Biggest vs busiest: the C-PACE markets nobody reads correctly
Every published C-PACE league table ranks states by dollars or by project count, and both rankings mislead an owner trying to work out whether their own deal is normal somewhere. The number that answers that question is the one nobody prints: cumulative investment divided by project count. Here is the full table with that column added, and what it tells you about where a given project should look for capital.
Published 2026-09-16 · last checked 2026-09-16
There are two league tables of the American C-PACE market in circulation, and an owner can read either one carefully and still come away with the wrong idea about their own deal.
The first ranks states by dollars. It puts California on top and leaves you thinking California is where C-PACE happens. The second ranks states by project count. It puts Minnesota on top and leaves you thinking Minnesota is the busiest market in the country. Both tables are accurate. Neither answers the question you actually have, which is narrower and more practical: is a deal the size of mine normal in this state, or would I be the exception?
That question has a number attached, and as far as we can find nobody publishes it. It is not hard to produce — it is the first column divided by the second — but it is missing from every national summary we could find, and it inverts a good deal of what the rankings appear to say.
The table, with the missing column
Everything below is the C-PACE Alliance’s 2024 National C-PACE Program Volume Data, taken from its programme volume page, which was last modified on 27 February 2025. The first two numeric columns are as that source publishes them. The third is ours: cumulative investment divided by project count, rounded. Jurisdictions the source lists at zero are omitted from the rows and included in the totals.
| State | Cumulative investment | Projects | Average project |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | $2.63B | 181 | $14.54M |
| Ohio | $928M | 324 | $2.86M |
| Texas | $843M | 128 | $6.58M |
| Florida | $654M | 66 | $9.91M |
| Nevada | $362M | 7 | $51.76M |
| Connecticut | $348M | 413 | $0.84M |
| Minnesota | $334M | 451 | $0.74M |
| Missouri | $315M | 66 | $4.77M |
| Michigan | $308M | 87 | $3.54M |
| Pennsylvania | $297M | 30 | $9.90M |
| New York | $293M | 35 | $8.36M |
| Utah | $290M | 11 | $26.36M |
| Colorado | $286M | 133 | $2.15M |
| Illinois | $279M | 44 | $6.35M |
| Washington | $279M | 20 | $13.96M |
| Wisconsin | $257M | 126 | $2.04M |
| Maryland | $141M | 91 | $1.55M |
| Nebraska | $136M | 43 | $3.16M |
| DC | $130M | 54 | $2.41M |
| Rhode Island | $117M | 37 | $3.16M |
| Kentucky | $113M | 20 | $5.65M |
| New Mexico | $86M | 2 | $43.19M |
| Oklahoma | $81M | 10 | $8.15M |
| Delaware | $81M | 15 | $5.39M |
| Tennessee | $71M | 12 | $5.94M |
| Oregon | $33M | 8 | $4.12M |
| Alaska | $31M | 5 | $6.26M |
| Georgia | $29M | 8 | $3.64M |
| Virginia | $15M | 3 | $5.10M |
| Idaho | $15M | 1 | $14.90M |
| Maine | $9M | 1 | $8.66M |
| Montana | $8M | 5 | $1.56M |
| Massachusetts | $2M | 3 | $0.79M |
| All jurisdictions | $9.80B | 2,440 | $4.02M |
The two rankings genuinely do point in opposite directions. Minnesota has closed 451 projects to California’s 181 — about two and a half times as many — on roughly an eighth of the dollars. Connecticut has closed more than twice as many projects as California and sits sixth by investment. Meanwhile Nevada, on seven closings, outranks Connecticut, Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and everything below them by dollars.
Why the average is the number that concerns you
A cumulative total is a measure of a programme’s history. An average project size is a measure of what that programme is set up to do, and it is the closer proxy for whether your transaction will find a home.
The reason is friction. C-PACE has a broadly fixed cost of getting done — an energy audit or engineering review, legal work on the assessment documents, programme application and review, and the written consent of your existing mortgage lender, which is the step that consumes the most calendar. Those costs do not shrink in proportion to the financing. On a $40 million assessment they disappear into the rounding. On a $400,000 assessment they are the deal.
