Rooftop solar survey · Pima County, AZ · October 2026

54,336 houses in Pima County have solar panels

95% range 52,391 to 56,061. That is 19.1% of the county's 284,413 single-family houses.

54,336single-family houses with solar

19.1%of all 284,413 houses

1,928manufactured homes with solar (of 28,397; range 1,587 to 2,299)

1,818houses with an open permit applied since 2023-09-01 (not counted)

How the count is built

34,745 houses have a finaled solar permit on record. On the aerial photos, 96.2% of a random sample of them show panels, which gives 33,440. A random sample of the houses with no permit on file was checked on the same photos to find the rest: 20,326 (95% range 18,941 to 22,093). Another 570 (range 549 to 579) were installed after the photos in Marana, where only monthly permit counts are published, not addresses.

Finaled permit, confirmed on photos 33,440
No permit on file, found on photos 20,326
Installed after the photos (permit counts only) 570 (549 to 579)

Check against utility records

Utilities serving the county report 61,184 residential customers with solar (2026-07, range 60,685 to 61,806). Counting the same kinds of homes, this survey finds 59,852 (range 56,083 to 61,878). That is 0.98 times the utility figure (range 0.91 to 1.02).

The survey figure is the sum of single-family houses 54,336; manufactured homes 1,928; townhouses and condos with a finaled permit 1,308; townhouses and condos with only an expired or older open permit 95; homes on parcels the assessor codes as non-residential, with a finaled permit 402; open permits, counted as likely built 1,783.

Homes the utility count can include but this survey cannot count (so the survey figure is low by up to their solar share):

Attached homes (townhouses, condos) with no solar permit on file: 40,364 homes. Attached townhouses/condos with no PV permit on file are not photo-sampled; EIA counts those of them that have net-metered PV.
Tribal land: 3,195 homes. ACS 2020-24 B25024 1-unit detached 287,608 (+/-2,415) minus 284,413 frame houses; parcels miss ~2,776 detached units on tribal land (tracts 9408-9411), which have no taxable parcels.

At the photo date (2024-07) utilities reported 54,356; the survey's comparable figure for that date is 51,931 (range 50,123 to 53,707).

This survey: homes of the kinds utilities countsurvey of Oct 2026

59,852 56,083 to 61,878

Utility records: residential customers with solar (EIA-861M)2026-07

61,184 60,685 to 61,806

Tracking the Sun (LBNL): install recordsthrough 2024-12

53,996

DeepSolar (Stanford): panels detected on older imageryimagery ~2016-2017

13,498

DeepSolar++ (Stanford): panels detected on older imagerycumulative by 2017

13,341

Google Project Sunroof: panels detected on older imageryfile 2019-01, imagery mostly 2015-2018

8,943

DeepSolar (Stanford), DeepSolar++ (Stanford) and Google Project Sunroof counted panels that a computer-vision model found on older imagery (dates on each row above), so they miss everything installed since.

LBNL Tracking the Sun: residential systems reported by utilities/agencies, ZIPs weighted by their land share in the county. A floor: providers that stopped reporting are missing.

By city or area

Area	Houses	With finaled permit	With solar (95% range)	Share
Tucson	122,780	21,497	22,717 21,894-23,525	18.5%
Unincorporated Pima County	103,947	8,318	19,594 18,381-20,810	18.8%
Marana	24,249	9	4,795 4,196-5,436	19.8%
Oro Valley	18,177	3,022	3,798 3,444-4,206	20.9%
Sahuarita	14,351	1,897	3,337 2,891-3,748	23.3%
South Tucson	909	2	94 55-150	10.4%

