The Industry Fragmentation League Table 2026: Consolidation Runway Scores for 50 Service Verticals

By Christoph Totter, Managing Partner, CT Acquisitions. Last verified: July 2026. Next refresh: annual (next SUSB vintage).

Executive summary

Every private equity memo written about a service business repeats the same phrase: highly fragmented industry. Almost nobody quantifies it. This report measures industry fragmentation directly from federal data and assigns a consolidation runway score to every service vertical that buyers actually roll up, so that “fragmented” stops being an adjective and starts being a number you can check.

We pulled the Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses national file, which counts every employer firm in America by industry and by enterprise employment size. We mapped 54 service verticals to their NAICS codes, flagged every imperfect mapping in plain language, and computed a Consolidation Runway Score for each of the 49 distinct industry rows the data supports. The score blends three facts about each industry’s structure: what share of its firms have fewer than 20 employees, what share of its jobs still sit outside 500-plus-employee companies, and how small the average firm is. Every number in the league table was computed directly from the Census SUSB national NAICS by enterprise size file. Nothing is estimated, modeled, or borrowed from a broker deck.

The results are not what the conference-panel consensus says. Residential remodeling is the single most fragmented service industry in America, with a Consolidation Runway Score of 97.8 out of 100. Flooring contractors rank second at 95.2. Auto repair, pool service, and med spas all score above 91. Dental sits at 89.6 despite fifteen years of DSO activity, because the firm count barely moved. At the other end, temporary staffing scores 28.2, the lowest in the table. Home health scores 51.6, a warning for anyone still pitching it as an untouched roll-up.

The gap between the top and bottom of the table is the whole story. In residential remodeling, companies with 500 or more employees hold 3.7 percent of employment. In staffing, that same class of company holds 81.8 percent. Both get called “fragmented” in pitch decks. Only one of them still is.

Use this table three ways. If you are a searcher or a fund picking a vertical, the top quartile is your hunting ground. If you are an owner deciding when to sell, your industry’s rank tells you how long the buyer wave can keep running before platforms start competing on price for scarce targets. If you are a lender or LP, the bottom quartile shows where “roll-up” theses are late.

Three numbers worth quoting

1. In residential remodeling, 97.8 percent of firms have fewer than 20 employees. That is the highest small-firm share of any service vertical in the Census SUSB 2022 file, across 132,711 remodeling firms.
2. Companies with 500 or more employees hold just 3.7 percent of flooring contractor employment. After a decade of home-services consolidation, flooring remains functionally untouched at the top of the size distribution.
3. In temporary staffing, firms with 500 or more employees already control 81.8 percent of employment. Staffing posts a Consolidation Runway Score of 28.2, the lowest of all 49 ranked industries, which is why platform math there is a share-taking game rather than a fragmentation game.

Methodology

The data source

Everything in this table comes from one federal dataset: the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses, 2022 reference year, the most recent SUSB vintage published as of this writing. SUSB is built from the Census Bureau’s Business Register, which covers every U.S. employer firm with paid employees. The specific file used is the national “U.S. and states, NAICS, detailed employment sizes” table, available directly at www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb/tables/2022/.

Three vintage notes matter. Employment in SUSB is a snapshot of the pay period that includes March 12 of the reference year. Receipts are calendar-year figures and are only published in Economic Census years, meaning years ending in 2 or 7, which is why the 2022 vintage carries revenue data that the 2021 and 2023 releases will not. And SUSB counts firms as enterprises, so a 40-branch company is one firm, while 40 independently owned franchise locations are up to 40 separate firms.

SUSB counts only employer firms. Nonemployer sole proprietors, which number in the millions across the trades, are excluded. Every fragmentation figure in this report is therefore conservative. The true count of independent operators in verticals like painting, landscaping, and remodeling is higher than the firm counts shown here.

