How to check a solar company before you sign

What should you check before signing with a solar company?

Four things: whether the company and the person at your table hold what your state requires, what complaints are on file and how the company answered them, what the company has filed against other homes in your county, and what the contract in front of you says. The first three are lookups you can run yourself. The fourth takes longer and matters most.

None of this is our idea. The FTC'sguide to home solartells you to check a company's history with your state and local consumer protection agencies and your state contractors licensing board, and to search its name with the words complaints or reviews. What it cannot tell you is which office that is in your state. That is what this page is for, in the three states we sell in. Look up whoever sells to you, us included.

How do you check a solar company in Texas?

Use TDLR's license search. Since September 1, 2026, residential solar retailers and solar salespersons have had to be registered with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to sell or lease residential solar in Texas, and both are license types you can look up.

1. Open theTDLR license search, pick Solar Residential Retailer, and search the company's name. Then pick Solar Residential Salesperson and search the name of the person who sat at your table. Those are two separate registrations. Check both.
2. Read the contract for the electrical contractor. Texas has required since September 1, 2025 that the agreement conspicuously state the name and license number of the licensed electrical contractor who will do the install (TDLR). Look that license up too, under Electricians, in the same search.
3. Search TDLR'sadministrative ordersby company name. It covers final orders from the current and two most recent fiscal years. When we checked in September 2026, solar retailers were not yet a program type in that search, so search the company name rather than filtering by program.

The search only shows active licenses. A company that is not in it does not have an active registration, at least not under the name it gave you, and that is a question to ask before you sign.

One timing detail worth knowing. On itsprogram page, TDLR says it has suspended enforcement of its contract-disclosure rule and its educational-materials rule until November 1, 2026, to give companies time to adjust. The statute's own contract requirements and the five-business-day right to cancel have applied since September 1, 2025. Complaints go through the File a Complaint link on that same program page, and consumer complaints can also go to theTexas Attorney General, whose page says a complaint filed there is open to the public under Texas law. For the search walked step by step, the full list of what a Texas solar contract has to say, and how to cancel, see is my solar company registered with TDLR.

How do you check a solar company in Florida?

Use the DBPR license search. Florida licenses contractors through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and itslicensee searchlets you look up a company or a person by name, license number, city or county, or license type.

Florida law defines a solar contractor as one whose work covers installing, repairing or replacing photovoltaic systems, and it also lets other contractors licensed under the same chapter do that work within the scope of their own license (Fla. Stat. § 489.105). So the license you find may not say solar. What you are checking is that the business doing the install has an active license, under the name on your contract, and that the license number on the paperwork matches the one in the search. The same portal has an unlicensed activity search and a complaint form.

For complaints about the sale itself, Florida's clearinghouse is theFDACS Division of Consumer Services, and theFlorida Attorney Generaltakes complaints too. The AG's page says complaints and communications sent to it are public records under Florida law.

How do you check a solar company in Illinois?

Check the installer with the Illinois Commerce Commission and the seller with Illinois Shines. Illinois splits the job in two, and it is easy to check one half and stop.

The installer first. Since the end of 2013, anyone other than a self-installer who installs distributed generation in Illinois has had to be certified by the ICC before doing it. The ICC'sdistributed generation installer pagelinks the list of certified installers. The link opens the ICC's entity search, which asks you to tick an I'm not a robot box. Choose Distributed Generation as the authority type and search the installer's name.

Then the seller. If your project goes through Illinois Shines, the state's solar incentive program, the company you contract with should be an Approved Vendor or one of its Designees. Illinois Shines publishes both lists as downloads on itsfind a vendor page. The program says Approved Vendors are vetted by and registered with it, and that a project developer must use an ICC-certified installer. The salesperson at your door may work for a marketing or sales Designee rather than the vendor itself. Find out which name is on the contract.

Illinois Shines also publishes aviolations report and a consumer complaint report, with warning and suspension letters and every complaint the program received. Read it before you sign with anyone. The program'sconsumer protection pagealso has a tool for walking through a sample Disclosure Form, so you know what yours should look like. Complaints about a sale can go to the Illinois Attorney General's Consumer Fraud Bureau, linked from the AG'spublic utilities page.

What do BBB and attorney general complaints tell you?

Less than a star rating suggests, and more than nothing. BBB says plainly that its rating is BBB's opinion of how a business is likely to interact with its customers, and that a rating is not a guarantee. Read the complaints themselves and the company's answers to them, not the letter grade.

BBB's ownrating overviewsays the complaint history it weighs includes the number of complaints, the size of the business, whether the company responded in a timely and appropriate way, and patterns of unresolved issues. Those are the right things to look at yourself, too. The attorney general offices in Texas and Florida both say complaints filed with them are public, so it is fair to ask what is on file for a company before you sign.

What does a pattern of complaints mean?

One complaint is a customer. The same complaint twenty times is a business practice. That is the whole skill, and it is worth being fair about both halves of it.

Illinois Shines puts the fair half in writing: the subject of a complaint is based on what the complainant reported and may or may not reflect what happened. A big installer will have more complaints than a small one, just from volume. So do not count. Read, and sort what you read:

• Repeated complaints that the right to cancel was not honored, or that the salesperson said the contract was something it was not. That is about the sale, and it is the pattern to walk away from.
• Repeated complaints about unfinished installs, missed interconnection, or no one returning calls about a leak. That is about the company's capacity, and you will be on its service list for years.
• Complaints that got a specific answer and a resolution. That is a company that does the boring part. A string of complaints with no response at all tells you how your own would be handled.
• Recent versus old. A cluster from the last few months says more about the company you would be signing with than a cluster from years ago.

What can county records tell you about a solar company?

Whether the company, or the finance company behind it, files against the homes it sells to. A financing statement has to name the secured party, and a solar fixture filing sits in the county office that records mortgages. The naming rule isUCC § 9-502. If your county's records search lets you search any party name, search the company's.

What you find tells you what the contract will likely do to your own title, and which finance company ends up holding the paper. Our page onwhere to search for a solar lien names the office for Florida, Texas and Illinois and walks through the search.

What should you check in the contract itself?

That it matches what you were told. The FTC's list is the right one: how long the contract lasts, what you pay and whether it goes up, who does maintenance and repairs, what happens if the system underproduces, whether there are early termination fees, and what happens when you sell the house.

Our solar contract checker reads a PDF, phone photos or pasted text in your browser, finds the escalator, term, lien, transfer and cancellation clauses, and quotes them back to you. Nothing is uploaded. If you have already signed and are having second thoughts,how to cancel a solar contract covers the cancellation window in each of our three states.

And the rule that sits above all of it, straight from the FTC: never deal with a company that pressures you for a quick decision or tells you to sign without time to review. A company that passes every lookup on this page and still will not leave the contract with you overnight has told you what you need to know.