Trades Business Statistics: How Many Shops, Workers and Wages (2023–2025 Data)

Key findings

• Plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors (NAICS 238220) are the biggest construction trade on this list: 111,207 establishments, 1,214,761 employees and $89.5 billion in annual payroll in 2023.
• Landscaping services (NAICS 561730) have the most employer establishments (117,969) but the smallest crews, 6.8 employees per establishment on average.
• Janitorial services (NAICS 561720) employ 1,088,193 people at 67,799 establishments, and 1,095,927 more janitorial businesses operate with no employees at all.
• Electricians earn the most of these trades at the top end: the 90th-percentile wage is $108,510 for electricians and $108,420 for plumbers (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
• The fastest-growing trade job is HVAC: 10.9% projected growth from 2025 to 2035 and about 40,600 openings a year (BLS Employment Projections).
• Roofing and landscaping are the most self-employed trades: 19.8% of roofers and 20.2% of landscaping and groundskeeping workers were self-employed in 2025.

How many trades businesses are there in the US?

There were 422,371 employer establishments across the six trades below in 2023, according to the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP). An establishment is a single physical location with paid employees, so a company with three branches counts three times, and one-person shops with no payroll aren't included here (see the next section).

Plumbing/HVAC and electrical contractors together employ more than 2.2 million people. The two cleaning and grounds trades have almost as many workers (1.89 million) but far lower payroll per employee: $30,089 in janitorial and $51,286 in landscaping.

How big is the typical trades business?

Most trades businesses are small. Between 56.9% (pest control) and 70.6% (landscaping) of employer establishments had fewer than five employees in 2023. That's the owner plus a tech or two, the size where one missed call or one sick day changes the week.

How many trades businesses have no employees?

Nearly 2 million businesses in five of these trades had no paid employees in 2023, based on the Census Bureau's Nonemployer Statistics (NES), which counts businesses that file federal income tax returns but have no payroll. In HVAC/plumbing, electrical, landscaping and janitorial work, no-employee businesses outnumber employer establishments.

Many nonemployer businesses are side gigs or part-year work, which is why average receipts are low. A $20,785 average for janitorial nonemployers doesn't describe a full-time cleaning company; it describes a mix of full-time solo cleaners and people cleaning a few houses a month.

What do trades workers earn?

Plumbers had the highest median wage of these trades in May 2025 at $63,800 a year ($30.67 an hour), just ahead of electricians at $63,190 and HVAC mechanics at $61,010, according to BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS). The median for all U.S. occupations was $50,980.

If you're pricing labor, the median is your market rate for an experienced tech and the 10th percentile is roughly what helpers and apprentices earn. Add payroll taxes and benefits on top with the labor burden calculator before you set an hourly rate.

Which trades are growing fastest?

HVAC mechanics and installers are projected to grow 10.9% from 2025 to 2035, the fastest of these trades and about three times the 3.5% projected for all occupations, according to BLS Employment Projections. Electricians follow at 9.2%. Most openings come from workers retiring or leaving the field, not from growth.

How many trades businesses survive?

About 56.5% of construction establishments that opened in the year ending March 2020 were still operating five years later, slightly better than the 51.4% for all private businesses, according to BLS Business Employment Dynamics. About 42.6% of construction establishments that opened in the year ending March 2015 lasted 10 years.

BLS counts an establishment as surviving while it keeps reporting employees. A shop that drops to the owner alone, merges or changes ownership can show up as a closure, so survival here is about employer locations, not owners going broke.

Methodology

What data. Business counts, employment and payroll come from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns 2023, national file. No-employee businesses come from Nonemployer Statistics 2023. Wages come from BLS OEWS May 2025 national estimates. Growth and self-employment shares come from BLS Employment Projections 2025–35, Table 1.2. Survival rates come from BLS Business Employment Dynamics, Table 7.

Which year. CBP and NES data year 2023 (the latest published as of October 24, 2026; the Census CBP page lists 2023 as its latest data and no 2024 CBP file is posted). OEWS reference period May 2025. Projections base year 2025, projected year 2035. Survival cohorts opened in the years ending March 2015, 2020 and 2024, followed through March 2025.

How we compiled it. We downloaded each official file directly (the cbp23us, nonemp23us, oesm25nat and occupation.xlsx files and the BED Table 7 text files), filtered the national rows for the NAICS industries and SOC occupations listed above (CBP rows for all legal forms of organization, NES rows for all receipt sizes), and wrote every value with its source file URL into the CSV. Payroll and receipts, published in thousands of dollars, were converted to dollars. Shares, averages and payroll per employee are our arithmetic on those published values and are marked "derived" in the CSV. We did not adjust, estimate or fill in any missing value.

Limitations. Industries (NAICS) and occupations (SOC) aren't the same thing: an electrician working for a factory is in the wage data but not in the electrical contractor counts. NAICS 238220 puts plumbing and HVAC contractors in one industry, so the Census data can't split them. CBP counts establishments, not companies, and excludes businesses with no payroll. NES counts tax filers with receipts of $1,000 or more ($1 or more in construction), so it includes many part-time and side businesses, and it doesn't publish roofing separately. Census applies noise infusion to CBP to protect individual businesses, so small numbers are approximate. OEWS excludes the self-employed. BLS survival rates are only published at the sector level. Census and BLS revise data; check the source pages for later releases.

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What these numbers mean for a trades owner

If you run a shop with fewer than five people, you're the typical trades business, not the exception. That size also explains why the phone is the bottleneck: the person who answers it is usually the person on the roof or under the house. Growing demand for HVAC and electrical work, plus a steady stream of retirements, means good techs will stay hard to hire and expensive to keep. Price your labor off the wage tables above, and see the trade pages for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, cleaning and pest control businesses.