The Consolidation Runway Score formula

SUSB publishes the firm-size distribution of each industry, not firm-level market shares. That means no true HHI and no top-4 concentration ratio can be computed from it, and we do not pretend otherwise. What the size distribution does support is a rigorous fragmentation proxy. We define the Consolidation Runway Score (CRS) as:

CRS = 100 x (0.40 x A + 0.35 x B + 0.25 x C)

Where, for each industry:

• A = small-firm share. The share of firms with fewer than 20 employees, taken from SUSB enterprise size class “06: <20”. This measures how much of the industry’s firm count is mom-and-pop scale, which is the raw target inventory for add-on acquisitions. Weight: 40 percent.
• B = independent employment share. The share of industry employment inside firms with fewer than 500 employees, computed as SUSB size class “19: <500” employment divided by total employment. Its complement is the employment share already held by 500-plus-employee enterprises, which is the closest SUSB gets to a “consolidated share.” Weight: 35 percent.
• C = firm-size inversion. One minus the min-max normalized natural log of average employees per firm, normalized across the 49 ranked rows. Smaller average firms score higher. The log transform stops one outlier industry, staffing at 249 employees per average firm, from compressing everyone else’s scores. Weight: 25 percent.

The weights are a judgment call and we state them so you can recompute with your own. Small-firm share gets the heaviest weight because add-on inventory is the binding constraint in most roll-up models. The large-firm employment share gets nearly as much because it captures how far consolidation has already run. Average firm size gets the remainder as a check on the other two.

A worked example: roofing

To make the formula concrete, here is the full computation for roofing contractors, NAICS 238160, using the SUSB 2022 national rows.

Component A comes straight from the firm counts. SUSB shows 24,044 total roofing firms. Of those, the “under 20 employees” class holds 21,834 firms, which makes A equal to 0.908.

Component B comes from the employment columns. Total roofing employment is 204,998. Employment inside firms with fewer than 500 employees is 190,266, which makes B equal to 0.928. The complement, 7.2 percent, is roofing’s consolidated employment share.

Component C uses average firm size, which for roofing is 8.53 employees. The natural log of 8.53 is 2.143. Across the 49 ranked rows, the smallest log average size is 1.250 for residential remodelers and the largest is 5.518 for staffing. Normalizing 2.143 within that range gives 0.209, and inverting it gives C equal to 0.791.

Weighted together: 0.40 times 0.908, plus 0.35 times 0.928, plus 0.25 times 0.791 equals 0.886. Multiply by 100 and roofing’s Consolidation Runway Score is 88.6, which ranks eighth. Every other row in the table is computed identically, and anyone with the source file can reproduce the whole table in an afternoon.

Why receipts are reported but not scored

The 2022 file includes receipts, so the detailed profiles below and the downloadable dataset carry receipts per firm and the share of industry receipts held by sub-20-employee firms. We deliberately excluded receipts from the CRS formula for one reason: receipts only exist in SUSB for years ending in 2 and 7. A score that needs receipts breaks in every non-census year and cannot be tracked annually. The revenue dispersion figures are context, not score inputs, and the report says so wherever they appear.

How to read the revenue dispersion figures

The receipts data answers different questions than the employment columns do. Receipts per firm tells you the size of the average check in the vertical, which sets the floor on how many acquisitions a platform needs to reach institutional scale. A vertical averaging $800,000 per firm requires roughly three times the integration work per revenue dollar as one averaging $2.4 million, holding margins equal, and that arithmetic quietly shapes which trades attract funds versus searchers.

The second figure, the share of industry receipts held by sub-20-employee firms, is the purest revenue dispersion measure SUSB supports. When it runs far above the small firms’ employment weight, as in general auto repair at 73.2 percent, small operators are holding their commercial ground, not just surviving as marginal players. When it runs far below the small-firm share of the firm count, as in staffing at 2.8 percent, the long tail of small firms is commercially irrelevant even though it dominates the census of businesses. Read the receipts figures together with the score, not as part of it, for the reasons covered above.

Known limitations, stated plainly

• SUSB measures size structure, not ownership. A PE platform with 300 employees sits in the “under 500” bucket, so industries in the middle innings of consolidation can still show high independent employment shares. Cross-reference the score against live deal activity, which is what our PE platform coverage by sector exists for.
• National only. A vertical can be fragmented nationally and locked up in a given metro.
• NAICS bundling is real. Where a vertical has no code of its own, the table says so in the mapping flag column and scores the parent code as such. We would rather publish an honest parent-code number than a fake precise one.
• The 2022 reference year predates deals closed in 2023 through 2026. Directionally the structure moves slowly, but the most heavily consolidated rows have likely concentrated further since measurement.

