A direct current through a metal-insulator-metal tunneling junction emits light when surface-plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are excited. Two distinct processes are believed to coexist in this light emission mediated by surface plasmons: inelastic tunneling, where electrons excite SPPs in the insulator gap, and hot-electron radiative decay, which occurs in the electrodes after elastic tunneling. Previous theoretical approaches to study light emission by inelastic tunneling have relied on Bardeen’s approximation where the electronic wave functions are considered only in the barrier of the junction. In this work, we introduce an extension to models of inelastic tunneling by incorporating the full quantum device solution of the Schrödinger equation, which can also account for processes in the metallic electrodes. The extension unveils the existence of long-range correlations of the current density across the barrier and enables us to establish the equivalence between two models widely used in the past: (i) a calculation of the inelastic transition rate between two states across the barrier based on Fermi’s golden rule and (ii) a calculation of the power transferred to plasmons by current fluctuations. Importantly, the new model accounts for processes that take place in the metallic electrodes and that could not be described within Bardeen’s approximation. Hence, it is no longer necessary to invoke a hot-electron mechanism to obtain a dependence on the geometry of metallic electrodes. The new framework enables to discuss the role of surface plasmons localized in different metal-insulator interfaces and to include possible nonlocal effects at the interfaces. Published by the American Physical Society 2024