We analysed every company in the Solar Cobber directory: 1,611 Australian solar businesses and the 130,526 customer reviews attached to them, as at 2 August 2026. This report sets out what that data shows about the shape of the industry, and it explains one finding that should change how you read solar reviews: ratings in this market are so high and so bunched together that they barely separate one installer from another.
This is our directory, not the whole market. It is a large sample of Australian solar companies with public business listings, big enough to describe patterns but not a census. Every figure below comes from a single query run against our live database on 2 August 2026. The method and the known weaknesses are set out in full below, and you are welcome to cite any of it.
Key findings
| Finding | Figure (as at 2 August 2026) |
|---|---|
| Companies in the directory | 1,611 |
| Customer reviews aggregated | 130,526 |
| Companies rated exactly 5.0 stars | 571 |
| Rated companies scoring below 4.0 stars | 13 |
| Median review count per rated company | 27 |
| Companies open on a Sunday | 11.2% |
The third and fourth numbers matter most. Out of 1,222 rated companies, 571 sit at a flawless 5.0 and only 13 sit below 4.0. Almost nobody in this industry has a bad public rating. That is not because almost nobody does bad work. It is because of how the rating pool is built.
Market shape: 1,611 companies
The directory holds 1,611 solar companies as at 2 August 2026. Of those, 1,222 carry a public star rating, 1,250 have usable location data, and 1,169 publish structured opening hours. The 389 companies with no rating are mostly listings with no reviews at all yet.
Where a state is recorded on the listing, this is the split.
| State or region | Companies | Avg rating | Avg reviews | Total reviews | Rated exactly 5.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 332 | 4.82 | 105 | 35,015 | 169 |
| Victoria | 283 | 4.80 | 80 | 22,777 | 127 |
| Queensland | 188 | 4.82 | 100 | 18,736 | 88 |
| Western Australia | 158 | 4.78 | 129 | 20,319 | 63 |
| South Australia | 110 | 4.89 | 77 | 8,480 | 57 |
| National operators | 43 | 4.78 | 73 | 3,126 | 24 |
| Australian Capital Territory | 38 | 4.77 | 96 | 3,632 | 13 |
| Northern Territory | 30 | 4.81 | 54 | 1,626 | 11 |
| Tasmania | 19 | 4.91 | 63 | 1,195 | 10 |
Two honest notes on that table. First, it accounts for 1,201 companies, not all 1,611. The rest have no state tag on their listing, so they are excluded here rather than guessed at. Second, the “National” row is a category in our directory for companies that operate across multiple states, not a separate geography, so its 43 companies are not double counted in the state rows.
The state pattern is unremarkable, and that is worth saying plainly. Average ratings run from 4.77 in the ACT to 4.91 in Tasmania, a spread of 0.14 stars across the entire country. There is no state where the typical installer is visibly rated worse than anywhere else. New South Wales has the most companies (332) and the most reviews (35,015), which tracks with population. Western Australia is the standout on one measure only: its companies average 129 reviews each, the highest of any state, despite being fourth on company count. Perth’s solar market has been busy for a long time and the review counts reflect that history.
The 43 national operators are a small slice of the directory. Their average rating (4.78) sits at the lower end and their average review count (73) is below the spread. Big brand does not mean better rated here. We compared that group separately in our guide to national solar companies.
The review landscape: 130,526 reviews
The 1,222 rated companies in the directory hold 130,526 reviews between them. Here is how those ratings are distributed.
| Rating band | Companies | Share of rated companies |
|---|---|---|
| Exactly 5.0 | 571 | 46.7% |
| 4.5 to 4.9 | 524 | 42.9% |
| 4.0 to 4.4 | 114 | 9.3% |
| 3.0 to 3.9 | 12 | 1.0% |
| Below 3.0 | 1 | 0.1% |
Just under half the rated directory is perfect. Nearly nine in ten sit at 4.5 or above. Thirteen companies in total, across the entire directory, are rated below 4.0.
Now look at how thin the evidence behind many of those ratings is.
| Review evidence | Companies |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 5 reviews | 289 |
| Fewer than 25 reviews | 771 |
| 100 or more reviews | 328 |
| Most reviewed single company | 6,654 |
The median rated company in our directory has 27 reviews, as at 2 August 2026. That is the typical Australian solar business: a couple of dozen customers who bothered to leave a rating, and a score somewhere between 4.8 and 5.0. Meanwhile 328 companies have crossed 100 reviews and one has 6,654. The gap between the median company and the top of the market is enormous, but you would never guess it from the star ratings, because both ends score about the same.
