The remodeling contractor census: seven states counted

Why nobody has counted the supply side

The demand side of remodeling is not under-studied. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies has run the Remodeling Futures Program since 1995 and publishes the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity quarterly, benchmarked to the American Housing Survey. The 23 July 2026 LIRA release, “Remodeling Spending Poised for Further Slowdown,” projects that annual spending on home improvements and repairs continues to lose momentum through mid-2027. Remodeling magazine’s Cost vs. Value report, built on BLS price series and REALTOR® input, owns the resale-value citation. We cite both. We do not compete with either on cost or on ROI.

What those programmes do not produce is a count of who is actually licensed — or registered, or municipally filed — to do the work. Business journals that need a firm-count paragraph reach for County Business Patterns, which is the right tool for employer establishments and the wrong tool for a trade that is mostly small shops and sole traders. CBP 2023 records ${n(CBP.us)} US employer establishments in NAICS 236118; ${n(CBP.usNlt5)} of them (${nPct(CBP.usNlt5, CBP.us)}%) have fewer than five employees. The nonemployer is outside the frame entirely.

HyreRemodel analysis: the empty cell is the supply side, and the reason it is empty is that “licensed remodeling contractor” is not one legal fact. Florida licenses certified building and certified residential contractors whose class names do not say remodeling. Arizona issues B-3 General Remodeling and Repair, which does. Nevada issues B-7 Residential Remodeling to a few dozen holders and B-2 Residential and Small Commercial to thousands. Texas issues nothing at state level. North Carolina issues a real licence that does not apply below $40,000. Adding those regimes into one national headcount is how you get a number nobody can check against a single statute. This page keeps the regimes separate and publishes the inclusion rule that produced each cell.

What “licensed remodeling contractor” means in each of the seven states

The hard part of this census, and the part that makes it citable, is that the classes are not comparable. A reasonable researcher would draw the inclusion line differently in every state. We publish the line we drew, the board query that produced it, and what sits on the other side of it. The class taxonomy in full is a different study — contractor licence classes by state. This page owns the count that falls out of the line.

Two facts that apply in every licensed state except Arizona, and in Arizona for the B / KB classes: the class name usually does not say remodeling. The licence is authorisation. Service evidence is a separate field. Folding “authorised to remodel” into “is a remodeler” is the silent transformation this desk refuses to make, so the inclusion rule is written as authorisation, and the CBP comparison is written as a comparison with a primary-activity industry code, not as a completeness audit of either source.

How our count compares with Census establishments — and why they differ

County Business Patterns is an annual series of employer establishments with paid employees, tabulated by geography and NAICS. The 2023 vintage, table CBP2023.CB2300CBP, was released 26 June 2025. We read NAICS 236118 Residential Remodelers from the state file cbp23st.txt (and the US file cbp23us.txt), legal form of organisation “all.” Retrieved 5 September 2026 from the Census CBP 2023 state dataset. The same table is published on data.census.gov as CBP2023.CB2300CBP.

NAICS 236118, in the Census Bureau’s own industry definition, “comprises establishments primarily responsible for the remodeling construction (including additions, alterations, reconstruction, maintenance, and repair work) of houses and other residential buildings, single-family and multifamily.” Remodeling general contractors, for-sale remodelers, remodeling design-build firms and remodeling project construction management firms sit in this industry. Establishments primarily engaged in building new single-family houses for others sit in 236115; new multifamily in 236116; for-sale / speculative new housing in 236117. A licensed general builder is not, by virtue of the licence, a 236118 establishment.

Three structural differences produce the gap, and they do not run in one direction.

1. Employer versus licensee. CBP’s universe is establishments with paid employees. A sole trader with a licence and no payroll is in our count where we harvested the licence, and is not in CBP. 81.0% of US 236118 employer establishments already have fewer than five employees (109,661 of 135,337); the nonemployer layer sits under that. In Florida, 85.5% of 236118 establishments are in the under-five class (8,800 of 10,287); in Arizona 76.4%; in Nevada 70.1%. CBP is already a small-shop industry in this NAICS. It is still not a licence census.

2. Primary activity versus authorisation. Our inclusion rules, outside Arizona’s named remodeling classes and Nevada’s 72 B-7 records, count credentials that authorise remodeling. CBP counts establishments that primarily do it. A Nevada B-2 firm that built thirty new houses and two kitchens last year is in our 3,494 and in CBP 236115. That single fact is enough to push a class-census ratio above 1 without any “missing sole traders” at all.