So when a state’s average project is $0.74 million, that is evidence about the machinery, not just the deal flow. It says a programme, a set of administrators and a group of capital providers have between them found a way to process small transactions at a cost that leaves them worth doing — standardised documents, a defined measure list, a predictable review, a lender-consent process people have run hundreds of times. When a state’s average project is $26 million or $52 million, the opposite is on display: capable of very large single transactions, and unproven at the bottom of the range.
Neither is better. They are different machines, and the useful question is which one your project is shaped like.
What the small-ticket markets are telling you
Three jurisdictions in the table average under $1 million a project: Minnesota at about $0.74 million, Massachusetts at about $0.79 million, and Connecticut at about $0.84 million. Set Massachusetts aside — three projects is not a pattern — and what remains is a high-volume group of two: Minnesota with 451 closings and Connecticut with 413. Maryland belongs with them on behaviour if not on the threshold, at 91 closings and about $1.55 million average.
These are also, not coincidentally, statewide single-administrator programmes rather than county-by-county adoptions. That is the part worth carrying away, because it generalises. Programme design shows up in average deal size more clearly than in any other public number. A state where one administrator runs one process for everybody tends toward volume and small tickets. A state where each county or district adopts its own programme separately tends toward fewer, larger transactions, because the transaction has to be big enough to justify learning a local process from scratch.
Ohio sits interestingly in the middle at 324 projects and $2.86 million average, and it is regional rather than statewide — Energy Special Improvement Districts covering the jurisdictions that joined them. High volume and mid-sized deals at once.
What the top of the average column is telling you
Strip out the states with one or two closings, where an average is just a single deal wearing a disguise — Idaho at one project, Maine at one, New Mexico at two — and the high-average markets that remain are Nevada at about $51.76 million across 7 projects, Utah at about $26.36 million across 11, California at about $14.54 million across 181 and Washington at about $13.96 million across 20.
California is the one that should reassure you, because it has both: an average of about $14.54 million and 181 completed transactions behind it. A high average on high volume means large deals are routine there rather than exceptional. Washington’s $13.96 million average on 20 projects says something narrower — that when C-PACE gets used there it is used at scale, on a base thin enough that you should ask a provider directly rather than inferring anything from the table.
Nevada and Utah are the clearest illustration of why dollar rankings mislead. Nevada is fifth in the country by cumulative investment on seven transactions. If you read that ranking as market depth and turned up with a $2 million retrofit, you would be bringing a deal unlike any of the seven that produced the ranking.
What this means for where your project looks for capital
Three practical readings.
If your project is under about $2 million, your realistic candidates are the high-volume programmes — and if you are not in one of those states, the binding question is not whether your state has C-PACE but whether any capital provider active there will quote a deal your size. That is a question to ask before you spend money on an audit. Our capital provider list is the starting point, and what C-PACE actually is covers the mechanics if you are still deciding whether it fits at all.
If your project is $10 million or more, the average column matters much less to you. Nearly every market in the table has closed transactions at that scale or has providers who will travel for one. Your constraint is the programme’s own cap and eligible scope, not the state’s historical average.
If your project is in the $2–10 million band, which is most of what crosses our desk, you are in the part of the market where the state you are in genuinely changes the answer — and where it is worth checking what your specific programme has actually done rather than what the national table implies. The state-by-state programme pages carry the programme, the administrator and the status for all fifty states.
And the honest fourth reading: sometimes the answer the table gives is that C-PACE is the wrong instrument for the project, which we have written about separately. A thin market with no comparable closings is a reason to price the alternative seriously, not a reason to be the test case.
How to read any national C-PACE table, including this one
Two cautions, both of which apply to the table above.
It is a vintage. The C-PACE Alliance’s per-state breakdown is its 2024 dataset on a page last modified 27 February 2025 — cumulative through calendar 2024, and now more than a year and a half behind. The Alliance’s own figures show how much a single year moves: it records 225 projects and $2.57 billion of volume in 2024 alone, against the $9.80 billion all-time total. More than a quarter of everything ever closed, closed in the last year that table covers.
