Solar Lead Qualification Criteria: The Four Checks the Best Published Screen Leaves Out

Quick answers: What are the standard solar lead qualification criteria? · What electricity bill makes a solar lead worth buying? · Is a low close rate normal for solar leads? · What if a lead passes the roof but fails the bill check? · How many companies is a solar lead sold to?

Key numbers – The average retail price of electricity to US residential customers was just over 18 cents per kilowatt-hour in the May 2026 reporting month of EIA’s Electric Power Monthly state price table, released in July 2026. – In 2022 the average US residential electric-utility customer bought 10,791 kilowatt-hours a year, about 899 a month, on EIA’s figures for utility customers rather than for all households. – SolarReviews states that its QA team disqualifies over 50% of the raw leads it generates from paid traffic, and a separate passage on the same page puts the share sold at 48%. – The same SolarReviews page puts lead to close at 3 to 7% for its own purchased internet leads, worked by a buyer running an efficient lead processing function. – The Department of Energy’s homeowner guide sets the boundary of who can buy at all: if your roof will not work “or you don’t own your home”, the route is community solar, not a rooftop install.

Most lead vendors will not tell you what they check. One will. SolarReviews publishes its screen in plain language on its own sales page. That makes it the most detailed one you can read before you spend anything.

So audit it. The screen is better than this category deserves, and it is blind in one specific place.

What the Best Published Screen in Solar Actually Checks

SolarReviews states that every lead address is checked for four things: “Shade coverage, Roof viability for solar, Confirmation that the address is not a mobile home, Confirmation that the address does not already have solar installed.”

It adds a phone step on top. In its words: “We require consumers to verify that their phone number is correct by having them enter a specific pin sent to their phone to see their online estimate.”

Then it tells you what that costs it. An onshore QA team completes the qualification, and SolarReviews says they “disqualify over 50% of the raw leads we generate from paid traffic, meaning we only sell approximately 50% of our raw leads.” An earlier passage on the same page puts the survivors at “only 48% of the raw leads” passing and being sold.

Roughly half, either way. Hold onto the fact that one page gave you two figures for the same step, because it happens again below. A vendor that throws away half of what it paid to generate is still not running a pure volume game. Give it credit for that.

It also publishes its distribution. SolarReviews says its leads are sold to just over two companies each on average, which is tighter than most shared products in this market.

Now read the four checks again. Shade. Roof. Mobile home. Existing solar. Every one of them is a fact about a building. The PIN step adds one fact about a phone.

Not one of them is a fact about money.

A roof that can take panels is not the same as a household that should buy them. The best published screen in this category tests the roof and never tests the household.

Whose Close Rate Is That?

The same page publishes a funnel, and this is where quoting gets dangerous.

SolarReviews describes a realistic expectation for a buyer with an efficient lead processing function as a contact rate of 80 to 85%, a lead to appointment rate of 20 to 30%, and a lead to close rate of 3 to 7%. Those figures describe SolarReviews own purchased internet leads, worked by a buyer running a defined follow-up process. That is the population. It is not a solar industry benchmark and it was never offered as one.

Watch what happens on that same page. It also says the conversion rate of a SolarReviews lead to appointment, “complete with a best practice follow-up, averages around 33% nationally”. So one vendor page carries two different rates for the same step in the same funnel.

Both can be true. One is a realistic expectation, the other is a national average under best-practice follow-up. They are different measurements of different things. The problem is that nobody carries that distinction downstream. The figure gets lifted, the qualifier gets dropped, and six months later a vendor is quoting it at you as an industry fact.

The denominator is the whole argument. If a vendor quotes you a close rate, ask whose leads it was measured on and over what window. If they cannot say, the rate has no denominator. Do not put it in your model.

The Bill Is the Buying Signal, and No Screen Asks for It

Hervé Billiet, writing in a LinkedIn collection on qualifying solar buyer leads, puts the threshold on the bill rather than the roof. His line: “When a household’s electricity bill crosses $500/month, something shifts. Conversations get shorter. Objections get fewer.”

He is specific about why. Most people carry only a vague sense of what they spend on electricity, he writes, but “at $500, autopay stops doing its job. They open the app. They look at the number. They feel it.”

That is a claim from a named practitioner, not a measured dataset, and it should be read as one. But it points at the gap precisely. The industry’s best-documented screen confirms that a roof can take panels. It never confirms that the household has a bill big enough to make taking them worth it.

You can be sold a perfectly qualified lead under that screen. South-facing roof, no shade, no existing array, verified phone, homeowner picks up on the second ring. And a power bill that means the pitch has nowhere to go.

Why You Must Ask for Both the Spend and the Usage

Billiet gives a range that looks like it should convert cleanly into kilowatt-hours, and he is explicit that it is local: “Know your local threshold. Utility rates vary. In some markets, $500/month hits at 800 kWh. In others, it’s 1,200 kWh. Your lead qualification criteria should match.”

Run that against the government series and it does not reconcile, which turns out to be the useful part.

