How Many Competitors Do You Really Have? For a $10M Contractor, Fewer Than 400 in Any Metro

"There's too much competition" is usually wrong

Every contractor owner believes their market is saturated. Look at the raw company count and you'll agree: there are about 2.3 million specialty-trade companies in the U.S. (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: public business registries and company records for U.S. specialty-trade contractors, NAICS 2381-2389, grouped by revenue band. n = 2,300,721 companies. Denominator is all company records, including nonemployer sole proprietors.

84% of that "market" is sub-$1M, largely owner-operators and one-truck shops. Only 0.6% (13,869 companies) clear $10M in revenue. Just 2,087 reach $25-50M. If you're a $10M contractor, you are already in the top half of one percent of your entire trade by size.

A note on the denominator, because it matters for citing this honestly: the 2.3M count includes nonemployer sole proprietors. 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. Either way, all-records or employer-firms, the pyramid is brutally 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 most saturated mid-market metros in the country, the worst case for competition:

Method: public business registries and company records, NAICS 2381-2389, grouped by metro (CBSA) × revenue band; ranked by combined $5M-$25M count. All cells n ≥ 25.

Los Angeles, the single most crowded mid-market in America, has 1,924 specialty-trade contractors in the entire $5M-$25M band. And that's across every specialty trade combined. Narrow it to your trade (say, HVAC), and your true direct competitor set in even the biggest metro is in the low hundreds. In a mid-size metro, it can be under 100.

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, most of whom, by the way, don't know their own numbers any better than the market average.

Where scaling is easiest: the thinnest $10M+ markets

Flip it around. Where are there the fewest firms that have actually scaled to $10M-$25M, relative to the total contractor base? Those are the markets where reaching that size means the least same-tier competition:

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

Florida metros dominate the "thin at the top" list: enormous bases of small contractors, very few that have broken through to $10M+. That's a market where a well-run firm has room to scale into relatively open air.

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 Sun Belt metros and legacy industrial ones. Younger markets mean more first-generation owners still figuring out their financial operations, and more firms hitting the "we've outgrown our bookkeeper" wall at the same time.

What to do with this

Two takeaways for a growing contractor:

1. Stop benchmarking yourself against the whole market. Your competitive set is a few hundred firms, your size, in your metro. Knowing that should make you more aggressive, not less.
2. The firms winning that cell are the ones who know their numbers. At $5M-$25M, the difference between the contractors who keep climbing and the ones who stall is almost never demand, it's financial visibility. That's the whole thesis behind Level.

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 company records (NAICS 2381-2389, all firms including nonemployers). On the stricter Census employer-firm basis it's roughly 500,000. Only about 0.6% of the all-records population, 13,869 firms, clear $10M in revenue.

Where does this come from? Public business registries and company records for U.S. specialty-trade contractors, filtered to specialty-trade NAICS codes, aggregated by metro and revenue tier. Cross-checked against 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 metro- or state-level count. No company, owner, or address appears, and every published cell is backed by at least 25 companies.