Metro overview, all trades
Home-service contractors in Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA
The Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA metro area has 1,548 home-service contractors across 11 trades, or 35.08 per 10,000 residents.
The largest trade here is other home service, with 835 records and 53.9% of the metro’s home-service total; the smallest with any record at all is pool, with 17.
Against California’s own rate per resident for each trade, Santa Maria-Santa Barbara carries more landscaping, painting contractors than the state average. It carries fewer pool contractors than the state average.
Among the 19 California metro areas this site carries, ranked by records per ten thousand residents in Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's largest trades: it is 6th of 19 for other home service, around the middle; it is 3rd of 19 for landscaping, inside the top quarter; and it is 5th of 19 for flooring, around the middle. The field is the metro areas this site publishes rather than every one in California.
The facts for Santa Maria-Santa Barbara
- Home-service contractors in this metro
- 1,548
- Per 10,000 residents
- 35.08 per 10,000
- Trades with at least one record
- 11 of 11
- Records first appearing in the last 12 months
- 39
- Records flagged closed in the last 12 months
- 6
- Independent, franchise, corporate
- 1,491 independent, 22 franchise brand, 27 corporate owned, 8 awaiting chain review
- Active licenses with no public listing
- 1,207
- Universe quality
- 0.51% of source records merged as duplicates, 2.45% carry no street address
Sources and dates: Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026. Population 441,257, 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 Maria-Santa Barbara
Other home service is Santa Maria-Santa Barbara'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 Maria-Santa Barbara'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 Maria-Santa Barbara. The smallest of them here is pool.
Santa Maria-Santa Barbara'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 Maria-Santa Barbara 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 Maria-Santa Barbara sits close to the California rate, so the counts here read as ordinary for the state.
Against California's own mix, Santa Maria-Santa Barbara is heaviest in landscaping: that trade takes a far larger share of this metro than of the state.
Even Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's thinnest trade against California, roofing, sits close to the state share.
Read per resident, the top of the table does not move: other home service, landscaping and flooring are Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's three densest trades, and pest control its thinnest.
Of the Santa Maria-Santa Barbara trades with a measured licensed share, electrical links to an active state licence most often and flooring 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 Maria-Santa Barbara 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 Maria-Santa Barbara 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, roofing and plumbing in Santa Maria-Santa Barbara. Of those, HVAC pays the most and plumbing the least.
Cleaning, flooring, landscaping, other home service, painting, pest control and pool carry no wage figure for Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, so those rows are blank rather than filled from a neighbouring occupation.
Plumbing carries Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's largest published employment count: the occupational series counts 740 workers across the metro, and this site publishes 89 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, roofing and HVAC follow it.
Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's franchise-brand and corporate-owned records are close to even. The franchised ones concentrate in plumbing and the corporate-owned ones in pest control.
Within Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, electrical and landscaping are the most independently held trades and plumbing the least.
Almost none of Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts here describe nearly the whole metro. HVAC holds what little of that bucket the metro has.
Painting is the Santa Maria-Santa Barbara 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 Maria-Santa Barbara records first appeared over the last twelve months than were flagged closed, so the file for this metro grew. Pool both added the largest share of new records and lost the largest share to closed flags.
The cities inside Santa Maria-Santa Barbara that differ from the wider metro enough to carry pages of their own are Santa Maria and Goleta. Each of them carries one trade.
Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, 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 Maria-Santa Barbara on this site are Corpus Christi above it and Salem below it. Those are the metros closest to it in population.
Ordered by records per resident rather than population, Santa Maria-Santa Barbara's neighbours are Columbus and Daphne-Fairhope-Foley. A metro can sit high on one of these orderings and low on the other.
Every trade in Santa Maria-Santa Barbara
| Trade | Contractors | Per 10,000 | Licensed share | Median hourly wage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning | 76 | 1.72 | Not published | |
| Electrical | 70 | 1.59 | 37.1% | $36.20 |
| Flooring | 98 | 2.22 | 9.2% | |
| HVAC | 78 | 1.77 | 24.4% | $37.81 |
| Landscaping | 142 | 3.22 | 15.5% | |
| Painting | 70 | 1.59 | 20.0% | |
| Pest control | 32 | 0.73 | Not published | |
| Plumbing | 89 | 2.02 | 28.1% | $29.33 |
| Pool | 17 | 0.39 | 17.6% | |
| Roofing | 41 | 0.93 | 29.3% | $29.51 |
| Other home service | 835 | 18.92 | 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 Maria-Santa Barbara with their own page
| City | Trades | Records covered |
|---|---|---|
| Santa Maria | other home service | 154 |
| Goleta | other home service | 71 |
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.