | 5.83 kW | 1.23% | 12.89¢ |
| 2018 | 1,911,892 | 285,609 | 11,357 | 5.94 kW | 1.43% | 12.87¢ |
| 2019 | 2,283,702 | 371,810 | 13,863 | 6.07 kW | 1.69% | 13.01¢ |
| 2020 | 2,661,029 | 377,327 | 16,433 | 6.18 kW | 1.95% | 13.15¢ |
| 2021 | 3,157,429 | 496,400 | 19,929 | 6.31 kW | 2.28% | 13.66¢ |
| 2022 | 3,788,427 | 630,998 | 24,668 | 6.51 kW | 2.71% | 15.04¢ |
| 2023 | 4,549,601 | 761,174 | 30,571 | 6.72 kW | 3.22% | 16.00¢ |
| 2024 | 5,077,543 | 527,942 | 34,226 | 6.74 kW | 3.55% | 16.48¢ |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861. "Added that year" is the change in the cumulative count.
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 ten highest-adoption jurisdictions, 2024
| # | State | Systems | Households | Share | Avg. size | Battery rate | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hawaii | 98,418 | 446,512 | 22.04% | 5.40 kW | 18.2% | 42.86¢ |
| 2 | California | 2,090,983 | 14,217,180 | 14.71% | 6.07 kW | 10.6% | 31.97¢ |
| 3 | Nevada | 134,257 | 1,311,755 | 10.23% | 7.60 kW | 2.3% | 15.00¢ |
| 4 | Arizona | 317,033 | 3,134,733 | 10.11% | 7.18 kW | 3.3% | 14.91¢ |
| 5 | Colorado | 179,751 | 2,557,732 | 7.03% | 5.16 kW | 0.7% | 14.92¢ |
| 6 | Connecticut | 103,824 | 1,552,746 | 6.69% | 7.71 kW | 0.7% | 28.75¢ |
| 7 | New Mexico | 61,209 | 936,098 | 6.54% | 5.35 kW | 0.2% | 14.20¢ |
| 8 | Massachusetts | 189,611 | 2,924,535 | 6.48% | 6.88 kW | 1.3% | 29.35¢ |
| 9 | Utah | 81,115 | 1,272,861 | 6.37% | 5.93 kW | 10.7% | 12.22¢ |
| 10 | District of Columbia | 17,780 | 318,780 | 5.58% | 6.35 kW | — | 17.71¢ |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. The full 51-jurisdiction ranking is on solar statistics by state.
Regional summary
| Region | States | Systems | Share of US systems | Household share | Avg. size | Residential price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northeast | 9 | 865,495 | 17.0% | 3.71% | 7.18 kW | 22.48¢ |
| Midwest | 12 | 264,722 | 5.2% | 0.85% | 7.87 kW | 15.38¢ |
| South | 17 | 835,056 | 16.4% | 1.45% | 7.96 kW | 14.18¢ |
| West | 13 | 3,112,270 | 61.3% | 10.00% | 6.19 kW | 20.05¢ |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. US Census Bureau regional definitions; the District of Columbia is counted in the South.
The regional gap is wider than the gap between many countries, and it is not explained by sunshine: the Northeast has the worst solar resource in the country and the second-highest adoption.
What these numbers do not tell you
Three things are worth stating plainly, because a page of fifty statistics invites the reader to believe the subject is fully measured. It is not.
Nobody counts panels. EIA counts systems and megawatts. Any figure you see for "number of solar panels in America" is an estimate built on an assumed panel wattage, and the assumption can go unstated. We have not made one.
Nobody counts solar outside net metering by household. The 2,031 MW on the other schedule has no installation count attached, so there is no honest way to produce a corrected national household figure. That is why every penetration number here is explicitly net-metered.
Production is not in this dataset at all. EIA-861 records capacity, not generation. A kilowatt in Arizona and a kilowatt in Maine do not produce the same electricity, and nothing on this page should be converted into output, savings or bill offset.
Methodology
Source
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, utilities are legally required to file, so this is not a sample and there is no sampling error.
The 2024 file is the final release. A 2025 early release exists and is excluded from every figure here: it covers a partial set of filers and using it would show a spurious collapse.
