Permitting: what your authority requires
The authority having jurisdiction decides what your job needs. There are 5,478 of them in our database, and the thing that surprises installers is how little they agree on.
The authority is set by the address
Not by where your company is based. A contractor working three counties answers to three authorities, and they will ask for different things on the same system.
What varies, in order of how much it costs you
- How the inspection is booked. Online, by telephone, by email, or through a named portal. There is no default.
- The cut-off. Not the lead time — the moment after which you lose a day. One authority we hold inspects a single day a week, where missing a 6 a.m. Monday window costs seven days.
- Whether a standard label set passes. Some authorities publish their own placard wording. Where they do, a standard set will not pass.
- Which code edition is enforced. The NEC is adopted locally, and adoption lags publication by years in places.
What we have researched
5,478 authorities held. 610 researched in full against all 82 questions, 2,777 partially, 2,091 not started. California is complete at 540; Florida has 63; Nevada 7.
Each answer carries a confidence score and the source it came from. A low score means ring them — some authorities contradict themselves across their own pages, and some answers came from an archived copy of a page that has since been taken down.
Documents go stale
An authority's own solar handout is the best source there is, and it is often old. We have found handouts re-issued in 2024 still specifying signage to the 2016 code cycle, and checklists on a solar page contradicting the current version two clicks away on the same site.