Metro overview, all trades
Home-service contractors in Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC
The Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC metro area has 5,826 home-service contractors across 11 trades, or 32.60 per 10,000 residents.
The largest trade here is other home service, with 3,135 records and 53.8% of the metro’s home-service total; the smallest with any record at all is pool, with 59.
Against Virginia’s own rate per resident for each trade, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk carries more pool contractors than the state average. No trade here runs meaningfully behind the state rate either.
Among the 4 Virginia metro areas this site carries, ranked by records per ten thousand residents in Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's largest trades: it is 3rd of 4 for other home service, around the middle; it is the thinnest of them for landscaping; and it is 3rd of 4 for HVAC, around the middle. The field is the metro areas this site publishes rather than every one in Virginia.
The facts for Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk
- Home-service contractors in this metro
- 5,826
- Per 10,000 residents
- 32.60 per 10,000
- Trades with at least one record
- 11 of 11
- Records first appearing in the last 12 months
- 157
- Records flagged closed in the last 12 months
- 7
- Independent, franchise, corporate
- 5,526 independent, 81 franchise brand, 167 corporate owned, 52 awaiting chain review
- Universe quality
- 0.49% of source records merged as duplicates, 1.00% carry no street address
Sources and dates: Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026. Population 1,787,169, Census Bureau Vintage 2023 population estimates, as of July 1, 2023.
Row definitions: methodology page.
What these numbers say about Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk
Other home service is Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk'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, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's four largest trades are other home service, landscaping, HVAC and cleaning. Other home service alone reaches half of every record on this page.
All eleven trades carry at least one record in Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk. The smallest of them here is pool.
Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's three smallest trades are pool, pest control and roofing. Between them they still hold a workable share of the metro.
Every trade in Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk 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, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk sits close to the Virginia rate, so the counts here read as ordinary for the state.
Against Virginia's own mix, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk is heaviest in pool: that trade takes a far larger share of this metro than of the state.
Even Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's thinnest trade against Virginia, plumbing, sits close to the state share.
Read per resident, the top of the table does not move: other home service, landscaping and HVAC are Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's three densest trades, and pool its thinnest.
No Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk trade carries a measured licensed share, so every row of that column reads as not published rather than as zero.
No licence issuance or lapse figure is published for Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, so no churn figure appears here rather than a zero standing in for one.
A median hourly wage is published for electrical, plumbing, HVAC and roofing in Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk. Of those, electrical pays the most and roofing the least.
Cleaning, flooring, landscaping, other home service, painting, pest control and pool carry no wage figure for Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, so those rows are blank rather than filled from a neighbouring occupation.
Electrical carries Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's largest published employment count: the occupational series counts 5,740 workers across the metro, and this site publishes 264 electrical 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. Plumbing, HVAC and roofing follow it.
Of the Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk records that are not independent, corporate-owned locations outnumber franchise brands and concentrate in pest control; the most franchised trade here is plumbing.
Within Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, electrical and landscaping are the most independently held trades and pest control the least.
Almost none of Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts here describe nearly the whole metro. Pest control holds what little of that bucket the metro has.
Other home service is the Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk trade whose records most often carry no street address, and pool the one whose records most often do. What a blank street line means is set out on the methodology page.
More Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk 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 painting lost the largest share to closed flags.
The cities inside Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk that differ from the wider metro enough to carry pages of their own are Hampton, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. Each of them carries one trade.
Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC crosses a state line, so this metro area sits in more than one licensing regime at once. Every count above is the whole metro; every licence figure beneath it is computed inside one state.
Ordered by population, the metro areas either side of Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk on this site are San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara above it and Jacksonville below it. Those are the metros closest to it in population.
Ordered by records per resident rather than population, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's neighbours are Amarillo and Binghamton. A metro can sit high on one of these orderings and low on the other.
Every trade in Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk
| Trade | Contractors | Per 10,000 | Licensed share | Median hourly wage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning | 286 | 1.60 | Not published | |
| Electrical | 264 | 1.48 | Not published | $29.98 |
| Flooring | 281 | 1.57 | Not published | |
| HVAC | 418 | 2.34 | Not published | $28.59 |
| Landscaping | 503 | 2.81 | Not published | |
| Painting | 240 | 1.34 | Not published | |
| Pest control | 167 | 0.93 | Not published | |
| Plumbing | 247 | 1.38 | Not published | $29.75 |
| Pool | 59 | 0.33 | Not published | |
| Roofing | 226 | 1.26 | Not published | $22.34 |
| Other home service | 3,135 | 17.54 | 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 Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk with their own page
| City | Trades | Records covered |
|---|---|---|
| Hampton | other home service | 203 |
| Suffolk | other home service | 135 |
| Portsmouth | other home service | 131 |
| Chesapeake | HVAC | 93 |
| Virginia Beach | pest control | 59 |
The gate a city has to clear is on the methodology page.
Home-service contractors in Virginia carries the boards and the consumer-protection route for this metro’s first-named state.