Definitions used throughout
Solar system: one residential net-metered photovoltaic installation as reported by the utility whose meter it sits behind. A leased system and an owned system each count once.
Household: one residential electricity account. Not a Census household: a master-metered apartment building is one account for many homes, so penetration is somewhat overstated where that stock is large.
Penetration, residential net-metered PV installations ÷ residential electricity customers, both from EIA-861, same year, same filers.
Battery attachment, PV-paired residential battery installations ÷ residential PV installations. Standalone home batteries are reported separately and excluded.
The one trap in this dataset
EIA files restructured-market service in two halves: Part B is a competitive supplier’s energy sale, Part C is the incumbent utility’s delivery of that same electricity to the same household. They carry identical megawatthours. Summing sales across every Part double-counts, and understates the 2024 national price by 1.12¢/kWh.
We sum revenue across all Parts and sales and customers across Parts A, B and D only. That handling reproduces EIA’s published price series across all 357 overlapping state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh, which is the evidence it is right.
What we deliberately do not publish
Two columns in this dataset fail a plausibility check and are excluded from all 50 statistics above.
EIA’s PV-paired battery energy capacity implies a California battery duration of 0.83 hours and Texas 0.38, below any residential product sold.
Its energy sold back column covers only 39.6% of installations and reports near-zero kWh per system for New Jersey and New York.
Both are in active use by people building solar statistics. We report the diagnostic and withhold the metric.
Limitations
Net metering only. 2,031 MW of residential PV is reported on a separate schedule and excluded from the system counts. In Texas that is most of the fleet.
Stock, not flow. Annual additions are derived by differencing a stock survey, so reclassification or non-response by a utility appears as an addition or a loss.
The peak demand column is incomplete. At least one state, West Virginia, reports a summer peak of 10 MW across 866,456 residential accounts (12 watts per account against a median of 7,533) which is not a plausible value.
The national peak figures above are therefore floors. We report the anomaly rather than dropping the state or silently imputing a replacement.
AC and DC capacity are mixed. Utilities report on different bases and EIA does not normalize, which affects average-size comparisons between states more than the national trend.
Reproducing this
Every figure on this page is generated from the source workbooks by script, not typed. The input is a public EIA download and the arithmetic is stated above. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it on the page with a dated note.
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>5,077,543 US homes had net-metered rooftop solar in 2024, 3.55% of residential electricity customers.</strong></p>
<figcaption style="font-size:13px;color:#555">Source: <a href="https://hyresolar.com/statistics/solar-energy/">HyreSolar, Solar energy statistics: every figure from federal data, sourced and dated</a> (EIA Form EIA-861, 2024 data, retrieved 2 September 2026).</figcaption>
</figure>Charts on this page may be reproduced with the same attribution. The rows behind them are in solar-energy-statistics.csv.
Citation, reuse and corrections
How to cite these statistics
Full citation. HyreSolar Research, “Solar energy statistics: every figure from federal data, sourced and dated”, updated October 2026. EIA Form EIA-861, 2024 data, retrieved 2 September 2026. Available at https://hyresolar.com/statistics/solar-energy/
In a chart or table. “Source: HyreSolar analysis of EIA Form EIA-861, 2024 data, retrieved 2 September 2026”.
Retrieval date
The EIA-861 workbooks behind every figure were downloaded on 2 September 2026. Each row in solar-energy-statistics.csv carries its source and retrieval date in its last column.
What you may reuse
The inputs are public US government data with no restriction. Our derived figures, rankings and charts may be reproduced for editorial, academic and non-commercial use with attribution and a link to this page (CC BY 4.0).
Corrections
Tell us about an error and we fix it on the page with a dated note. The inputs are public and the arithmetic is stated in the method section, so disagreements can be settled on the evidence.
Questions
What percentage of US homes have solar panels?
How many solar panels are installed in the US?
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Written and audited by
HyreSolar Research
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
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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 why the rest can be checked.
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How this desk works
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Data as of EIA-861 2024 final release. Authorship on this site is organizational: 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.
The data behind this page
Every figure on this page is computed from one file, and that file is published here so the analysis can be checked, disagreed with, or reused.
Sources & retrieval dates
Where does your own roof land in these numbers?
National statistics describe a market. The calculator prices a specific house on 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.