We study the nonequilibrium steady-state of interacting photons in cavity arrays as described by the driven-dissipative Bose–Hubbard and spin-1/2 XY model. For this purpose, we develop a self-consistent expansion in the inverse coordination number of the array to solve the Lindblad master equation of these systems beyond the mean-field approximation. Our formalism is compared and benchmarked with exact numerical methods for small systems based on an exact diagonalization of the Liouvillian and a recently developed corner-space renormalization technique. We then apply this method to obtain insights beyond mean-field in two particular settings: (i) we show that the gas–liquid transition in the driven-dissipative Bose–Hubbard model is characterized by large density fluctuations and bunched photon statistics. (ii) We study the antibunching–bunching transition of the nearest-neighbor correlator in the driven-dissipative spin-1/2 XY model and provide a simple explanation of this phenomenon.