The State of Solar Jobs 2025

Where are solar jobs today? Which market segments are hiring? And what do the latest employment numbers tell us about where the industry is headed?

We turned to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s (IREC) newest National Solar Jobs Census to answer these questions. In the video below, we share key insights from IREC’s research. We highly recommend checking out their full report to dive deeper into the data and trends we didn’t cover here. 

Interested in exploring solar career opportunities? HeatSpring’s free “Solar Career Pathways” course offers a comprehensive look at the roles available in this field—from hands-on installation work to project development, sales, engineering, and more.

Transcript below.

Welcome. We’re gonna be talking about the current state of jobs in the solar industry or the solar industry snapshot. So let’s dive in.

Before we get started, I did wanna note that all of this data comes directly from our friends over at IREC, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. They’ve been around for over forty years, and their mission is to build the foundation for rapid adoption of clean energy and energy efficiency to benefit people, the economy, and the planet.

So all this data is from their National Solar Jobs Census, which they publish annually.

These stats that we’re about to look at in particular are from the Solar Job Census 2024, which was published in November 2025. Let’s look at it.

As of 2024, there were around 280,000 solar energy jobs here in the US. You can see in this chart, the pace of solar job growth has slowed since solar was truly an emerging industry. So between 2010 and 2019, solar jobs increased by a whopping 167% with more than 150,000 jobs added. Then in that five year period between 2019 and 2024, solar jobs grew at a much slower pace around 12%.

It’s interesting because at the same time, installed solar capacity increased by 286%, and we’ll look at that a little bit further in the presentation. One thing that shows is that the trend in the industry is that we’re becoming more and more labor efficient really across all different types of jobs.

Let’s look at jobs where they are across the country, these solar jobs. California remains the undisputed leader with nearly 79,000 solar jobs, which is far more than any other state. And that makes sense. They’re a bigger state. They’ve got a big population. And it also makes sense because one third of California’s electricity comes from solar and about 1 in 5  homes in California have solar on it. One other thing to note, though, about California is they actually lost 1,000 solar jobs in 2024, and that’s largely due to changes in the state’s net metering policy, which really affected the residential market out there.

Following California, some of the next largest solar employer states are Florida, Texas, and New York. Those states all have really thriving solar markets. Texas actually installed more solar capacity than any other state in 2024.

Something that’s kind of interesting is that some of the strongest job growth is happening in states that you might not expect. Ohio saw a five percent increase in solar jobs. Georgia, where I am, grew by 4.5%, Utah by 3.5%, and Texas by 3%, little over 3%. All four of these states experienced big surges in utility scale solar installations, and Ohio and Georgia actually hit record highs in that area.

This highlights an important point about solar is that it’s really bipartisan. It doesn’t really matter what these states tend to have done historically politically. Growth is happening in the solar workforce and in solar energy really regardless of that. It’s just simply because solar makes economic sense in so many instances and can be deployed so quickly.

So coming to this solar capacity growth that I had mentioned earlier, the US added 50 GW of solar capacity in 2024, and that’s a record that represents nearly 4 times the 2019  level and more than double what was installed just two years prior. Solar and battery energy storage combined accounted for over 80% of all new electricity capacity added to the grid. Solar has really emerged as this very cost effective and fast option for meeting the accelerated electricity demand that we’re seeing all over the country and rising power costs.

It’s interesting to note, and I mentioned this earlier, that despite this huge increase in solar deployment, total solar employment has held relatively steady right around that 279,000 workers. IREC mentions this in their report, but they attribute it to really significant gains in labor productivity. That’s happening as the industry matures, and we’re adopting improved technologies and improving our processes and permitting, and there’s just so many factors that help us get those labor productivity gains.

Let’s look at these solar jobs by sector. Solar employment, of course, spans multiple industry sectors. Installation and project development firms employ the largest share, as you could see here, about 2/3s of the workforce. It’s about 178,000-179,000 jobs. While this sector includes things like construction crews and electricians, it also encompasses the project managers and sales teams, the engineers, the administrative staff that support these projects across all scales, so residential, commercial, and utility scale installations.

Beyond installation, the industry employs workers in wholesale trade and distribution. That’s a little under 35,000 handling logistics and warehousing. There’s also manufacturing, which is about 32,000 jobs at facilities that are producing modules, inverters, racking systems, and other components.

Operations and maintenance is another area here with about 22,000 jobs, and they’re responsible for keeping everything running efficiently and operationally. Finally, there is this other section, and there’s about 12,000  workers there. That’s things like research, nonprofits, other things, and supporting roles that haven’t been mentioned previously.

Within installation and project development, jobs break down by market segment. This chart here compares the numbers between 2021 and 2024. Looking at the numbers for this most recent year, residential solar accounts for 45% of these jobs. Utility-scale represents about 33%.

Commercial makes up 14%, and community solar comprises 8%.

Recent growth has been driven almost entirely by utility-scale projects. Utility-scale jobs have surged 73% since 2021. And that’s at the same time residential, commercial, and community solar jobs all declined during that same period. And that shift really reflects that utility-scale installations are reaching really high numbers, 41 GW in 2024, which is a 33% increase. We’re seeing that as utilities and corporate buyers are increasingly wanting to choose solar because of its competitive pricing and ability to be installed much quicker than other types of energy. 

At the same time, residential installations dropped 31% in 2024 to 4.7 GW and that’s pressured by high interest rates for consumers and various policy changes. California’s NEM 3.0 policy, which cut solar residual solar compensation by about 75%, led to a 50% decline in the state’s residential installations, although battery attachment rates increased significantly.

Looking at future predictions… In 2025, there were a lot of changes in federal policy that significantly reduced support for solar energy. New legislation scaled back key tax incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s imposed earlier deadlines for projects to qualify for credits, and the residential solar tax incentive was eliminated entirely. Combining those things with other administrative actions that have affected project approvals and funding programs, these policy shifts have created a more challenging environment for solar deployment.

All that being said, solar still retains really fundamental advantages for the United States and the world. Utility-scale solar remains one of the most cost competitive and fastest to build electricity sources. Rising electricity demand from data centers, EVs, manufacturing facilities, combined with the fact that electricity prices are rising faster than inflation, is creating this continued pressure for new capacity.

While we may see a little bit less solar being deployed than we would have predicted a few years ago, we still anticipate that there will be strong growth in the industry despite these challenges.