Hire an in-house solar designer when your volume is high, steady, and concentrated in one or two jurisdictions. Outsource when volume swings, when you sell across several AHJs and code cycles, or when you need a PE or SE stamp in a state where you do not employ an engineer. The decision is about cost structure and capacity, not cost per drawing.
Key takeaways
- A salaried designer is a fixed cost; per-plan-set pricing is a variable cost. Which one you want depends on how predictable your pipeline is.
- Capacity settles more of these arguments than price does. One designer is one queue, one vacation, and one resignation.
- Code-cycle maintenance is ongoing work. NFPA publishes the National Electrical Code on a three-year cycle and jurisdictions adopt on their own schedule, so someone has to track which edition each of your AHJs enforces.
- A drafter cannot stamp. Engineering licensure is granted state by state, so stamping access is a separate question from drafting capacity.
- Rework is where the money goes. A rejected submittal costs a second trip through the plan review queue, not just an hour of redrawing.
- Avila Solar Drafting produces plan sets in 2-3 business days standard and 1-2 business days on Fast Roof, drawn to the code cycle your jurisdiction has adopted.
What does hiring an in-house solar designer commit you to?
An in-house designer is a fixed monthly obligation that does not shrink when your pipeline does. You are buying salary, payroll burden, benefits, software seats, training time, and a share of somebody senior’s attention, every month, whether you sold four projects or forty.
Price those line items for your own market rather than trusting a table you read somewhere. A drafter in Portland and a drafter in Tampa are not the same number, and a published average is stale the day it is written. What matters is the shape of the cost, not its size: it is fixed, it is monthly, and it is committed before the first job of the month is sold.
The commitment does not begin producing on day one either. A new designer has to learn your title block and templates, your standard equipment list, your racking details, and the submittal habits of the AHJs you file into. Until they have, someone senior checks every sheet, which is a second cost drawn from the person on your team who can least afford the hours.
Then there is tooling: AutoCAD, a modeling package such as Aurora, Helioscope or PVsyst, plotting, storage, and the licenses to keep all of it current. Those are per-seat costs, and they do not get cheaper at one seat.
None of this makes hiring wrong. It makes hiring a volume decision. Permit-ready plan set contents do not change based on who draws them. The question is whether you have enough of that work to keep one person busy every month, all year.
What do you actually buy when you outsource plan sets?
Outsourcing turns drafting into a per-project line item. You buy production capacity, a review layer you did not have to build, and access to stamping and jurisdiction knowledge you would otherwise hire for. What you give up is direct control of the queue and the ability to walk over to a desk.
The cost moves with your volume. Sell forty projects in July and you pay for forty plan sets; sell nine in January and you pay for nine. For a shop with a seasonal or lumpy pipeline, that alone is often the whole argument.
The second thing you are buying is a second reader. A shop that produces plan sets all day has seen the corrections your AHJ writes and checks for them before the package leaves. Learn to judge plan set quality before you sign with anyone: ask for a full sample set, not a cover sheet, and read the structural and label sheets rather than the pretty site plan.
What outsourcing demands from you is a disciplined intake. An outsourced designer cannot walk to the truck and ask the crew which wall the meter is on. Photos, dimensions, the actual equipment list and the AHJ name have to be in the file at submission. Shops that outsource badly are usually shops that submit thin intake and then blame the turnaround.
Outsourced solar drafting services are a capacity decision more than a cost decision. You are renting a bench you do not have to keep warm.
How do you compare a salary against per-plan-set pricing?
Convert the in-house option into a cost per plan set before you compare anything. Take the fully loaded annual cost of the role – salary, payroll burden, benefits, software, training – and divide it by the number of plan sets that person will realistically finish in a year. That quotient is the number to hold against a quoted per-set price.
We are deliberately not publishing a salary table. Compensation varies by market and goes stale quickly, and an invented figure would make this comparison look more precise than it is. Use your own offer letter and your own benefits load.
Three adjustments matter more than the headline numbers:
- Utilization. The denominator is not capacity, it is completed sets. Revisions, site survey follow-up, as-builts and meetings all come out of the same hours.
- Rework. Count corrections as production. If a package goes around twice, it consumed the design time twice.
- Specialty work. Structural PE review, commercial single lines and out-of-state projects are frequently bought in even by shops with a designer on staff. Those costs sit on top of the salary, not inside it.
The U.S. Department of Energy groups design, permitting and interconnection together as solar soft costs, the non-hardware share of an installed system. That framing is the useful one here, because the line you are trying to reduce is the whole soft-cost line, not the invoice for one drawing.
Avila’s standard and Fast Roof options are quoted per plan set, which is the number to hold against your own.
What happens to design capacity when your volume swings?
One in-house designer is one queue. In a slow month you pay for idle capacity; in a peak month every project waits behind the one in front of it, and a single vacation or resignation stops plan set production outright. Outsourced capacity flexes with the pipeline because it is not yours to keep busy.