The five-star anomaly
This is the finding that matters most for anyone using ratings to pick an installer.
| The 5.0 cohort | Companies |
|---|---|
| Rated exactly 5.0 | 571 |
| Of those, on fewer than 10 reviews | 217 |
| Of those, on 10 to 49 reviews | 201 |
| Of those, on 50 or more reviews | 153 |
Of the 571 companies rated exactly 5.0 as at 2 August 2026, 217 (38%) got there on fewer than 10 reviews. Another 201 are running on 10 to 49. Only 153 have held a perfect score across 50 or more reviews, and that last group is the only one where the rating is doing real work.
Think about what a 5.0 on eight reviews actually tells you. Eight people were happy, or at least eight happy people were asked. It does not tell you what happens on the hundredth job, or what the company does when an inverter fails in year four. One genuine one-star review would drop that company to 4.6. The same review would barely move a company with 500 reviews. Small samples produce perfect scores easily, for good and mediocre businesses alike.
Now put that next to the other end of the scale. Thirteen companies out of 1,222 rated below 4.0. In most consumer categories you would expect a long tail of poorly rated operators. It is not here. A few explanations are plausible, and none of them are flattering to ratings as a selection tool:
- Solar businesses that collapse or get a bad reputation tend to disappear from listings rather than sit there with a two-star average. Failed operators leave the dataset instead of dragging the average down.
- Many installers actively ask satisfied customers for reviews on handover day and do not ask the unhappy ones. That is normal practice across trades, and it skews the pool upward.
- The people most likely to be let down by a solar install are often let down later, at warranty-claim time, years after the review window has closed.
What this means if you are choosing an installer. A five-star rating is close to worthless as a filter on its own, because roughly half the directory has one. Ratings only start separating companies when you attach a volume threshold. A practical rule from this data: treat 50 reviews as the point where a score means something, since only 153 companies in the whole directory hold a perfect 5.0 at that depth. Below that, read the review text rather than the number, and look for reviews written more than two years after an install. Our guide on how to choose a solar installer covers the checks that do separate companies.
Does scale hurt service?
A common belief in the solar industry is that companies get worse as they get bigger, because volume means subcontracting, rushed jobs and slow after-sales support. Our data lets us test a rough version of that, by grouping rated companies by how many reviews they carry and comparing average ratings.
| Review volume | Companies | Average rating |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 | 288 | 4.82 |
| 10 to 49 | 427 | 4.81 |
| 50 to 199 | 382 | 4.83 |
| 200 to 499 | 96 | 4.80 |
| 500 or more | 29 | 4.75 |
The finding here is undramatic, and we are not going to dress it up. The highest bracket average (4.83) and the lowest (4.75) are 0.08 stars apart. On a five-point scale that is nothing. There is a mild downward drift at the top, since the 29 companies with 500 or more reviews average 4.75, the lowest of any bracket. But with only 29 companies in that group, a couple of outliers would move the number.
The honest conclusion is that review volume does not predict review quality in this dataset. Busy companies are not visibly rated worse than quiet ones. That negative result is still useful, because it kills a talking point. If a small local installer tells you the big operators have worse service, the public ratings do not back that up. Nor do they disprove it. Ratings measure what customers post, not what they experience, and the compression of scores in this market (nine in ten companies above 4.5) left this test very little room to detect a difference.
Geographic coverage: 545 postcodes, 743 suburbs
The companies in our directory are based across 545 postcodes and 743 named suburbs as at 2 August 2026. These are the twenty postcodes with the most companies based in them.
| Postcode | Area | Companies |
|---|---|---|
| 4350 | Toowoomba, QLD | 21 |
| 6230 | Bunbury, WA | 20 |
| 2911 | Mitchell and Gungahlin, ACT | 18 |
| 6280 | Busselton, WA | 16 |
| 3000 | Melbourne CBD, VIC | 14 |
| 2640 | Albury, NSW | 14 |
| 2153 | Baulkham Hills, NSW | 14 |
| 3029 | Hoppers Crossing and Tarneit, VIC | 13 |
| 4670 | Bundaberg, QLD | 13 |
| 4870 | Cairns, QLD | 12 |
| 2650 | Wagga Wagga, NSW | 12 |
| 3550 | Bendigo, VIC | 12 |
| 4810 | Townsville, QLD | 11 |
| 4655 | Hervey Bay, QLD | 11 |
| 5000 | Adelaide CBD, SA | 11 |
| 2150 | Parramatta, NSW | 11 |
| 2164 | Wetherill Park, NSW | 10 |
| 6065 | Wanneroo area, WA | 10 |
| 6017 | Osborne Park, WA | 10 |
| 4700 | Rockhampton, QLD | 10 |
Area names are added by us for orientation and are not part of the source data. The postcode is the company’s listed business address, not its service area, so a company based in Osborne Park may well install across most of Perth.
