Resources
How SolarDNA scores markets, what every metric means, and where the U.S. solar market is heading.
How Market Score works
Every state and zip is scored from 0 to 100 and benchmarked against every other market in the country. The Market Score measures how healthy a market is for solar sales today; the Opportunity Score measures how much upside is left.
Letter grades are set on a curve, states against states and zip codes against zip codes: A is the top 10% of markets, B the next 20%, C the middle 40%, D the next 20% and F the bottom 10%. A grade therefore says where a market stands today relative to the others, whatever the national cycle is doing; the 0-to-100 score and its sub-scores show why.
Opportunity Score
Rewards markets that are under-served relative to their potential.
- •Headroom · 30 — how far adoption is from the addressable ceiling
- •Utility rate · 25 — higher retail rates, bigger savings
- •Resource · 20 — sun
- •Incentives · 15 — programs that shorten payback
- •Momentum · 10 — recent growth and permits
Solar market glossary
Solar systems
The market-size figure for a state: systems that utilities report on their lines, plus an estimate (sized from reported capacity) for systems outside net metering.
Tracked installations
Residential, commercial and utility-scale systems SolarDNA holds an individual record for, de-duplicated so one system is counted once. Zip, city and installer figures come from these.
Installed cost ($/W)
The price paid per watt of DC capacity before incentives. SolarDNA reports the trailing-12-month median and quartiles for residential systems.
Adoption rate
Residential systems divided by owner-occupied homes.
TAM penetration
Installed residential capacity divided by the addressable rooftop capacity (suitable roofs × a typical system size).
12-month growth
For states: residential solar capacity added in the trailing twelve months versus the twelve months before, from utility-reported totals with one-off reporting corrections smoothed out. For cities and zip codes: tracked installations over the same windows.
Permits
Solar building permits filed, a leading indicator that runs months ahead of installations.
Battery attach rate
Share of new residential systems that include energy storage.
Battery share
Share of a state's solar customers whose system includes a battery, as reported by utilities.
Simple payback
System cost divided by first-year bill savings at the local retail rate.
Market Score
0–100 grade combining velocity, cost, incentives, solar resource and installer depth.
Opportunity Score
0–100 grade rewarding under-served markets: headroom, utility rates, sun, incentives and momentum.
Where the market is heading
SolarDNA tracks 4M+ installations across 16,340 zip markets and 9,753 installers, with data through October 2, 2026. The outlook report ranks every state on momentum, pricing and headroom, and flags the zip markets where permits are running ahead of installs.
See the state rankingsWhat to watch in 2026
- ✓Battery attach rates keep climbing in states with time-of-use rates.
- ✓Installed $/W is flat to down; installer margins come from volume and attach.
- ✓Permit activity is the earliest signal of a market turning.
- ✓Utility-scale pipelines are largest in the Southwest and Texas.
How we build this data
SolarDNA is built from two layers. Market totals for every state (systems, capacity, monthly additions and battery share) come from what utilities report each month. Beneath them sit millions of individual installation records, standardized and de-duplicated with probabilistic entity resolution so the same system is never counted twice, which supply pricing, installers, equipment and every zip-level figure. Each state page shows what share of its systems SolarDNA holds a record for, the dates both layers run through, and every score is recomputed after each refresh.
About SolarDNA
SolarDNA is the market intelligence platform for solar sales and installation: the place installers, dealers, lenders and manufacturers go to know a market before they sell in it.