Abstract Models of photovoltaic devices are used to compare the properties of photovoltaic cells and panels, and to predict their I-V characteristics. To a large extent, modeling methods are based on the one-diode equivalent circuit. Although much research exists on the implementation and evaluation of these methods for typical outdoor conditions, their performance at indoor illumination levels is largely unknown. Consequently, this work performs a systematic study of methods for the parameter extraction of one-diode models under indoor conditions. We selected, reviewed and implemented commonly used methods, and compared their performance at different illumination levels. We have shown that most methods can achieve good accuracies with extracted parameters regardless of the illumination condition, but their accuracies vary significantly when the parameters are scaled to other conditions. We conclude that the physical interpretation of extracted parameters at low illumination is to a large extent questionable, which explains errors based on standard scaling approaches.