How Many Competitors Do You Really Have? A $10M-$25M Contractor Registry View by Metro

"There's too much competition" is usually wrong

A contractor owner can look at the raw company count and conclude the market is saturated: there are about 2.3 million specialty-trade company records in the licensed U.S. registry (NAICS 2381-2389, foundation, electrical/plumbing/HVAC, finishing, and other specialty trades).

But that number is a trap. Here's how those 2.3M actually split by revenue:

Method: Level analysis of licensed company records for U.S. specialty-trade contractors, NAICS 2381-2389, grouped by revenue band. n = 2,300,721 source records. Independent firm deduplication and employer or nonemployer coverage were not validated. The table omits the $50M+ band, which by subtraction holds 1,732 records (2,300,721 minus the 2,298,989 shown). Whether registry revenue is reported or modeled is not documented here; see the denominator note below.

84% of those source records fall below $1M in source revenue. That band does not by itself establish fleet size, owner-operator status or payroll coverage. Only 0.6% (13,869 records, including 1,732 at $50M+ not shown in the table) clear $10M in registry revenue. Just 2,087 reach $25-50M. If you're a $10M contractor, you are in roughly the top 0.6% of these registry records by revenue. On the Census employer-firm basis below, the share at $10M+ is closer to 4.3%, so your rank depends on the denominator.

A note on the denominator, because it matters for citing this honestly: the 2.3M count is a licensed record population with unverified employer coverage and firm deduplication. The U.S. Census counts about 500,000 specialty-trade employer firms (businesses with payroll). On that stricter basis, roughly 163,000 clear $1M and about 4.3% clear $10M.

The two sources do not reconcile at the top. 4.3% of about 500,000 is about 21,500 employer firms at $10M+. The licensed registry shows only 13,869 records at $10M+. Yet the registry shows 367,671 records in the displayed $1M-$50M bands; including the omitted 1,732 records at $50M+ gives 369,403 at $1M+, compared with Census employer firms (about 163,000). That pattern is consistent with registry revenue being estimated or compressed for private firms, or with firms split across records. We have not yet documented which. Neither source establishes a floor for the other. Revenue estimates, timing, classification and firm-versus-record definitions may produce undercounts or overcounts. Treat metro counts as a starting screen, then validate actual competitors. Note also that County Business Patterns counts employer establishments (510,803 in 2022), while SUSB counts firms; one firm can operate several establishments. Either way, all-records or employer-firms, the pyramid is steep. We lead with the shape, not a single denominator.

Your real competitor set is a metro × tier cell, and it's tiny

You don't compete with 2.3 million companies. You compete with firms your size, in your market. So we cut it that way. Here are the metros with the largest absolute source-record counts in these bands:

Method: Level analysis of licensed company records, NAICS 2381-2389, grouped by metro (CBSA) × revenue band; ranked by combined $5M-$25M count. All displayed metro cells n ≥ 25 source records.

Los Angeles, the most crowded mid-market metro in this registry data, has 1,924 specialty-trade contractors in the entire $5M-$25M band. These are registry band counts, with unresolved revenue-estimation and record-coverage differences; they are not verified lower bounds on competitors. And that's across every specialty trade combined. We have not published a trade x metro cut, so the next step is a fictional planning assumption, not a measured count: if one trade made up 15% to 20% of LA's band, the direct set would be roughly 289 to 385 firms (1,924 x 0.15 and 1,924 x 0.20), or the low hundreds. A mid-size metro with a few hundred firms in the band could fall under 100 for a single trade under the same assumption.

That changes how you should think about winning. You're not fighting a faceless crowd of two million. You're competing with a knowable, countable set of firms. A practical check: list the same-size firms that show up on your bid lists, permits and supplier conversations over the last 12 months, and compare that list with the registry count for your metro and band.

The thinnest $10M-$25M markets: where to test expansion

Flip it around. Where are there the fewest firms that have actually scaled to $10M-$25M, relative to the total contractor base? Those markets have fewer $10M-$25M records relative to the full local source-record base. Absolute counts still differ: New York has 314 in that band versus San Antonio's 70, so check the count as well as the ratio:

Method: subset of the metro × tier table; density = 1,000 × ($10M-$25M count) ÷ total metro specialty-trade companies. Ranked thinnest first.

Florida metros take three of the six displayed "thin at the top" spots: large bases of smaller source records and a lower share in the $10M-$25M band per 1,000 records. Firms above $25M are not counted in this ratio. One reading is that a well-run firm has room to scale into relatively open air. A counter-reading fits the same data: low density at the top can mean the market resists scale. Possible causes include fragmented residential demand, licensing or permitting friction, thin labor pools, large firms registered outside the metro, or registry undercounting at $10M+. Before treating a thin market as an opportunity, check bid-list composition, licensed-contractor counts for your trade, and wage and hiring data for the roles you would add.

The age gap nobody talks about

One more cut, because it tells you something about how a market behaves. Company-count-weighted average firm age, oldest vs. youngest metros:

• Oldest: Cleveland (28.9 yrs), Cincinnati (28.3), Detroit (27.3), New Orleans (27.0)
• Youngest: Phoenix (17.0), Seattle (17.3), Atlanta (17.6), Charlotte (17.7), Austin (18.2)

A decade-plus gap in average company maturity between fast-growth metros and legacy industrial ones. Younger estimated company age does not establish owner generation or finance maturity. The source uses an estimated-age field, and its underlying founding-versus-registration convention is not published here. Use it as descriptive registry context, then check the actual firms before inferring a buying need.

What to do with this

Two takeaways for a growing contractor:

1. Stop benchmarking yourself against the whole market. Under the single-trade share assumption above, the planning set may be a few hundred company records in your size band and metro; validate the actual competitor set against bid lists. Knowing that should make you more aggressive, not less.
2. Know your numbers inside that cell. Level's hypothesis, not a finding from these counts, is that at $5M-$25M financial visibility is a common constraint on growth. Firm counts and ages cannot separate demand from financial visibility. A practical test: if win rate, job margin by trade and backlog are steady while cash is tight, look at billing, closeout and job costing first. If bids are scarce, look at demand first. That's the thesis behind Level.

Competitor count is only one part of market selection. For replacement and retrofit contractors, building-stock age by metro is a second structural signal to test. Parcel year built is not equipment age or condition, so validate it against installed-base and customer service records before forecasting replacement work.

Related reading

• When Do Contractors Actually Need a CFO?
• The October Problem: Why Q4 Revenue Funds a Q1 Cash Crunch

FAQ

How many specialty-trade contractors are there in the U.S.? About 2.3 million licensed company records (NAICS 2381-2389). These are not a verified count of independent firms or a validated employer-and-nonemployer census. On the stricter Census employer-firm basis it's roughly 500,000. Only about 0.6% of the all-records population, 13,869 records, clear $10M in registry revenue. That is fewer than the roughly 21,500 employer firms implied by the Census 4.3% share, so the populations do not reconcile; this comparison does not establish the direction or size of registry error.

Where does this come from? Level analysis of licensed company records for U.S. specialty-trade contractors, filtered to specialty-trade NAICS codes, aggregated by metro and revenue tier. Compared with U.S. Census County Business Patterns 2022 (510,803 employer establishments) and SUSB 2022. Machine-readable data: levelcfo.com/data/benchmarks/permit-market.json.

Is any individual company named? No. Every figure is a national, state- or metro-level aggregate count. No company, owner, or address appears, and every metro cell shown here has at least 25 source records. This threshold does not establish independent firm identities.