Residential solar volume is not flat across the year. Incentive deadlines, weather, utility program windows and financing conditions push sold projects into clusters, and design sits directly upstream of the install calendar. When drafting backs up, crews idle, and crew hours are the expensive resource.
Run the arithmetic on your peak rather than your average. If your busiest month is three times your slowest, a designer sized to the average is a bottleneck for one part of the year and underused for another.
The hybrid answer is common and works: keep a designer for steady in-market residential work, and push overflow, commercial and out-of-state projects to an outsourced bench. That sizes your fixed cost to your floor rather than your ceiling.
Avila Solar Drafting turns standard plan sets around in 2-3 business days, and 1-2 business days on Fast Roof. Those figures are useful for scheduling precisely because they do not move when your volume does. How a plan set moves from intake to AHJ-ready covers the process side of the same problem.
Who keeps up with the code cycle in each model?
Somebody has to know which edition of the National Electrical Code each of your AHJs enforces, and keep knowing it as adoptions move. In-house, that research and retraining is your overhead. Outsourced, it is spread across every client the drafting shop serves.
NFPA publishes NFPA 70, the National Electrical Code, on a three-year cycle, and jurisdictions adopt on their own schedule, frequently with state amendments. NFPA maintains NEC adoption maps so you can look up which edition is enforced in a given state. Jurisdictions are spread across several NEC editions at any given time, and a shop selling across state lines will be filing into more than one of them.
This is not academic. Rapid shutdown language at NEC 2023 690.12 is not the NEC 2017 language. The busbar allowance at NEC 2023 705.12(B)(3)(2) – the 120 percent rule – has to be shown correctly on the sheet, and it is a different calculation from the 125 percent factor applied to continuous inverter output current. A template that was right two cycles ago is a correction notice waiting to happen.
For one designer covering one county, staying current is manageable. Across five counties in three states, it is a job of its own. Which NEC articles govern a plan set is a reasonable place to start the internal audit.
How do you get a PE or SE stamp in every state you sell in?
A drafter cannot stamp a plan set. A professional engineer licensed in the state where the project is built has to, and licensure is granted state by state. Stamping access is therefore a separate question from drafting capacity, and it is the one that most often settles the argument for shops selling across state lines.
NCEES licensure guidance, published by the body made up of the engineering and surveying licensing boards from all 50 states, tells candidates to verify requirements in the state or territory where they plan to practice. There is no single national license to buy.
Practically, an installer entering a new state has three options: employ or retain an engineer licensed there, buy stamping per project, or stay out. Most shops buy per project, because volume in a new market rarely justifies a retainer.
Avila Solar Drafting offers electrical and structural PE certification, including wet stamps, as an add-on to a plan set. Knowing which projects need a stamp before you quote them is worth more than the stamp itself: it is a scoping question, and discovering the answer late is what turns a two-week job into a two-month one.
One scoping note. Avila Solar Drafting does not accept projects in APS or SRP territory in Arizona, the cities of Peoria and Phoenix, Los Angeles County (LABD) in California. If your expansion plan runs through those jurisdictions, plan around them. The current list sits on the engineering stamps page.
What does a revision cycle actually cost?
A correction notice does not cost you an hour of redrawing. It costs a second trip through the plan review queue – your resubmittal lands behind everything filed since – plus the crew slot you had already scheduled. That is why QA on the front end beats drafting speed.
When you compare providers, or compare a provider against a hire, ask the rework questions first:
- Who pays for a revision, and for how long after delivery?
- What is the turnaround on a revision, as distinct from a first draft?
- Does the reviewer check against the code cycle that AHJ has adopted, or against a house template?
- Will they read the correction notice themselves, or do you have to translate it?
Avila’s solar plan sets page states that changes can be requested at no charge for up to six months after the order is placed. Whatever provider you use, get the equivalent answer in writing before the first job.
In-house, the same questions apply and the answer is “you”. A revision consumes your designer’s next slot, which pushes the next project, which is the queue problem one level up.
Why solar permits get rejected covers the specific causes worth auditing. Most of them are completeness failures that a second reader catches in minutes.
Does it matter whether your design partner is US-based?
It matters for stamping, jurisdiction knowledge, revision responsiveness and legal recourse. It does not matter much for first-draft speed. Plenty of offshore drafters produce a first draft quickly, so the honest comparison is about what happens after the first draft, and about whether the package can carry a licensed stamp in your state.
We are not going to tell you offshore providers are slow, because that is not the differentiator and you would find out otherwise on your first job. Ask these questions instead, of any provider, anywhere:
Can it be stamped where you build? A PE licensed in that state has to sign it. A provider without access to that license is selling you a drawing, not a permit package.
Do they know your AHJ? Setback dimensions, pathway widths, whether the plan checker wants the load calculation on the cover sheet – local submittal requirements are learned by filing, not by reading. A provider who has submitted into your jurisdiction before is worth more than one who has not.
