New Construction Solar Statistics 2026: How Many Builders Build Solar In

The National Number, and How It Compares to Other Green Practices

NAHB’s 2024 Green and Resilient Single Family Homes SmartMarket Brief, published April 16, 2024, found that 10% of builders nationally report including onsite solar energy on half or more of the homes they build. Put next to the same survey’s other findings, that figure sits well behind general energy efficiency practices, used by 91% of builders, and water efficiency practices, used by 52%. It sits just behind geothermal, the highest-adoption onsite renewable category at 11%, and ahead of the fact that 25% of builders now construct more than half their homes fully electric.

Solar, in other words, is not the leading edge of new-construction green building. It is a mid-pack practice, one a meaningful minority of builders have adopted at scale while a much larger majority has not, at least as of this 2024-dated survey.

Why the West Builds Solar In and the South Mostly Does Not

The regional spread is the sharpest part of this data: 31% of West-region builders include solar on half or more of their homes, more than double the Northeast’s 21%, and more than ten times the Midwest and South, both at just 3%. NAHB’s own survey does not explain that gap directly, but a reasonable read, this document’s own inference rather than a stated NAHB finding, is that states with existing solar-friendly building codes and incentive structures concentrated in the West make solar-inclusive construction a lower-friction default for a builder there than in a region without those same policy layers.

California’s 2022 Energy Code Layer

Per the California Energy Commission’s own 2022 Building Energy Efficiency Standards, the state’s 2022 Energy Code update expanded solar photovoltaic and battery storage standards for new residential construction, applying to any building whose permit application was submitted on or after January 1, 2023. That sits on top of the state’s original rooftop solar mandate for new homes, in effect since January 2020 by wide report, though this specific research pass could not independently re-confirm that earlier 2020 milestone from a primary state source this cycle. What is confirmed directly from the California Energy Commission’s own page is the 2023-forward update, not a specific percentage of California new homes actually built solar-included.

California solar sits inside a bigger 2026 story than just new construction. The state’s NEM 3.0 net billing rules reshaped what a solar pitch even needs to lead with, covered in full in this site’s guide to selling in California after NEM 3.0.

The Gap This Data Still Cannot Close

This site’s own guide to new-construction builder partnerships flagged an open question directly: how many new US homes are actually being built solar-ready or solar-included. NAHB’s builder-reported figures above are the closest sourced answer available, but they measure what builders say about their own practice, not a literal share of new homes with solar installed. A builder reporting they include solar on half or more of what they build is a real, meaningful adoption signal, and it is still a different number than a national count of solar-included new homes, which no source currently publishes.

The Numbers

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• NAHB, Eye on Housing, on the 2024 SmartMarket Brief’s new-construction solar adoption data
• California Energy Commission, 2022 Building Energy Efficiency Standards, on new-construction solar and storage requirements

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