The national totals themselves differ by source. PACENation’s PACE market data page reports cumulative C-PACE investment of $13,500 million across 3,837 commercial projects through December 2025, and notes that its own per-state breakdown covers states above $50 million only to December 2024. That is a considerably larger national market than the C-PACE Alliance’s $9.80 billion, and the later cut-off explains part but not obviously all of the gap. Two industry bodies counting the same market arrive at different numbers, which is a reason to treat any single table as one organisation’s count rather than as the market.
The practical consequence is that none of these figures should be the last thing you check. They are good for orientation — which programmes are built for deals like yours, which are not, which are too thin to tell. For anything you are about to spend money on, the programme’s own current reporting and a live conversation with a provider active in that state are what you want, and the table is how you decide which conversations are worth having.
Questions people actually ask
Which state has the largest C-PACE market?
California, by dollars, in the most recent national dataset that publishes a per-state breakdown. The C-PACE Alliance's 2024 National C-PACE Program Volume Data, published on its programme volume page and last modified 27 February 2025, puts California at $2,632,474,234 of all-time cumulative investment across 181 projects — more than a quarter of the $9,803,735,672 national all-time total it reports across 2,440 projects. Ohio is second by dollars at $928,000,000, and Texas third at $842,500,000. Note that the same dataset gives Minnesota the highest project count at 451, so 'largest' depends entirely on which column you rank.
Which state has closed the most C-PACE projects?
Minnesota, in the C-PACE Alliance's 2024 National C-PACE Program Volume Data, which records 451 all-time projects there against $333,732,355 of investment. Connecticut is second at 413 projects and $347,557,259, and Ohio third at 324 projects and $928,000,000. Minnesota's project count is roughly two and a half times California's 181, while its dollar volume is about an eighth of California's — which is why project count on its own tells an owner very little about whether a particular deal size is fundable there.
What is the average C-PACE deal size?
Nationally about $4.0 million, but the national average is the least useful number in the table. Dividing the C-PACE Alliance's all-time national total of $9,803,735,672 by its 2,440 all-time projects gives roughly $4.02 million per project in data current through 2024. The state-level spread around that is enormous: the same table divides out to about $0.74 million per project in Minnesota and about $14.54 million per project in California. Average deal size is a property of the programme you are borrowing under, not of the country.
Does a big C-PACE market mean my project is easier to finance there?
Not on its own, because dollar volume can be produced either by many small closings or by a few very large ones. Nevada illustrates the point: the C-PACE Alliance's 2024 dataset records $362,300,000 of all-time investment there across just 7 projects, which is about $51.8 million per project and fifth place nationally by dollars on seven closings. A market like that demonstrates that large transactions clear; it does not demonstrate that a $1.5 million retrofit has a route through. Compare your own deal size against a state's average project, not against its headline total.
How current is the state-by-state C-PACE data?
The most detailed public per-state breakdown is more than a year behind, and you should price that lag in. The C-PACE Alliance's per-state table is its 2024 National C-PACE Program Volume Data, on a page last modified 27 February 2025, so it is cumulative through calendar 2024. PACENation's PACE market data page reports a larger cumulative C-PACE figure of $13,500 million across 3,837 commercial projects running through December 2025, while noting that its own state-level breakdown covers states above $50 million only to December 2024. Any single state's current position can therefore differ materially from either table, and a programme's own reporting is the only way to close that gap.
Do all states with C-PACE legislation have closed transactions?
No, and the distinction matters when you are choosing where to build. The C-PACE Alliance's programme map distinguishes an 'Active C-PACE Program with Closed Transactions' from a 'New C-PACE Statute, No Closed Transactions', and its 2024 volume table carries two jurisdictions — Hawaii and New Jersey — at zero projects and zero dollars. Enabling legislation establishes that C-PACE is legally possible in a state. It does not establish that a programme is open, that capital providers are active in it, or that anyone has yet completed the process end to end.