One major loss mechanism for currently relevant solar cells [e.g., passivated emitter and rear cells (PERC)] is locally enhanced recombination at the interface between semiconductor and metalization. For investigating these losses in detail, a reliable detection technique is crucial. The photovoltaics community frequently applies an area-weighted model to extract the local dark saturation current density in the metalized area of the emitter j 0,met—e.g., from photoluminescence imaging (PLI) data. However, this model does not account for the nonuniformity of the excess carrier density Δ n within the sample during the measurement. Therefore, we compare numerical PLI simulations using Quokka3 to PLI measurements, to quantitatively reveal the impact of the nonuniformity of Δ n . Test structures with locally laser-ablated passivation on one side—serving as ideal test structures—are used for the experimental verification. Additionally, we show results on metalized samples. We find that the results ( j 0,met*) using the simulative approach for the laser-ablated samples exceed the results using the conventional area-weighted approach by more than 20%. For the metalized samples, we see a similar trend where the area-weighted approach again underestimates the results ( j 0,met), in this case by up to 20%. Based on our investigations, we show that the deviation between the results arises due to the assumption of uniform Δ n applied by the area-weighted approach.