By ZIP code

Find a ZIP

ZIP	Houses	With finaled permit	With solar (95% range)	Share
85747	11,532	2,714	2,632 2,328-3,062	22.8%
85710	13,407	2,327	2,538 2,320-2,735	18.9%
85641	12,031	1,085	2,451 2,060-2,861	20.4%
85742	12,191	876	2,373 1,996-2,798	19.5%
85629	10,626	1,314	2,327 1,992-2,679	21.9%
85756	9,050	1,928	2,197 2,012-2,453	24.3%
85743	9,168	162	2,164 1,778-2,601	23.6%
85730	11,026	2,012	2,161 2,028-2,335	19.6%
85745	11,411	1,620	2,154 1,881-2,476	18.9%
85746	10,111	1,421	2,101 1,819-2,398	20.8%
85614	10,605	1,092	2,086 1,760-2,432	19.7%
85718	8,937	796	2,009 1,679-2,397	22.5%
85706	9,628	1,789	1,863 1,665-1,988	19.4%
85711	10,982	1,735	1,844 1,727-2,012	16.8%
85755	8,768	1,429	1,818 1,593-2,093	20.7%
85741	9,441	724	1,708 1,440-2,065	18.1%
85704	8,291	781	1,595 1,330-1,910	19.2%
85737	7,796	1,262	1,593 1,380-1,883	20.4%
85750	8,113	598	1,590 1,288-1,914	19.6%
85653	7,628	43	1,548 1,212-1,914	20.3%
85757	6,547	530	1,507 1,205-1,846	23.0%
85749	7,490	686	1,444 1,167-1,741	19.3%
85713	9,248	1,229	1,431 1,366-1,491	15.5%
85748	7,122	1,105	1,303 1,179-1,510	18.3%
85716	6,754	1,056	1,135 1,046-1,288	16.8%
85658	7,471	0	1,002 744-1,317	13.4%
85719	7,228	909	955 893-1,052	13.2%
85705	6,252	724	911 778-1,102	14.6%
85715	5,416	784	882 844-896	16.3%
85712	6,261	815	839 802-856	13.4%
85714	3,223	457	486 466-520	15.1%
85739	1,743	160	473 321-655	27.1%
85622	2,773	190	362 250-531	13.1%
85735	1,431	130	265 167-410	18.5%
85701modelled	1,024	147	161 model-based	15.7%
85321	1,576	46	132 65-249	8.4%
85736modelled	481	25	80 model-based	16.7%
85645modelled	357	25	66 model-based	18.5%
(no ZIP)modelled	573	1	52 model-based	9.1%
85619modelled	327	4	43 model-based	13.2%
85601modelled	172	5	25 model-based	14.5%
85602modelled	112	3	17 model-based	14.9%
85637modelled	68	6	13 model-based	19.6%

ZIPs with fewer than 50 houses are left out. A ZIP's estimate uses its own sampled houses where it has enough of them in a stratum, otherwise that stratum's county-wide rate. ZIPs marked modelled get more than half of their houses that way, so their figure is model-based and no range is shown. ZIP and area figures include the 570 installs after the photos that are known only from aggregate permit counts, allocated to their ZIPs.

How accurate it is

7,418houses inspected on aerial photos (random sample)

96.6%first-look detection rate on homes with a finaled permit

98.5%first-look 'solar' calls confirmed on close-up recheck

0.1%first-look 'no solar' calls that were actually solar

0.96agreement of the two independent close-up readers (Cohen's kappa, n=2,995)

96.2%homes with a finaled solar permit that show panels

Every possible solar house from the first look, every permit home that looked empty, and a random 25% of the other empty-looking houses were rechecked close up by two independent readers; a third reader settled disagreements. The 95% range comes from re-running the whole calculation on 1,000 resamples of the inspected houses.

What it does not cover

Aerial photo dates: Pictometry 3-inch flown 2024-06-28..2024-07-03 over the metro; PAG 2023 (Oct-Nov 2023) / NAIP 2023 in outlying areas. Panels installed after the photos are counted from finaled permits, which exist with addresses for Tucson (from 2011-01), Unincorporated Pima County (from 2021-06), Oro Valley (from 2015-06) and Sahuarita (from 2019-06).
Marana and South Tucson have no address-level permit records, so houses there are counted from the photo sample only. Installs in Marana after the photos are added from its aggregate permit counts: 683 residential solar permits since 2024-07-01, times the share of comparable address-level permits elsewhere in the county that were not withdrawn or expired (89%, range 85% to 90%). In South Tucson, installs after the photos are not counted.
1,818 houses have an open solar permit applied on or after 2023-09-01; they are not in the total. Another 1,032 houses with older open permits are covered by the photo sample.
About 6,410 houses (2.3%) were empty lots or under construction on the photos. They count as no solar unless a solar permit has been finaled for them since.
Of the sampled houses, 2 could not be seen on the photos even on a view of the whole lot. They are left out of the sample, so their strata are estimated from the other sampled houses.
Attached townhouses and condos are not photo-sampled. 1,355 of them have a finaled solar permit. Applying the photo confirmation rate and adding their share of the post-photo permit counts gives about 1,308 with solar.
The house count comes from the county's taxable parcels (ACS 2020-24 B25024 1-unit detached: 287,608 +/- 2,415). Parcels miss ~2,776 detached units on tribal land (tracts 9408-9411), which have no taxable parcels.
'Has solar' means solar-electric panels anywhere on the lot; 98.6% of the confirmed cases in the sample had them on the roof. Solar pool heaters and water heaters are not counted.
Utility records count residential customers with net-metered solar of every home type and miss off-grid systems. They are a cross-check, not the answer.