Commercial building market
Boston, MA holds about 35,637 serviceable commercial buildings. That is about 16 buildings for every competing plumbing and HVAC location.
Crowded and slow
Fewer buildings per competing location than typical, while local plumbing and HVAC employment grew slower than the metro median.
We count about 35,637 commercial buildings over 4,000 square feet. This building stock is relevant to HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and fire protection.
Counts are by structure, not parcel, and are a coverage floor rather than a complete census. We do not attach an all-trade revenue total because the available billing model is mechanical-only and would mislabel the opportunity for every other trade.
Serviceable buildings
35,637
commercial structures over 4,000 sqft
Largest building segment
17,230
multifamily
Plumbing and HVAC context
16
buildings per NAICS 238220 location, not an all-trade rival count
| Building type | Buildings | Share of counted stock |
|---|---|---|
| Multifamily | 17,230 | 48.3% |
| Office | 5,321 | 14.9% |
| Education | 5,050 | 14.2% |
| Government | 4,901 | 13.8% |
| Worship | 1,644 | 4.6% |
| Healthcare | 681 | 1.9% |
| Hospitality | 404 | 1.1% |
| Industrial / manufacturing | 386 | 1.1% |
| Warehouse / distribution | 20 | 0.1% |
Buildings are counted per structure inside Boston, MA, from FEMA/ORNL USA Structures, filtered to commercial occupancies over 4,000 square feet and excluding structures under 3.2 meters tall. Counts are a floor because coverage varies by place.
Competitor counts and employment are Census County Business Patterns for NAICS 238220, plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors. They are retained as a clearly labeled mechanical-market comparison, not presented as roofing, electrical, or fire-protection competition.
Equipment market sizing
We apply national CBECS equipment incidence to the measured Boston, MA building stock. Refrigeration also includes local Census food-service and grocery establishments. These are planning estimates, not equipment censuses.
Commercial refrigeration
87,964
estimated covered units across about 16.2K serviceable locations
$24,805,848 / year
scheduled PM at $282 per unit, saturation scenario
About $9,401,416 gross profit at 37.9% margin
Size one building and your market share →Elevator service
6,857
estimated covered units across about 2.7K serviceable locations
$26,173,169 / year
recurring service at $3,817 per unit, saturation scenario
About $7,930,470 gross profit at 30.3% margin
Size one building and your market share →The estimate excludes multifamily and industrial buildings because CBECS does not support those mappings here. Refrigeration covers scheduled maintenance only. Elevator service excludes repairs and modernization.
Buildings per competing location against metro plumbing and HVAC employment growth from 2018 to 2023. Boston, MA is outlined.
Top right: more buildings per rival, with faster local trade employment growth.
Top left: fewer buildings per rival, with faster local trade employment growth.
Bottom right: more buildings per rival, with slower local trade employment growth.
Bottom left: fewer buildings per rival, with slower local trade employment growth.
Quadrant lines are the medians of the places plotted, not fixed thresholds, so a position means "compared with everywhere else measured here" rather than passing some absolute bar. The y-axis is CBSA-level plumbing and HVAC contractor employment from Census County Business Patterns, measured directly for 2018 and 2023.
Closest to Boston, MA by serviceable building count, which makes them the fairest comparison for a contractor weighing an expansion.
Seattle, WA
37,539 serviceable buildings
35 buildings per rival location
Tampa, FL
38,371 serviceable buildings
27 buildings per rival location
Detroit, MI
39,028 serviceable buildings
35 buildings per rival location
San Diego, CA
41,222 serviceable buildings
38 buildings per rival location
Orlando, FL
30,051 serviceable buildings
31 buildings per rival location
Washington, DC
41,456 serviceable buildings
25 buildings per rival location
How many serviceable commercial buildings are in Boston, MA?
About 35,637 in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH Metro Area: structures with a commercial occupancy, over 4,000 square feet, and tall enough to be real premises rather than a garage. That count is a floor rather than a census, because national structure coverage is uneven by metro.
How many competitors are there in Boston, MA?
2,169 plumbing and HVAC contractor locations (US Census County Business Patterns, NAICS 238220, 2023), which works out to about 16 serviceable buildings per location. Read that as an average over a very uneven field: most locations in a typical metro have fewer than five employees and are not competing for a portfolio of commercial service contracts.
Is the mechanical trade workforce growing in Boston, MA?
Plumbing and HVAC contractor employment in the metro grew 10.4% from 2018 to 2023, measured directly by US Census County Business Patterns for NAICS 238220. This measures trade employment, not construction demand.
Does a building in Boston, MA bill more than the same building elsewhere?
Not measurably. We tested it: once you control for WHICH CONTRACTOR services a building, state explains almost none of the variation in revenue per building and county barely more. Climate looked like a 1.7x driver as a group mean and disappeared under a within-contractor control. So the total here differs from another metro because the COUNT of buildings differs, not because a building is worth more. No regional multiplier is applied.
This page covers the Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH Metro Area, Census CBSA 14460, 9,030 square kilometres of land area. Buildings are counted per structure inside that boundary polygon rather than by any address field, because the national structure dataset leaves its ZIP, state and city fields empty across whole regions: keying on them reports near-zero for real places.
Building counts: FEMA/ORNL USA Structures (CC BY 4.0). Competitor counts and employment: US Census County Business Patterns, NAICS 238220, 2023 with 2018 as the trend baseline and the same industry vintage across both. Construction growth: US Bureau of Economic Analysis state GDP by industry, NAICS 23. Population, education and income: American Community Survey 5-year. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Building counts are useful across trades. The competitor and employment figures on this page are limited to NAICS 238220, plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors, and should not be read as electrical, roofing, or fire-protection density.
Machine-readable, free to cite with attribution under CC BY 4.0: geo-building-stock.json, version 1.0.2.
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