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Metro fact page

Plumbing contractors in Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA

The Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA metro area has 68 plumbing contractors, or 2.60 per 10,000 residents.

What plumbing work involves and how it is licensed is written once on the national plumbing page. California publishes a business-level licence source for plumbing, and the California page lists which classes count.

The facts

Plumbing contractors in this metro
68
Per 10,000 residents
2.60 per 10,000
Records first appearing in the last 12 months
4
Records flagged closed in the last 12 months
0
Licensed share, CA portion of this metro
16.2%
Share of this metro’s entities excluded as out-of-state: 0.0%. California licenses the business itself, so the share is measured against business-level records. About 47% of California licensees are sole owners, whose published address is frequently a home.
Active licenses with no public listing
98
Verify any single record at the board: CSLB license check.
Licenses lapsed in the last 12 months
15
Employment and pay for this trade
350 employed, $68,130 median annual wage
Occupation as the Bureau of Labor Statistics titles it: Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters. Median hourly wage $32.75. SOC 47-2152 pools plumbers with pipefitters and steamfitters, so this employment figure and this wage cover all three occupations together and are not a plumbing-only measure.
Independent, franchise, corporate
62 independent, 3 franchise brand, 2 corporate owned, 1 awaiting chain review
Universe quality
0.00% of source records merged as duplicates, 1.47% 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. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 OEWS, published May 15, 2026, SOC 47-2152.

Row definitions: methodology page.

What these numbers say about plumbing in Santa Cruz-Watsonville

By record count, plumbing is the fourth largest of the 11 trades this site counts in Santa Cruz-Watsonville, behind flooring and ahead of electrical. That ordering is a property of the source data's categories rather than a judgement about which trade matters most in Santa Cruz-Watsonville.

Per resident, Santa Cruz-Watsonville carries more plumbing records than California as a whole.

The independent share of Santa Cruz-Watsonville's plumbing records is close to the California figure, so the mix of independent, franchise-brand and corporate-owned records here is ordinary for the state.

Address completeness on Santa Cruz-Watsonville's plumbing records is close to the California figure.

A smaller share of Santa Cruz-Watsonville's plumbing records link to an active state licence than the California figure for the same trade. Read it as a measurement of the join between two files rather than as a description of any record below.

Almost every Santa Cruz-Watsonville plumbing record sits inside California, the state the licensed share is computed inside, so that share covers nearly the whole metro.

More plumbing 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.

More active California licences covering plumbing in Santa Cruz-Watsonville have no matching record in open place data than this page lists records at all, and none of those licences appear in the list below.

The occupational series the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes for this trade counts 350 workers across Santa Cruz-Watsonville, 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.

Of the Santa Cruz-Watsonville plumbing records that are not independent, franchise brands outnumber corporate-owned locations.

Almost none of Santa Cruz-Watsonville's plumbing records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts above describe nearly the whole list.

More plumbing records first appeared in Santa Cruz-Watsonville over the last twelve months than were flagged closed, so the file for this trade and metro grew. A record appears when the source learns of a business, which is a different event from a business opening.

No city inside Santa Cruz-Watsonville differs from the metro enough on plumbing to carry a page of its own, so every record here is answered on this page.

Among the 19 California metro areas this site publishes a plumbing page for, Santa Cruz-Watsonville is 3rd of 19 by records per resident, inside the top quarter. The field is the metro areas this site publishes a plumbing page for rather than every metro area in California.

Ordered by plumbing records per resident across every metro area this site publishes a plumbing page for, the hubs either side of Santa Cruz-Watsonville are Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach above it and Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach below it.

Plumbing contractors, A to Z

51 publishable contractors. Ordering never depends on payment, claim status, license status, or any commercial relationship.

Other trades in Santa Cruz-Watsonville