US Local Business Census 2026: 2.29 million businesses across 27 trades
How many plumbers, HVAC contractors, restaurants and other local businesses are there in the US?
We counted 2,288,171 US local businesses across 27 trades in July 2026. Healthcare is the largest at 196,566 and bookstores the smallest at 22,636. California holds 13.9% of all of them, more than Texas and New York combined. The full per-trade and per-state breakdown is below.
These are counts of our own 27 US local-trade files, built on 24 July 2026 from Google Maps business listings. Every record is counted; nothing is sampled, weighted or estimated. The measurement script is measure-local-fields.mjs in this repository and it reads the same files the products ship.
One business appears once per trade file. A business listed under two trades on Google Maps is counted in both, so the 2,288,171 total is a sum of trade counts rather than a count of distinct companies. We have not de-duplicated across trades and do not claim to have.
State is parsed out of the free-text address, because the source has no state column. 83.0% of all rows resolve to a state, which is 99.6% of the rows that carry an address at all. The remaining rows are businesses Google Maps publishes without a street address. See the completeness benchmark for why that happens and which trades it affects.
What this is not: a census of every business in America. It is a complete count of what Google Maps lists in these 27 categories on the scan date, which is a different and smaller thing. Businesses with no Maps listing do not appear here at all.
All 27 trades, by size
Counted 24 July 2026. Total: 2,288,171 businesses.
| Trade | Businesses |
|---|---|
| Healthcare | 196,566 |
| General Contractors | 189,224 |
| Food & Beverage | 172,242 |
| Restaurant | 166,556 |
| Hair Salons | 143,966 |
| Cleaning Services | 134,185 |
| Landscaping | 110,373 |
| Kitchen Remodeling | 102,286 |
| Clothing Stores | 95,545 |
| Painters | 90,060 |
| Bakeries | 83,605 |
| HVAC | 73,586 |
| Moving Companies | 72,057 |
| Barber Shops | 71,842 |
| Carpenters | 70,489 |
| Medical Spas | 65,453 |
| Hotels | 56,973 |
| Tree Services | 51,959 |
| Convenience Stores | 50,924 |
| Plumbers | 50,724 |
| Jewelry Stores | 49,525 |
| Furniture Stores | 40,365 |
| Orthodontist | 40,308 |
| Roofers | 32,105 |
| Pharmacies | 28,473 |
| Pest Control | 26,144 |
| Bookstores | 22,636 |
Where they are
1,899,253 records resolved to one of 52 states and territories. California alone holds 13.9% of every local business in this dataset, narrowly more than Texas and New York put together, and over 100,000 ahead of second-place Florida.
| State | Businesses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| California | 263,658 | 13.9% |
| Florida | 161,906 | 8.5% |
| Texas | 131,069 | 6.9% |
| New York | 131,006 | 6.9% |
| Illinois | 89,854 | 4.7% |
| New Jersey | 63,743 | 3.4% |
| Massachusetts | 57,902 | 3.0% |
| Ohio | 57,880 | 3.0% |
| Georgia | 53,032 | 2.8% |
| Washington | 52,454 | 2.8% |
What a count is worth on its own
Not much, which is why we publish two other numbers next to every one of these. A trade count tells you the size of a market; it does not tell you how much of that market you can actually reach.
Roughly one in three of these businesses has no real web presence, and address coverage swings from 55.6% to 100% depending on the trade. Both are measured in the companion reports, and both matter more than the headline count when you are deciding what to buy.