The clear pattern is that this is not a capital-city industry. Toowoomba and Bunbury top the list ahead of the Melbourne and Adelaide CBDs, and regional centres like Albury, Wagga Wagga, Bendigo, Bundaberg, Cairns, Townsville, Hervey Bay and Rockhampton all carry more solar businesses per postcode than most inner-city areas. Part of that is a records artefact, because city installers spread across many suburb addresses rather than clustering in one. Part of it is real. Regional demand is strong and it supports a lot of small independent operators. You can browse the directory by state at /companies or start with New South Wales, which has the most listings.
Availability: most of this industry does not work weekends
Of the 1,169 companies publishing structured opening hours, here is how many are open on each day.
| Day | Companies open | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 1,063 | 90.9% |
| Tuesday | 1,132 | 96.8% |
| Wednesday | 1,135 | 97.1% |
| Thursday | 1,135 | 97.1% |
| Friday | 1,100 | 94.1% |
| Saturday | 345 | 29.5% |
| Sunday | 131 | 11.2% |
Only 29.5% of companies with published hours are open on a Saturday, and only 11.2% on a Sunday, as at 2 August 2026. That is a meaningful practical problem for the customer, because solar is bought by working households and installed on residential roofs. If you work standard hours, roughly seven in ten of the companies near you are not contactable on the day you are most free to organise quotes.
The edges of the working day are a bit better. Across the same sample there are 1,736 opening intervals that start before 8am and 1,446 that finish at 6pm or later. Those are counts of time intervals, not counts of companies, so read them as a rough signal that early starts are more common than late finishes in this trade.
One data quirk worth flagging rather than hiding: Monday shows 1,063 companies open against 1,135 on Wednesday and Thursday. We would not read anything into that 72-company gap. It is most likely a listings artefact, such as public holiday flags or incomplete Monday entries, rather than a real habit of taking Mondays off.
If weekend contact matters to you, filter for it early. It is also a fair proxy question on a first call, because a company that answers on a Saturday is more likely to answer when you have a fault on a Saturday.
What installers say about themselves
We searched the public description text of every listing for common marketing phrases. This measures claim language, not truth.
| Claim in listing text | Companies | Share of directory |
|---|---|---|
| Affordable or cheap | 103 | 6.4% |
| Accredited | 103 | 6.4% |
| CEC or Clean Energy Council | 93 | 5.8% |
| Family owned | 67 | 4.2% |
| Years of experience | 65 | 4.0% |
| Premium | 52 | 3.2% |
| Award winning | 18 | 1.1% |
| 25 year warranty | 16 | 1.0% |
| Tier 1 panels | 15 | 0.9% |
| No hidden costs | 8 | 0.5% |
The headline here is how quiet most listings are. No single claim appears in more than 6.4% of the directory. The overwhelming majority of solar companies write a plain description and make none of these claims at all. Solar marketing has a loud reputation, but at the business listing level it is mostly silence.
A few observations:
- “Affordable or cheap” (103) beats “premium” (52) two to one. Twice as many companies position on price as on quality.
- “Tier 1 panels” appears in only 15 listings (0.9%), which is good news. Tier 1 is a bankability ranking of manufacturers used by finance analysts, not a quality grade for panels, and it is often misused in sales copy.
- Only 8 companies (0.5%) advertise “no hidden costs”, a claim that tends to raise a question rather than answer one.
- “Award winning” (18) is rare enough that if you see it, ask which award, from whom, and in what year.
An important limitation on the accreditation rows. Ninety-three listings mention the Clean Energy Council and 103 use the word “accredited”. Those are counts of words in company-written text. Solar Cobber does not verify, track or display any company’s accreditation status, and a company that does not use the word may well be accredited while a company that does may not be current. Check it yourself at the source, and note that two different bodies are involved. Individual installers and designers are accredited by Solar Accreditation Australia, which publishes a public status check searchable by accreditation number or installer name. Retailers are separate and sign up to the New Energy Tech Consumer Code, the approved seller program run by the Clean Energy Council, which also publishes the approved product lists at cleanenergycouncil.org.au. Confirm both the retailer’s approved status and the accreditation of the individual who will be on your roof before you sign. Our guide to comparing solar quotes lists the other documents worth demanding at quote stage.
Methodology
What the data is. Aggregated public Google Business listing data for solar companies in the Solar Cobber directory: company name, state, suburb, postcode, star rating, review count, structured opening hours, and the public business description text.
Sample size. 1,611 companies. Of those, 1,222 have a star rating and review count, 1,250 have usable location data, 1,169 publish structured opening hours, and 1,201 have a state recorded. Sub-samples are stated in each table so you can see which base a figure uses.
When it was collected. All figures are a single snapshot of the live directory queried on 2 August 2026. Ratings and review counts change daily, so treat every number as a point-in-time reading, not a trend.
