Metro overview, all trades
Home-service contractors in Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA
The Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA metro area has 1,092 home-service contractors across 11 trades, or 41.75 per 10,000 residents.
The largest trade here is other home service, with 561 records and 51.4% of the metro’s home-service total; the smallest with any record at all is pool, with 11.
Against California’s own rate per resident for each trade, Santa Cruz-Watsonville carries more landscaping, painting, electrical contractors than the state average. It carries fewer pool, pest control contractors than the state average.
Among the 19 California metro areas this site carries, ranked by records per ten thousand residents in Santa Cruz-Watsonville's largest trades: it is 4th of 19 for other home service, inside the top quarter; it is 2nd of 19 for landscaping, inside the top quarter; and it is 2nd of 19 for flooring, inside the top quarter. The field is the metro areas this site publishes rather than every one in California.
The facts for Santa Cruz-Watsonville
- Home-service contractors in this metro
- 1,092
- Per 10,000 residents
- 41.75 per 10,000
- Trades with at least one record
- 11 of 11
- Records first appearing in the last 12 months
- 24
- Records flagged closed in the last 12 months
- 4
- Independent, franchise, corporate
- 1,068 independent, 10 franchise brand, 13 corporate owned, 1 awaiting chain review
- Active licenses with no public listing
- 725
- Universe quality
- 0.18% of source records merged as duplicates, 1.74% carry no street address
Sources and dates: Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026. Population 261,547, Census Bureau Vintage 2023 population estimates, as of July 1, 2023. State license files, as of September 2, 2026.
Row definitions: methodology page.
What these numbers say about Santa Cruz-Watsonville
Other home service is Santa Cruz-Watsonville's largest trade, and more than half of every record this site holds here sits in it. It holds more than three times as many records as landscaping, the next largest.
In order, Santa Cruz-Watsonville's four largest trades are other home service, landscaping, flooring and plumbing. Other home service alone reaches half of every record on this page.
All eleven trades carry at least one record in Santa Cruz-Watsonville. The smallest of them here is pool.
Santa Cruz-Watsonville's three smallest trades are pool, pest control and roofing. Between them they still hold a workable share of the metro.
Every trade in Santa Cruz-Watsonville clears the record floor a trade page has to meet, so each has a page of its own. That is a statement about how thick this metro's thinnest trade is.
Per resident, Santa Cruz-Watsonville carries more home-service records than California as a whole, across all eleven trades summed together.
Against California's own mix, Santa Cruz-Watsonville is heaviest in landscaping: that trade takes a far larger share of this metro than of the state.
HVAC is thinner in Santa Cruz-Watsonville than across California, the mirror of the lean above.
Read per resident, the top of the table does not move: other home service, landscaping and flooring are Santa Cruz-Watsonville's three densest trades, and roofing its thinnest.
Of the Santa Cruz-Watsonville trades with a measured licensed share, electrical links to an active state licence most often and pool least often. That spread measures how well two files join here, not whether either row's businesses hold a licence.
More trade-covering licences lapsed in Santa Cruz-Watsonville over the last twelve months than were issued. A lapse is a licence that stopped being current, not a business that stopped trading. Both figures come from the state's own status field.
Almost every Santa Cruz-Watsonville record sits inside the state whose licence file its share is computed from, so that share covers nearly the whole metro.
A median hourly wage is published for HVAC, electrical, plumbing and roofing in Santa Cruz-Watsonville. Of those, HVAC pays the most and roofing the least.
Cleaning, flooring, landscaping, other home service, painting, pest control and pool carry no wage figure for Santa Cruz-Watsonville, so those rows are blank rather than filled from a neighbouring occupation.
Plumbing carries Santa Cruz-Watsonville's largest published employment count: the occupational series counts 350 workers across the metro, and this site publishes 68 plumbing records here. The two count different things, one an occupation across every employer and the other the businesses on this site, so they stand side by side rather than one against the other. Electrical, HVAC and roofing follow it.
Of the Santa Cruz-Watsonville records that are not independent, corporate-owned locations outnumber franchise brands and concentrate in plumbing; the most franchised trade here is plumbing.
Within Santa Cruz-Watsonville, electrical and HVAC are the most independently held trades and plumbing the least.
Almost none of Santa Cruz-Watsonville's records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts here describe nearly the whole metro. Plumbing holds what little of that bucket the metro has.
Cleaning is the Santa Cruz-Watsonville trade whose records most often carry no street address, and roofing the one whose records most often do. What a blank street line means is set out on the methodology page.
More Santa Cruz-Watsonville records first appeared over the last twelve months than were flagged closed, so the file for this metro grew. Pest control added the largest share of new records and pool lost the largest share to closed flags.
One city inside Santa Cruz-Watsonville, Watsonville, differs from the wider metro enough to carry pages of its own.
Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA sits inside California alone, so the labour market this page counts and the licensing regime that governs it are the same geography.
Ordered by population, the metro areas either side of Santa Cruz-Watsonville on this site are Kalamazoo-Portage above it and Bend below it. Those are the metros closest to it in population.
Ordered by records per resident rather than population, Santa Cruz-Watsonville's neighbours are Pittsburgh and Santa Rosa-Petaluma. A metro can sit high on one of these orderings and low on the other.
Every trade in Santa Cruz-Watsonville
| Trade | Contractors | Per 10,000 | Licensed share | Median hourly wage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning | 63 | 2.41 | Not published | |
| Electrical | 66 | 2.52 | 25.8% | $36.83 |
| Flooring | 73 | 2.79 | 11.0% | |
| HVAC | 40 | 1.53 | 7.5% | $37.66 |
| Landscaping | 108 | 4.13 | 23.1% | |
| Painting | 53 | 2.03 | 17.0% | |
| Pest control | 14 | 0.54 | Not published | |
| Plumbing | 68 | 2.60 | 16.2% | $32.75 |
| Pool | 11 | 0.42 | 0.0% | |
| Roofing | 35 | 1.34 | 20.0% | $29.64 |
| Other home service | 561 | 21.45 | Not published |
Wage occupations for this metro area: Electricians, Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, Roofers. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 OEWS, published May 15, 2026.
All 11 trades here clear the 8-record floor, so no trade URL of this metro redirects here. The methodology page sets out what the floor is for.
Cities inside Santa Cruz-Watsonville with their own page
| City | Trades | Records covered |
|---|---|---|
| Watsonville | other home service | 72 |
The gate a city has to clear is on the methodology page.
Home-service contractors in California carries the boards and the consumer-protection route for this metro’s first-named state.