Home-service contractors in Maryland

Maryland's largest trade by record count is other home service, and it is dominant rather than merely first: more than a quarter of every home-service record this site holds for Maryland sits in that one trade, with landscaping the next largest. A concentrated mix like this usually says more about how the source data categorises a business than about how Maryland homeowners spend.

In order, Maryland's four largest trades are other home service, landscaping, HVAC and plumbing. Other home service alone account for half of every record on this page, which is a narrow base for a statewide figure.

Every one of the eleven trades this site counts carries at least one record in Maryland, which is not true of every state. The smallest of them here is pool, and a small row is a small row: it is not evidence that Maryland is short of that trade, only that few businesses in it were categorised that way.

At the other end of the same ordering, Maryland's three smallest trades are pool, pest control and painting. Between them they still hold a workable share of Maryland, so most of their metro hub pages clear this site's publish floor and publish.

No trade is strongly over-represented in Maryland. Cleaning leans furthest above the national mix and even that lean is slight, so Maryland looks like the country in miniature on this measure.

Pool is thinner in Maryland than it is nationally, the mirror of the lean above. Read it as a difference in how businesses here are categorised before reading it as a difference in what they do.

Per resident, Maryland sits close to the national rate for home-service records, in the middle of the fifty-one this site counts. Being average is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up, and it means the counts on this page can be read as typical.

By raw record count Maryland sits in the middle third of the states in this corpus, which is the size at which a single large metro can move a trade row on its own.

Maryland's split between independent, franchise-brand and corporate-owned records is close to the national one, so the chain mix on this page is typical rather than distinctive.

More of Maryland's records carry no street address than the national average, which usually means a larger share of the state's businesses run from a home rather than a storefront.

Almost none of Maryland's records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts on this page describe nearly the whole state rather than most of it. Pest control holds what little of the review bucket Maryland has.

Read per resident rather than by count, the ordering does not change at the top: other home service is both the largest trade in Maryland and the one with the most records per ten thousand residents, and pool has the fewest.

Over the last twelve months more Maryland records first appeared than were flagged closed, so the file for this state grew; cleaning added the largest share of new records and pool lost the largest share to closed flags. A record appears when the source learns about a business, which is not the same event as a business opening.

Cleaning, Flooring, Landscaping, Other home service, Painting, Pest control and Pool carry no Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation in the extract loaded here, so those Maryland rows have no employment or wage series to sit beside them. Every other Maryland row does, by metropolitan area rather than statewide.

The metro fact pages Maryland owns are Baltimore-Columbia-Towson and Hagerstown-Martinsburg. Each carries the same counts for one trade in one metro area, and a metro that crosses a state line is listed under the state its name leads with, not under every state it touches.

Ordered by records per resident, Maryland sits between Delaware above it and Alaska below it. Those two are the states this page's per-resident rate is closest to, and they are named because a rank on its own says less than the company it keeps.

Ordered by total records rather than by rate, Maryland's neighbours are Tennessee and Missouri. A state can sit high on one of these two orderings and low on the other, and reading both is the point of naming them.

Of the Maryland records that are not independent, corporate-owned locations outnumber franchise brands, and they concentrate in pest control; the most franchised trade in Maryland is pest control.

Within Maryland, electrical is the most independently held trade and pest control the least. That gap is the reason the statewide independent share is a summary rather than a description: a homeowner hiring in pest control meets a different market from one hiring in electrical.

Other home service is the Maryland trade whose records most often carry no street address, and HVAC the one whose records most often do. A missing street line usually means the business runs from a home, so the list on an other home service page in Maryland is thinner in addresses than an HVAC one and no less real for it.

Maryland is outside the verified-licence layer, so no Maryland row above carries a licensed share and no Maryland profile carries a licence fact. The counts are still measured; what is absent is the join between them and a licence file, which is why the licensed-share row reads as not published rather than as zero.

Until that changes, Maryland Department of Labor, Occupational and Professional Licensing is where a Maryland licence is checked and Maryland Attorney General, Consumer Protection Division is where a Maryland homeowner takes a dispute. This site takes no complaints about a Maryland contractor and resolves none.

Taking the largest row on its own: other home service is about as large a part of Maryland as it is of the country, so Maryland leads with that trade for the same reason the country does.