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Property & housing

Austin's rooftop-solar permits have halved since 2022

Published 2026-11-07 · By Pushbuild · Data: Building Permits API – City Permits, Valuations and Contractors

Austin issued 2,479 permits mentioning solar in 2022 and 1,202 in 2025. Chicago peaked at 2,363 in 2024 and fell to 1,929; Philadelphia went from 1,787 to 1,485. All Austin permits fell 23% over the same years.

08261,6532,479201820192020202120222023202420251,929 Chicago1,485 Philadelphia1,202 Austin
AustinChicagoPhiladelphia
YearAustinChicagoPhiladelphia
20181,534261587
20192,0991,033665
20202,1281,344541
20212,4681,252634
20222,4791,7281,287
20232,1511,6081,471
20241,6042,3631,787
20251,2021,9291,485

Caveats

Permits whose description mentions solar, photovoltaic or PV. Cities word descriptions differently, so compare each city with itself.

Sources

Data as of 2026-11-07. Every figure in this post is in the table above and the CSV below.

Download the data behind this post: b1-solar-permits-by-year.csv

Get this data

Every number in this post comes from the Building Permits API – City Permits, Valuations and Contractors. $0.0008 per row returned; every key gets $1 of free usage each month.

curl -X POST https://api.pushbuild.com/building-permits/run \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jurisdictions": ["seattle"], "description": "solar", "maxItems": 20}'
API docs and keyMore analysis from this data
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Header photo: Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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