The league table: all 49 ranked rows

Ranked by Consolidation Runway Score, computed from the Census SUSB 2022 national file. “500+ emp. share” is the percent of industry employment inside enterprises with 500 or more employees. The mapping flag column states, for every row, whether the vertical maps to its NAICS code exactly or through a parent, shared, or bundled code; the full flag language for each row is in the mapping table that follows.

The same figures drive every detailed profiles below. Establishment counts, total employment, and the receipts columns for every row are in the downloadable dataset at the end of this report.

The NAICS mapping table, with honesty flags

Every vertical in this report is mapped to a NAICS code below, with an explicit flag wherever the mapping is anything less than an exact 6-digit match. Verticals that share one code are ranked as one row, because SUSB cannot split them and neither can we.

Two verticals from our original coverage list were consolidated into parent rows rather than dropped: fire and life safety (a subset of security systems and of mechanical contracting, with no code of its own) and MSSP (a subset of security systems services and IT services). Both are named inside the shared row for NAICS 561621. Tree care is ranked inside the landscaping row for the same reason. Fencing and crane services share the NAICS 238990 parent row. Where the demand for granularity exceeds what the Census publishes, the table says so instead of inventing a split.

The verticals we could not cleanly rank, and what would fix it

A citation-grade table has to be explicit about its edges, so here is the full list of verticals that appear inside parent or shared rows rather than as clean rankings. Fire and life safety inspection has no NAICS code and lives inside security systems services and mechanical contracting. MSSPs live inside the same security services code and inside IT services. Tree care shares the landscaping code. Fencing and crane services share the specialty-trades catch-all. Garage door service shares a code with elevator contractors. Pool service shares a code with chimney sweeps. Med spas share a code with tattoo studios. Dermatology, and every other physician specialty, is invisible below the all-physicians code. Water well drilling sits inside the water and sewer construction code. In each case we ranked the code that exists and said so, because a fake 6-digit split would be indistinguishable from the modeled numbers this report exists to replace.

Two federal datasets could sharpen future editions. The Economic Census publishes firm-level concentration ratios for many industries on a five-year cycle, which would let us pair each CRS with a true top-firm share where the Census releases one. And the Census nonemployer statistics series counts the solo operators this report excludes, which would let us size the full universe of potential targets rather than the employer-firm subset. Both are on the roadmap for the 2027 edition, which will also pick up the first SUSB vintage reflecting the 2023 and 2024 deal cycles.

One thing no dataset will fix: verticals defined by business model rather than by activity. “MSP” describes a contract structure, not an industry, which is why federal data will never split it from project-based IT shops. For those verticals, our deal-level trackers are the measurement instrument, and the league table is the backdrop they sit against.

The 10 most fragmented service industries in America

Each profile below reads the Census structure first, then cross-references what buyers are actually doing in the vertical using our live multiples reports and PE roll-up trackers.

1. Residential remodeling: CRS 97.8 (NAICS 236118)

Remodeling is the most fragmented service industry the Census measures, and it is not close in absolute terms. SUSB counts 132,711 residential remodeling employer firms. The average firm employs 3.49 people. Firms with fewer than 20 employees make up 97.8 percent of the industry. Companies with 500 or more employees hold only 3.7 percent of remodeling employment, the joint-lowest consolidated share in the entire table. The revenue picture matches the headcount picture: sub-20-employee firms still collect 67.4 percent of the industry’s receipts. Total industry receipts ran $142.7 billion in calendar 2022. The small-firm slice alone is roughly a $96 billion pool of revenue sitting inside businesses that average three and a half employees.

Why has nobody consolidated it? Project-based revenue, no recurring contracts, and severe key-person dependence make classic platform math harder than in HVAC or pest control. That is exactly why the vertical appears here as runway rather than as a crowded trade. Buyers who solved the model in restoration and exterior remodeling niches are the early signal to watch, and our restoration and disaster recovery PE tracker follows the closest adjacent consolidation that is already underway. Note the honest caveat both directions: NAICS 236118 also serves as the alternative Census home for property restoration work, so a slice of this row overlaps that adjacent thesis.

2. Flooring contractors: CRS 95.2 (NAICS 238330)

Flooring posts the second-highest score with 17,777 employer firms. Average firm size is 4.83 employees. The sub-20-employee share of firms is 96.1 percent. Large enterprises are nearly absent: the 500-plus class holds 3.7 percent of flooring employment. Receipts per firm average $1.43 million. Small firms still hold 47.5 percent of the industry’s $25.4 billion in 2022 receipts.

