Which states have the most home-service contractor establishments?

The most useful version of this study would normalize establishments per resident — a state with 40 million people should have more contractor businesses than one with 600,000, so a raw ranking partly just re-ranks population. We considered computing establishments per 100,000 residents.

We did not do that, and the reason is a deliberate honesty call. This repository has no committed, authoritative state-population dataset to use as a denominator. The city-and-county population data we hold covers incorporated places only, so summing it would undercount every state by a different, unknowable amount — and dividing a clean BLS numerator by a dirty denominator would manufacture a precise-looking per-capita rate that is quietly wrong. Absolute counts that are exactly right beat a per-capita rate that is approximately wrong. When a committed Census state-population figure is wired into the repo, a future revision can add the per-100k column honestly.

An establishmentin BLS QCEW is a single physical business location classified into a trade's NAICS industry — for example, NAICS 238210 (Electrical Contractors) or 2361 (Residential Building Construction). It is the count of business locations, not a headcount of licensed tradespeople (that is employment, which the data also carries), and it has nothing to do with how good those contractors are. A large, well-run company and a one-person shop each count as establishments; quality, license status, and reputation are separate signals ProFix tracks elsewhere.

These counts are notProFix listing counts. ProFix's directory covers a curated subset of contractors with verification overlays; BLS QCEW is a near-census of every UI-covered employer in the country. The two answer different questions: BLS says how many businesses exist in a trade, ProFix says which of them we can verify.

• Source. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW 2024. The QCEW is a near-census of establishments covered by unemployment insurance, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is public-domain U.S. government data (17 U.S.C. 105). Figures are the 2024 annual averages.
• What we count.Establishments = business locations in each trade's NAICS industry. Not ProFix listings. Not licensed-individual headcounts. Not a quality or reputation signal.
• No double-counting. The plumbing+HVAC industry (NAICS 238220) maps to two ProFix trades but is one BLS industry. We aggregate over distinct NAICS industries per state, so it is counted exactly once — never twice.
• Suppressed cells excluded. BLS suppresses any cell that could disclose an individual employer. Those cells are omitted, not treated as zero, which is why smaller states cover fewer of the 11 industries and why the state sum (584,429) sits just under the national total (587,233).
• No per-capita rate. We publish absolute counts only. This repo has no committed authoritative state-population denominator, and we will not fabricate one from incomplete data. A per-100k column can be added later from a committed Census figure.
• Computed live. Every number is read from the committed BLS seed at render time. If the seed is rebuilt for a newer QCEW year, this page updates automatically — no value here is hardcoded.