Home-service contractors in Washington

Washington'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 Washington 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 Washington homeowners spend.

In order, Washington's four largest trades are other home service, landscaping, flooring and cleaning. 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 Washington, 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 Washington is short of that trade, only that few businesses in it were categorised that way.

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

Painting takes a larger share of Washington's records than it takes nationally, which is the clearest way Washington's trade mix departs from the country's. The gap is real but ordinary and would not survive being called a trend.

At the other end, pool is far thinner in Washington than it is nationally. A trade this far under the national share is usually one the state's businesses file under a different category rather than one that is genuinely absent.

Per resident, Washington 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 Washington sits in the upper third of the states in this corpus, large enough that its trade rows are stable from one release to the next.

Washington'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 Washington'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 Washington'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 Washington 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 Washington and the one with the most records per ten thousand residents, and pool has the fewest.

Pool is the one Washington trade in which every record is already classified as independent, franchise brand or corporate owned, with none left in review. The other rows on this page carry at least one name the chain rule has not finished with.

Over the last twelve months more Washington records first appeared than were flagged closed, so the file for this state grew; pest control 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 Washington rows have no employment or wage series to sit beside them. Every other Washington row does, by metropolitan area rather than statewide.

The metro fact pages Washington owns are Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Spokane-Spokane Valley, Kennewick-Richland and Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater, and 2 more. 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, Washington sits between Michigan above it and Delaware 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, Washington's neighbours are Virginia and Minnesota. 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.

Washington's franchise-brand and corporate-owned records are close to even in number. The franchised ones concentrate in flooring and the corporate-owned ones in pest control, which is a difference the statewide split above hides.

Within Washington, pool 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 pool.

Cleaning is the Washington trade whose records most often carry no street address, and pool the one whose records most often do. A missing street line usually means the business runs from a home, so the list on a cleaning page in Washington is thinner in addresses than a pool one and no less real for it.

Washington is outside the verified-licence layer, so no Washington row above carries a licensed share and no Washington 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, Washington State Department of Labor and Industries is where a Washington licence is checked and Washington Attorney General, Consumer Protection is where a Washington homeowner takes a dispute. This site takes no complaints about a Washington contractor and resolves none.

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