Divide a bill of $500 by 800 kilowatt-hours and you get roughly 63 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is higher than every state average in EIA’s May 2026 price table, where the top figure is Hawaii at 52 cents. Do the same at 1,200 kilowatt-hours and you get about 42 cents, still above every state average in that table except Hawaii.

The practitioner is not wrong. The two figures are measuring different things. A household bill carries fixed delivery and service charges that a per-kilowatt-hour average spreads out, and a heavy user on a tiered rate pays a top-block price well above the average their state posts. Both effects push the effective rate on a big bill above the state average.

Which gives you the rule your intake form needs. A dollar amount and a kilowatt-hour figure are two separate facts about a household, and neither one lets you compute the other with any confidence. A screen that captures one of them has captured half a signal.

Here is what the derivation looks like in your own market. The price column is EIA’s, the rest is our arithmetic on it.

State	Average residential price, cents per kWh, May 2026	Monthly kWh a bill of $500 implies at that price	Rounded multiple of the average residential customer’s monthly purchase	Source for the price
US total	18.44	about 2,700	3x	EIA state price table
Hawaii	52.00	about 960	1x	EIA state price table
California	33.25	about 1,500	2x	EIA state price table
New York	29.93	about 1,670	2x	EIA state price table
Massachusetts	28.82	about 1,730	2x	EIA state price table
Texas	16.44	about 3,040	3x	EIA state price table
Arizona	15.23	about 3,280	4x	EIA state price table
Louisiana	14.15	about 3,530	4x	EIA state price table
Idaho	12.35	about 4,050	5x	EIA state price table

Read the two ends of that table. A bill of $500 in Hawaii is roughly what an average residential customer already buys in a month. The same bill in Idaho implies a household buying about five times that. Those are not the same lead. They are not even the same kind of household. One screen threshold cannot cover both, and a national bill threshold quietly imports a price assumption you never agreed to.

There is one more trap sitting inside the usage figure, and EIA flags it itself. Its consumption series counts electricity purchased from a utility, not electricity used. EIA notes that in states with a lot of rooftop solar the purchase figure understates real consumption, and gives Hawaii in 2020 as the example. Its residential energy survey put consumption at 7,976 kilowatt-hours per household. Its utility sales data put purchases at 6,446 kilowatt-hours per residential customer. Two populations, two collection methods, one state, one year.

So the single metric a solar buyer would most want to screen on is understated worst in exactly the markets that already have the most solar on roofs. If you are benchmarking a lead’s usage against a state average, you are benchmarking against a figure that is depressed by your competitors’ installed base.

The Four Checks to Add

The published screen handles the building. These four handle the household. None of them require anything a vendor cannot collect on the form it already runs.

1. Monthly spend and monthly kilowatt-hours. Both fields, both required. This is the whole argument above, turned into two boxes. Asking for spend alone gives you a figure whose meaning changes by state. Asking for usage alone gives you one that is systematically low in high-solar markets. Neither derives the other, so collect both or accept that you are screening on half a signal.

2. Homeownership verified against a record, not self-declared on a form. The Department of Energy’s homeowner guide is direct about the boundary. If a professional finds your roof unsuitable, “or you don’t own your home, you can still benefit from solar energy.” The route in that case is community solar, which splits the “costs associated with purchasing and installing a solar energy system” among all of the participants. A renter is not a junk lead. A renter is a different product with a different population, and if you sell rooftop installs they are somebody else’s lead entirely. A checkbox on a form does not tell you which one you bought.

3. Financing readiness, because most routes to a sale run through credit. The same DOE guide lays out how a system gets paid for: an outright purchase, a solar loan, a lease, or a power purchase agreement. Three of those four turn on a credit decision or a long contract rather than cash in hand. LinkedIn’s own editorial summary of that collection, rather than any named practitioner in it, reaches the same place in one line: “Assess financial readiness: Make sure potential buyers have the budget or credit to move ahead.” A lead that clears the roof check and fails the finance check consumed a full sales cycle to tell you nothing.

4. Utility territory, as one commercial question. Whether the numbers work for a given household depends on what their utility pays for exported power, and that is a market-by-market fact rather than a national one. Ask which utility serves the address. Then keep your own list: the utilities in your footprint whose export rate makes the pitch land, and the ones where it does not. A lead outside that list is not dead. It is a longer sale, and it should be priced as one.

One caution on the fourth check. Export rates change, and so does the arithmetic that depends on them. Treat your utility list as something you re-check on a schedule, not something you write once and inherit.

The Six Questions, Written to Send

Paste these into an email to a vendor before you spend anything. They are written to be sent as they are. The second column is what each one catches, which is the part you should actually be listening for.

Send this	What it catches
“What is the average monthly electricity spend of the leads in this batch, and the average monthly kilowatt-hour usage? Please send both figures, not one.”	A vendor screening on the roof only. If they have never collected it, they cannot answer, and you have learned what you needed in one reply.
“What share of your raw leads do you disqualify before selling, and on which specific checks?”	A vendor that sells everything it generates. A real screen has a disqualification rate the vendor knows without looking it up.
“How many companies is each lead sold to, on average and at the maximum?”	An average hiding a tail. The average is the figure they publish. The maximum is the one that costs you the deal.
“Is homeownership verified against a property record, or self-declared on the form?”	Renters and community-solar candidates arriving priced as rooftop install leads.
“Is the phone number verified before the lead is sold, and by what method?”	Unreachable records. A PIN sent to the handset is a different thing from a format check on the digits.
“What is your close rate, whose leads was it measured on, and over what window?”	A vendor quoting someone else’s funnel back at you. If the answer has no denominator and no window, the rate is decoration.