Are they drawing to your adopted cycle? Ask which edition they will cite and how they confirmed it. The right answer names the jurisdiction and the edition.
How fast does a revision move? Not the first draft. The revision, on the day the correction notice lands. Overlapping working hours matter more here than anywhere else, because a correction is a conversation.
Who absorbs the rework, and what recourse do you have? Put it in the agreement. A US-registered vendor also gives you a W-9, US invoices and a contract enforceable in a US court; talk to your accountant about how foreign contractor payments should be handled on your books before you set up a recurring one.
Avila Solar Drafting is based in Beaverton, Oregon, with the design team and project management in the United States. Standard plan sets are 2-3 business days and Fast Roof is 1-2 business days, and questions about either get answered inside your working day.
When does in-house design actually win?
In-house wins when your volume keeps a designer fully utilized in your slowest month, your work sits in one or two jurisdictions, and your systems are repeatable. Under those conditions the fixed cost per plan set drops below any per-set price, and the jurisdiction knowledge compounds inside your business instead of someone else’s.
Four conditions have to hold together:
- Steady volume, not average volume. The designer has to be busy in your slowest month.
- One or two jurisdictions. Code-cycle and submittal knowledge is per-AHJ, and concentration is what makes it cheap to maintain.
- A repeatable system. The same modules, the same inverters, one or two racking systems. Templates only pay off when they are reused.
- A second reader. Someone other than the designer checks the set before it files. A one-person design team with no QA layer is how completeness errors reach the plan checker.
Where it usually breaks is expansion. The month a shop opens a second state, the in-house model needs a stamping answer and a second code cycle, and last year’s arithmetic stops working. Commercial work does the same thing: a commercial solar PV design carries structural and single-line complexity a residential drafter has not necessarily done.
The outsourced versus in-house comparison goes further into the operational detail. Most shops that run the numbers honestly end up somewhere hybrid.
How do you make the call on your own numbers?
Answer six questions with your own data. If most of them point the same way, you have your decision. If they split, the hybrid model is usually the right read.
- What was your slowest month’s sold volume last year, not your average?
- How many AHJs did you file into, and how many code cycles is that?
- How many projects needed a PE or SE stamp, and in how many states?
- What is your first-pass rate on submittals, and do you measure it at all?
- What is the fully loaded annual cost of the role, divided by the plan sets it would actually finish?
- What happens to plan set production if that person is out for three weeks?
Questions four and five are the ones most shops cannot answer. Start capturing them now; two months of data changes the conversation.
FAQ
Should I hire an in-house solar designer or outsource plan sets?
Hire in-house when your volume is high, steady and concentrated in one or two jurisdictions and your systems are repeatable. Outsource when volume swings seasonally, when you file into several AHJs and code cycles, or when you need a PE or SE stamp in a state where you do not employ a licensed engineer. Many installers run a hybrid: a designer sized to their slowest month, with overflow, commercial and out-of-state work outsourced.
How do I compare the cost of an in-house designer against outsourced plan sets?
Convert the role into a cost per plan set. Take the fully loaded annual cost – salary, payroll burden, benefits, software seats, training – and divide it by the plan sets that person will realistically complete in a year, counting revisions as production. Compare that quotient against a quoted per-set price, then add the specialty work you would still buy in, such as structural PE review and out-of-state stamping.
How fast are outsourced solar plan sets?
Avila Solar Drafting delivers standard plan sets in 2-3 business days and Fast Roof plan sets in 1-2 business days. First-draft speed is rarely the real differentiator between providers; revision turnaround and first-pass quality are.
Can an outsourced design provider stamp my plan set?
Only through a professional engineer licensed in the state where the project is built, because engineering licensure is granted state by state. Drafting and stamping are separate services. Avila Solar Drafting offers electrical and structural PE certification, including wet stamps, as an add-on to a plan set, and does not accept projects in APS or SRP territory in Arizona, the cities of Peoria and Phoenix, Los Angeles County (LABD) in California.
Are US-based solar design providers better than offshore providers?
They differ on specific axes rather than being uniformly better. A US-based provider can offer access to PE and SE stamping in the state of construction, familiarity with the AHJs you file into, currency with the code cycle those AHJs enforce, revision turnaround inside your working hours, and a vendor relationship governed by US contract and tax paperwork. Raw first-draft speed is not one of the differences worth deciding on.
When does in-house solar design make more sense than outsourcing?
When a designer would be fully utilized in your slowest month, your work sits in one or two jurisdictions, your equipment and racking are standardized, and you have a second reader to QA every set before it files. Remove any one of those and the fixed cost starts outrunning per-plan-set pricing.
Get the drafting off your fixed cost line
Avila Solar Drafting produces permit-ready solar plan sets for installers and EPCs: 2-3 business days standard, 1-2 business days on Fast Roof, drawn to the code cycle your jurisdiction has adopted and designed to pass first-time review. Electrical and structural PE certification is available as an add-on.
Commercial, utility-scale, or a multi-state stamping question? Call 971-410-0655.
