Research

Australian solar installers, by the numbers

We checked what 1,516 Australian solar installers publish about themselves, and how much of it holds up against an independent source.

Measured 2026-09-22 · free to reuse with attribution

Of 1,516 Australian solar installers measured in 2026, 18.3% publish an ABN that can be confirmed against the national register. Of the 1,028 whose listed phone number was compared with the number on their own website, 46.1% match and 8.5% contradict it. 84.4% of the 1,196 websites fetched responded, and 81.1% of the 1,294 cross-source matches found two or more independent sources. The median Australian solar installer has 52 Google reviews. The comparable national figures across all 23 trades are 19.5% with a checkable ABN and a median of 40 reviews. Source: WhoToHire, 2026-09-22.

18.3%

publish a checkable ABN

of all 1,516. 6% below the national rate of 19.5%.

46.1%

phone number confirmed against their own site

of 1,028 compared. 23% below the national rate of 59.8%.

8.5%

phone number contradicting their own site

of 1,028 compared. 25% above the national rate of 6.8%.

84.4%

have a website that loads

of 1,196 fetched. In line with the 82.6% national rate.

52

Google reviews for the median business

The national median is 40. Review counts track how often people hire a trade, not how well they do it — a trade you call once a decade will always sit lower.

What stands out

Solar Installers publish a checkable ABN at 18.3%, 6% below the 19.5% national rate — the easiest identity check a customer can run is unavailable for more of this trade than for most.

87 solar installers8.5% of the 1,028 we compared — list a phone number that contradicts the one on their own website, 25% above the national 6.8%. That is worth knowing before you call: it is the signature of both a stale listing and of a lead-reselling middleman.

The median has 52 Google reviews against 40 nationally. That gap says more about how often households need solar installers than about the standard of the work, which is why the ranking on this site weights review volume on a log scale rather than treating a 5.0 from four reviews as equal to a 4.6 from three hundred.

Solar Installers by state

States with at least 40 solar installers in the directory. Smaller groups are held back rather than published as percentages that move too far on a single record.

Verification coverage for Australian solar installers, by state
StateBusinessesABNPhones checkedPhone confirmedPhone mismatchSites checkedSite loadsMedian reviews
New South Wales43619%31045.8%6.8%35285.8%52
Victoria40618%27138%7%30887.3%49
Queensland35521.1%22951.5%9.6%27482.8%60
Western Australia13215.2%8854.5%8%10282.4%54
South Australia11315.9%7250%11.1%9671.9%50

Method, and what it can't tell you

1,516 Australian solar installers. Every one of them gets the same four checks: an ABN lookup against the national register, a comparison of the listed phone number against the number on the business's own website, an HTTP request to that website, and a match against open mapping data maintained separately from Google.

Not all four have run everywhere yet, so the figures above are shares of what has been checked: 1,028 phone comparisons, 1,196 website fetches and 1,294 cross-source matches out of 1,516 businesses. A check that has not run counts in neither half of a percentage.

This is a census of a directory, not of the trade. It covers businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all, which if anything biases these figures upward — a business too small to appear here is less likely to publish an ABN, not more.

ABN registration is the one figure taken over every business in the group rather than over a checked subset, because an absent ABN is not a failed lookup — read it as a floor. Review counts and averages are held; individual reviews are not, so nothing here can tell you whether a business's reviews arrived steadily or all at once.

Full method and national figures: the state of Australian trade business data.

Common questions

How many Australian solar installers are in this dataset?
1,516, drawn from 565,935 scanned records and measured on 2026-09-22. That is a census of the solar installers in this directory rather than of every solar installer in Australia, and it skews toward businesses with enough of a public footprint to be found at all.
How many Australian solar installers publish an ABN you can check?
18.3% — 277 of 1,516. The national rate across all trades is 19.5%, so solar installers sit 6% below it. An ABN is free and public, so a missing one is usually a business that never put it on their website rather than a business without one.
How many solar installers list a phone number that doesn't match their website?
8.5% of the 1,028 we compared, or about 87 businesses. This counts only cases where a listed number directly contradicts the number on the business's own site — not businesses with no phone number and not ones the comparison has not run for. It is often a stale listing, and sometimes a lead-reselling service sitting between you and the person who does the work.
How many Google reviews does the median Australian solar installer have?
52, against a national median of 40 across all trades. Half have fewer. Review counts track how often people hire a trade rather than how well it performs, so comparing a solar installer against a trade people call more often tells you very little.
Which state has the best-documented solar installers?
Queensland leads on published ABNs at 21.1%, against 15.2% in Western Australia. Only states with at least 40 businesses are compared, because percentages taken over a handful of businesses move too far on a single record to mean anything.

Using these numbers

Free to quote, chart or republish under CC BY 4.0, which asks only for attribution and a link. The full aggregate dataset is available as a free download. If you need a cut that isn't published, ask.

WhoToHire, “Australian solar installer data 2026”, 2026-09-22. https://whotohire.com.au/research/trades/solar-installers

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