3. Sampling frame versus statewide employer universe. CBP is statewide in every state. Our count is statewide only where the harvest was a classification query that we then stored. Nevada’s Nevada-addressed B and C-3 records meet that test. Arizona’s harvest meets it; the store is a subset of it. Florida, California, Utah, Texas and North Carolina do not. In those five, a ratio below 1 is the expected shape of an incomplete frame, not a finding that the state has few remodelers.

HyreRemodel analysis: the journalist angle that “there are far more licensed remodelers than federal statistics suggest” is true in Arizona and Nevada under the inclusion rules we published, and is not a sentence this page will support in California, Florida, Texas, Utah or North Carolina. The honest version is narrower and more useful: where we counted licences by classification statewide, the licence-derived count exceeds the employer-establishment count, because the licence is an authorisation and CBP is a primary-activity payroll census. Where we sampled, the sample is smaller than CBP, as a sample of a broader population should be.

Density per 10,000 owner-occupied units — and when not to use it

The denominator is ACS 2024 1-year table B25003 Tenure, owner-occupied housing units, retrieved 5 September 2026 from the Census table-based Summary File (acsdt1y2024-b25003.dat, geography 0400000US). The United States estimate is 86,635,506 owner-occupied units. We use owner-occupied units, not total housing units and not population, because the LIRA spending frame is owner-occupiers and because a renter is not the customer for a kitchen remodel of the unit they do not own.

HyreRemodel calculation, our licences per 10,000 owner-occupied units: Nevada 46.9, Arizona 24.4, Florida 11.5, Utah 8.5, California 6.3, Texas 1.3, North Carolina 0.5. The CBP version of the same fraction: California 21.8, Florida 16.5, Utah 16.0, North Carolina 12.1, Nevada 11.3, Arizona 11.2, Texas 8.7.

HyreRemodel analysis: the CBP densities cluster. Six of the seven states sit between 11 and 22 CBP establishments per 10,000 owner-occupied units; Texas is the low outlier at 8.7, which is still a real statewide employer census. Our densities do not cluster, because the numerators were not produced by one rule. Nevada’s 46.9 is a class-census numerator over a small owner-occupied base. North Carolina’s 0.5 is a 200-candidate cap over a statewide housing stock. Publishing those two numbers in a ranked density table without the frame would be the error this page is built to prevent. A standalone density study would carry the CBP series, which is the series that can actually be ranked.

What this means for a homeowner who is hiring

A census of credentials is not a recommendation of any firm in it. The use of the count is narrower: it tells you which register to open, and how much of the market that register actually sees.

In Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah there is a state board lookup. The number on this page is not the number of people who will answer your bid request. It is the size of the credential pool we have verified under a published rule. In Arizona you can look up a B-3 and know the class names the work. In Florida you can look up a CRC and know only that the board authorised residential building, including remodeling, at the certified (statewide) level. In California you can look up a B and know the firm is allowed to contract a structure that takes two unrelated trades — which is the legal shape of a remodel and also the legal shape of a new house.

In Texas the state lookup for a general contractor does not exist. The useful question is which city you are in. San Antonio and El Paso both register; most of the state does not, at city level, in any file we hold. A TDLR search is the right tool for the electrician and the air-conditioning contractor on the same job, and the wrong tool for the person managing the kitchen. In North Carolina the useful question is whether the job is valued at $40,000 or more. Below that line the NCLBGC lookup returns a silence that is not a finding.

HyreRemodel recommendation, not a source fact: take the licence number off the bid, open the board yourself, and save the page with the date. Our store is a research snapshot measured ${STORE.measured_at}, not a live verification for your lot. Comparing what each quote actually includes is a different and more useful act than comparing licence counts, and it has a worksheet at quote comparison.

What will change on the next pass

The remodeling contractor census is a snapshot, not a live register. Licence statuses move every week; CBP moves once a year (the 2023 vintage used here was released 26 June 2025; the 2024 vintage had not replaced it as of 5 September 2026). The next edition will re-measure the store, replace CBP when the 2024 state file is published, and replace ACS when the 2025 1-year file is published. Florida CGC, a statewide CSLB classification path if the board ever ships one, a North Carolina harvest that is not capped at 200, and a Texas frame wider than two cities are the four expansions that would change a cell rather than just a date.

Until those expansions exist, the cells stay labelled as they are. A larger number obtained by silently widening a class or dropping a cap is not an update. It is a different study, and it would need a different inclusion rule written next to it.