Will Your System Be Running by Your Deadline?
Every solar deadline — an incentive cutoff, a tariff window, a rate lock, a move-in date — is really a chain of four clocks: permit review, installation, inspection, and utility PTO. Pick a jurisdiction and a target date, and this calculator walks the chain backwards to the latest safe day to submit the permit application.
How the math works
Permit-review and interconnection days come from our per-jurisdiction data: live tracked averages where enough projects have accumulated, seeded national/state benchmarks where they haven’t. Install and inspection scheduling are yours to set — crews and calendars vary too much to benchmark honestly. The optional rejection buffer reflects what installers report as the most common timeline killer: a resubmission cycle that sends the application to the back of the queue. If a stage looks unfamiliar, the stuck-permit guide explains what happens (and what resets) at each one, and the PTO guide covers the final — and least predictable — clock.
These are planning figures, not guarantees: real projects swing around every benchmark, which is exactly why the dates are worth tracking rather than assuming.
The calculator plans the dates. The tracker defends them.
Once the project is live, PermitClock runs the same clocks forward and flags the moment any stage sits past its typical window — while there’s still time to act on it.