How Crowded Is Your Business Type? Establishments per 100,000 People for 14 Common Businesses

"Is my city saturated?" is the second question every new owner asks, right after "would this work here?" The answer has a number, and the number is public. It comes from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns, which counts every establishment with paid employees by industry code and county.

Divide the count by the population, multiply by 100,000, and you have a density you can compare across places. Here is that number for the fourteen businesses first-time owners open most, for the United States as a whole, using 2022 County Business Patterns and the 2022 population of 333.3 million.

The benchmark

Read the middle column as "how many people each business has to itself." A restaurant shares its 1,300 residents with every other restaurant's 1,300; a pet groomer has nearly 14,000 to draw from. That gap is the reason the pet business is the cheapest-to-start growth story in our ranking of the same fourteen types.

How to compare your county

The national number is only the yardstick. The decision is local, and it is a ratio of ratios:

1. 1Find your county's establishment count for the NAICS code in County Business Patterns. The code for coffee shops is 722515; the full list is at the bottom of this article.
2. 2Divide by the county population and multiply by 100,000.
3. 3Divide the result by the same figure for your state.

Below about 0.65 times the state rate, the county is underserved for that business. Above about 1.35, it is crowded. Between the two it is ordinary, and the decision comes down to the specific corner.

Those are the thresholds the free Neur saturation check uses. Type a business and a city and it runs the three steps for you, against the state and the country, from the same Census tables.

Why the count is only half the answer

A ratio of establishments to residents assumes residents are the customers. For a lot of businesses they are not.

• •Daytime population. A downtown county can show 60 coffee shops per 100,000 residents and still be underserved at 8 a.m., because 300,000 workers commute in and none of them are counted in the denominator. Census LODES data counts jobs by block; a Neur report uses it to put workers on the map next to residents.
• •Quality of the incumbents. Twelve salons with 3.2-star averages and a wall of complaints about scheduling is not a saturated market; it is an opening. Our scoring treats the presence of competitors as proof of demand and takes points off only for real saturation per resident or for a wall of highly rated incumbents.
• •Price band. Thirty restaurants in a county may include zero at the $40 ticket that the household incomes there would support. Count the competitors in your price band, not the category.
• •Growth. A crowded county that is adding 4% jobs a year in your business type is absorbing new entrants. A quiet county that is shrinking is not. The state rankings carry the trend by state; the report carries it by county.

The NAICS codes

For anyone who wants to pull the numbers directly from the Census API: coffee shops 722515, full-service restaurants 722511, quick-service restaurants 722513, bars 722410, food trucks 722330, gyms 713940, hair salons 812112, nail salons 812113, child day care 624410, auto repair 811111, pet care 812910, landscaping 561730, cleaning 561720, dry cleaning and laundry 812320.

Run a Neur report when you want the full version: competitors on the map with ratings and price levels, residents and daytime workers within a drive, the county trend, and a score that weighs all of it.