Why This Page Does Not Give You a Single Company-Count Number
A precise, current count of surviving US residential solar installers, or a formal market-concentration ratio showing how much share the top handful of companies hold, is not something the industry’s major data publishers currently make available in public-facing reporting. Rather than estimate a number nobody has actually published, this page uses the two figures that are solidly sourced and gets specific about what they can and cannot tell you.
The Two Numbers That Do Exist: Bankruptcies and Workforce
More than 100 US solar companies have filed for bankruptcy or shut down since 2023, a pace Solarinsure’s maintained tracker describes as the largest the industry has seen in roughly 20 years. This site’s own bankruptcy list carries the full, dated roster of individual filings; what matters for the concentration question specifically is that the wave has not been confined to marginal or already-small operators. Freedom Forever, the #2 US residential installer holding roughly 6.1% of national market share at the time of its own April 2026 Chapter 11 filing, is the most recent and largest name on that list, meaning a business with a genuinely material share of the surviving market is now among the departed, not just the long tail of smaller regional installers.
The workforce tells the same contraction from a different angle. The US solar workforce stood at more than 280,000 workers as of late 2025, down from a record 464,053 counted in the 2024 National Solar Jobs Census, a combined solar-plus-storage figure, a real, sourced decline of well over a third in a single year. A workforce cut that steep, in the same window as a wave of failures that reached as high as the #2 national installer, is consistent with genuine consolidation among fewer, larger survivors, even without a published company count to confirm exactly how concentrated the market has become.
What These Proxies Suggest, and What They Do Not
Together, more than 100 shutdowns and a workforce cut by over a third strongly suggest the market has genuinely concentrated among fewer, larger survivors since 2023. What neither figure tells you is a specific remaining company count, or whether the companies still standing now hold a larger or smaller combined share than they did before the wave started. Treat the bankruptcy count and the workforce figure as evidence of a real contraction, not as a substitute for a company count or a concentration ratio that simply is not published yet.
The Numbers
More than 100 US solar companies have filed for bankruptcy or shut down since 2023, a pace described as the largest the industry has seen in roughly 20 years, a wave that reached as high as Freedom Forever, the #2 US residential installer with roughly 6.1% market share, which filed Chapter 11 in April 2026.
The US solar workforce fell from a record 464,053 workers in the 2024 National Solar Jobs Census to more than 280,000 by late 2025, a decline of well over a third in a single year.
A shutdown wave reaching as high as the #2 national installer, alongside a workforce cut by well over a third in the same window, is consistent with genuine consolidation among fewer, larger survivors, even though neither figure is a company count or a formal concentration ratio on its own.
No public source currently publishes a specific remaining US solar installer company count or a formal market-concentration ratio; the bankruptcy and workforce figures above are the closest available proxies, not a substitute for either.
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.
- Solarinsure, complete list of solar bankruptcies and closures
- Solar Power World, 2025 solar layoffs and closures report