“Aurora Solar Trust Signal,” a new quarterly benchmark tracking U.S. homeowners’ experiences with solar professionals and the factors shaping confidence in going solar, launches this week in response to a finding the data kept returning: homeowners want to know which companies are trustworthy.
The “Aurora Solar Snapshot” asks homeowners their opinions of solar, annually. In 2023, 22% said “trustworthiness of solar companies” was a concern; that number nearly doubled to 43% in 2024, improving in 2025 (41%) and again in 2026 (36%).
The “Aurora Solar Trust Signal” digs deeper into these findings. It’s a quarterly health check on homeowner trust in the solar industry. The data shows the industry is making positive inroads with homeowners; from August 2025 to July 2026, a growing share of homeowners reported no negative experience with a solar company, improving every quarter.
The numbers point to a useful theme, Aurora says: homeowners want to know how to best evaluate a solar company, and better-informed homeowners are less likely to judge installers by the reputation of a few industry outliers.
“When it comes to going solar and electrifying a house, homeowners are making a decision about technology they’ll live with for 25 years or more, often without enough information to assess the offer in front of them,” said Chris Hopper, co-founder of Aurora Solar. “That’s a hard position to be in as a buyer, and a tough one to sell into. The Aurora Solar Trust Signal is how we measure this gap, and the Aurora Solar Marketplace is how we close it: by putting real production estimates and side-by-side installer comparisons in a homeowner’s hands.”
While surveying homeowners about their experiences, Aurora Solar asked a broader set of questions about how they evaluate solar. A few highlights from the findings:
- 71% of homeowners are open to going solar
- One-third (33%) of homeowners say keeping costs down as utility prices rise due to AI and data center energy demand would be their primary reason to buy solar, compared with roughly 29% in August 2025
- 46% of Gen Z and 41% of Millennials express interest in rooftop solar, compared with 33% of Gen X and 18% of Baby Boomers
- 30% of homeowners say they haven’t heard much about solar recently, up from 26% in April
Aurora Solar will publish an updated Aurora Solar Trust Signal every quarter and continue to track the broader market through the annual Aurora Solar Snapshot. Together, the two reports should give the industry a short-term read on whether homeowner experiences are improving, and a multi-year view of how homeowners feel about solar.
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