How it was analysed. Each table is a direct database query with no weighting, no modelling and no imputation. Rating bands use the company’s current displayed rating. The review-depth counts and the review-volume brackets are separate queries on slightly different bases, so they will not add up to each other exactly, and we have left them as queried rather than reconciling them. The weekend availability figures count a company as open on a day if its published timetable contains at least one interval on that day. The marketing claim figures are case-insensitive text matches against the listing description.
Limitations. These are the ones that matter:
- This is our directory, not the Australian market. It is a large sample of solar businesses with public listings. It is not a census, it under-represents companies with no online presence, and it will include some listings that are stale or for businesses that have since closed.
- Ratings are self-selected. Google reviews come from customers who chose to post, and often from customers who were asked to post. They over-represent the immediate post-install period and under-represent warranty problems that surface years later. Averages built on them are averages of what got written, not of what happened.
- Small samples dominate the rating data. The median rated company has 27 reviews and 289 companies have fewer than 5. Averages across those companies are statistically fragile.
- Postcode is a business address, not a service area. The geographic tables show where companies are registered, not where they install. Metro companies in particular often list one office address while servicing a whole city.
- Opening hours and description text are self-reported and are not maintained to any standard. Missing hours are excluded rather than assumed closed.
- We do not verify accreditation, licensing or insurance. No figure in this report should be read as a statement about any company’s Clean Energy Council status or any other credential.
How to cite this report
This research is free to quote, with attribution and a link. Suggested citation:
Solar Cobber (2026). The Australian Solar Installer Report 2026. Analysis of 1,611 Australian solar companies and 130,526 customer reviews, Solar Cobber company directory, data as at 2 August 2026. https://solarcobber.com/blog/australian-solar-installer-report-2026
For a specific figure, cite the table and the date, for example: “571 of 1,222 rated solar companies were rated exactly 5.0 stars (Solar Cobber directory, n=1,611, as at 2 August 2026).”
Journalists and researchers who want a figure cut differently, by state, review bracket or postcode, can ask. We will supply what the data supports and say so when it does not support the cut you want.
FAQ
Is 1,611 companies the whole Australian solar industry?
No. It is the Solar Cobber directory as at 2 August 2026, which is a large sample of Australian solar businesses with public listings. Businesses with no online presence, sole traders working purely through referrals, and companies that have closed recently will all be represented imperfectly. Use it to describe patterns, not to count the industry.
Why are almost all solar companies rated above 4.5 stars?
Because of who writes reviews and which companies survive. Happy customers are asked to review on handover day, unhappy ones usually are not, and companies with genuinely bad reputations tend to vanish from listings rather than sit at two stars. Only 13 rated companies in the directory are below 4.0 as at 2 August 2026, which tells you more about the review pool than about installation quality.
How many reviews should a company have before I trust its rating?
Around 50 is a sensible floor based on this data. Only 153 companies in the entire directory hold a perfect 5.0 across 50 or more reviews, so that threshold does real filtering work. Below 10 reviews a single bad job can swing the score by half a star, and 217 of the 571 perfect-rated companies sit in that fragile zone.
Do bigger solar companies have worse ratings?
Barely. Companies with 500 or more reviews average 4.75 and companies with 50 to 199 average 4.83, a gap of 0.08 stars. That is too small to act on, and the group with 500 or more reviews contains only 29 companies. The data does not support the claim that scale ruins service, and it is not sensitive enough to disprove it either.
Can I check whether an installer is accredited using this directory?
No. Solar Cobber does not verify, track or display accreditation status for any company. The marketing claim table only counts how often companies use words like “accredited” in their own listing text. Check the New Energy Tech Consumer Code approved seller directory for the retailer, and check Solar Accreditation Australia’s public status check for the accreditation of the individual who will physically be on your roof. They are two separate registers.
Which state has the best solar installers?
The data does not show a best state. Average ratings run from 4.77 in the ACT to 4.91 in Tasmania, a spread of 0.14 stars, and the sample sizes at the small end (19 companies in Tasmania) are too thin to rank on. Choose by the individual company, not by the state. Our state pages, such as Queensland, are a starting point for that.
Related reading
- why solar installer ratings tell you almost nothing
- how every state compares on installer ratings
- when you can actually reach a solar installer
- where Australians have the most installers to choose from
- where regional Australia runs out of installers
- do bigger installers give worse service
- what installers claim about themselves, and what it is worth
- what happens to your warranty if your installer disappears
About this research
This is independent desk research by Solar Cobber. We did not visit sites, request quotes or accept payment for inclusion. Figures are dated and sourced, and pricing and policy details change, so confirm current terms directly before you sign anything.