Set the floor as a number, not a band

Vendors will offer you a band. Do not accept one, because a band is what lets both sides be right later. Set a single value and put it in the intake spec.

The field is monthly electricity spend, numeric, required, and a blank value rejects the record rather than passing it through as unknown. The second field is monthly kilowatt-hours, numeric, required, same rejection rule.

Set the floor from your own market rather than a national figure. Take Billiet’s $500 as the starting value, not the answer. In Texas at 16.44 cents that same bill means about 3,040 kilowatt-hours a month, so those are the two numbers your form requires. Idaho at 12.35 cents makes the same bill mean about 4,050. Pick your state’s row from the table above and write both figures into the spec.

Optimize the buy toward appointments that were actually sat, not toward form fills. Revisit the floor when EIA moves your state’s price, which it publishes monthly in that same table.

What This Screen Does Not Do

A screening spec is not a buying strategy. Here is where this one stops.

It does not price the lead. What a screened lead is worth is a separate calculation, and we have already worked through how aged inventory prices out against its real cost per contact. Start from what the four solar lead products actually cost rather than from a screen.

It does not settle shared against exclusive. A screen raises the value of both, and it raises the exclusive one more, because you are the only buyer paying for the screen you just got. The arithmetic is in our comparison of exclusive and shared solar leads on cost per customer.

It does not detect fraud. Every field discussed here is a field a consumer typed, and a verified bill figure is still a self-reported bill figure. That is a different lane, covered in solar lead fraud and what verified actually means and in the general habit of verifying a lead before you bid.

It does not predict your close rate. Nothing on a vendor page can. Your close rate is a fact about your follow-up speed, your crew and your quote, and the only honest source for it is your own last ninety days.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the standard solar lead qualification criteria?

There is no industry standard, only what individual vendors publish. The most detailed public screen is SolarReviews, which checks the address for shade coverage, roof viability, whether it is a mobile home and whether it already has solar, then verifies the phone number with a PIN. Those criteria all test the building and the contact details. They do not test the household’s electricity spend, homeownership record or financing readiness, which is why a buyer needs to add those four checks themselves.

What electricity bill makes a solar lead worth buying?

There is no single national figure, and any vendor offering you one is importing a price assumption. Hervé Billiet, in a LinkedIn collection on qualifying solar buyers, puts the practical shift at a bill of $500 a month. Convert that into your own market rather than accepting it flat. At the US average residential price of just over 18 cents per kilowatt-hour in May 2026, that bill implies a household buying about 2,700 kilowatt-hours a month, roughly three times what the average residential utility customer bought in 2022. In a low-price state it implies far more, and in Hawaii it implies barely above average.

Is a low close rate normal for solar leads?

SolarReviews publishes a lead to close range of 3 to 7% for its own purchased internet leads, worked by a buyer with an efficient lead processing function. That is the population the figure describes. It is not an industry benchmark, and the same page also publishes a lead to appointment average of around 33% nationally alongside a realistic expectation of 20 to 30% for that same step. Treat any close rate as belonging to the vendor, the buyer and the window it was measured in, and ask for all three before you use it in your own model.

What if a lead passes the roof but fails the bill check?

Do not discard it and do not pay full price for it. A workable roof with a small bill is a real household on a longer timeline, and it is worth less to you today than one with the same roof and a large bill. Two practical moves. Route it to a slower follow-up sequence rather than your best closer, and tell the vendor you will take that segment at a lower price as a separate batch. Vendors who screen well usually know which of their leads are in it, because they collected the field. Vendors who do not screen will tell you no such segment exists, which is the same answer as saying they never asked.

How many companies is a solar lead sold to?

It depends entirely on the product and the vendor, and it is a question you should ask directly rather than infer. SolarReviews publishes an average of just over two companies per lead for its own inventory, which is tighter than much of the shared market. Ask for the maximum as well as the average. The average is the figure a vendor volunteers. The maximum is the one that decides whether you are the fourth call that homeowner takes this morning.

Where This Leaves Your Next Buy

The screen most of this industry runs is better than its reputation. It genuinely removes shaded roofs, mobile homes, existing arrays and wrong phone numbers, and it throws away half the file to do it. That is real work and it is fair to pay for.

It just stops at the property line. Every check ends at the building, and the decision to buy solar is made by the household inside it, on a number they see once a month.

Add the four checks. Send the six questions. If a vendor cannot tell you the average bill and the average usage of the leads they are about to sell you, that is your answer, and it arrived before you spent anything.

If you want a straight conversation about what screened solar leads should cost you and what we verify before a call reaches your phone, ask us. We will give you real numbers on the first call, not a band.