Flooring is what roofing looked like before the platforms arrived: a labor-intensive installed trade with local brand loyalty, thin professionalization, and no dominant national residential installer on the contractor side. Consolidation has started, which is why we maintain a dedicated flooring PE roll-up tracker, but the Census structure says the activity so far has not dented the size distribution. For owners, that combination reads one way: early-cycle pricing with a decade of buyer demand behind it.

3. Painting contractors: CRS 93.8 (NAICS 238320)

Painting counts 37,830 employer firms in the SUSB file. The average painting contractor employs 5.23 people. Sub-20-employee firms are 95.6 percent of the industry. The 500-plus employment share is 5.9 percent, most of which traces to a handful of national commercial and franchise-adjacent operators. Receipts per firm average $900,000, the second-lowest of the top ten, which tells you the median target here is genuinely small.

The painting thesis is a labor arbitrage and route-density story rather than a recurring-revenue story, and the franchise systems proved the branding layer works. What has not happened yet is large-scale independent consolidation of the kind mapped across sectors in our PE platforms by sector guide. With 36,000-plus sub-20 firms as inventory, the constraint is integration capacity, not target supply.

4. General auto repair: CRS 93.4 (NAICS 811111)

General auto repair is the largest truly fragmented automotive vertical, with 79,429 employer firms. Average firm size is 4.85 employees. The under-20 share of firms is 97.5 percent, second only to remodeling and self storage among all ranked rows. Employment inside 500-plus firms is 10.5 percent. Small shops still collect 73.2 percent of the industry’s receipts, the highest small-firm revenue share in the table. Total 2022 receipts were $71.7 billion.

The structural contrast with the rest of automotive is the story. Collision repair, ranked 16, already shows a 20.4 percent large-firm employment share after two decades of consolidator activity. Quick lube and tire retail sit far down this table with half their employment already consolidated. General mechanical repair is the piece the consolidators have not cracked, largely because the work is diagnostic rather than standardized. Pricing context for owners is in our auto repair and mechanic shop M&A multiples report, with the broader sector covered in the automotive services multiples report.

5. Pool service: CRS 93.2 (NAICS 561790, parent code)

Honesty flag first: pool cleaning and maintenance has no NAICS code of its own, so this row scores NAICS 561790, Other Services to Buildings and Dwellings, which also houses chimney sweeps, gutter cleaners, and pressure washers. Treat the numbers as the structure of the residential-services grab bag that pool service dominates, not as a pure pool census.

With that caveat: the code contains 17,342 firms. Average firm size is 5.04 employees. The under-20 firm share is 95.8 percent. Employment in 500-plus firms is 8.4 percent. Receipts per firm average $791,000, the smallest average revenue in the top five, consistent with route-based residential service businesses. Recurring weekly service revenue is why buyers keep entering despite the small average check, and our pool service PE roll-up tracker follows the platforms building density metro by metro.

6. Med spas: CRS 91.2 (NAICS 812199, parent code)

Same discipline: med spas have no dedicated NAICS code, so this row scores NAICS 812199, Other Personal Care Services, which bundles med spas with day spas, tanning salons, and tattoo studios. The Census cannot isolate medical aesthetics, and neither can anyone else using federal data, whatever their marketing says.

The parent code counts 26,863 firms. Average firm size is 6.31 employees. Sub-20-employee firms are 92.8 percent of the code. The 500-plus employment share is 6.9 percent, remarkably low for a category with this much investor attention. Receipts per firm average $519,000, the smallest in the entire top ten, which reflects the non-medical businesses diluting the code. The consolidation wave in medical aesthetics is young and pricing is moving fast, which is why our med spa M&A multiples report tracks it as its own lane within healthcare services.

7. Dental: CRS 89.6 (NAICS 621210)

Dental is the table’s best proof that a decade of consolidation headlines can coexist with a barely-dented firm base. SUSB counts 120,488 dental employer firms. Average firm size is 8.56 employees, roughly one practice with a doctor, hygienists, and front office. The under-20 firm share is 94.2 percent. Here is the number that should recalibrate the “DSOs have taken over” narrative: firms with 500 or more employees hold 8.1 percent of dental employment. Small practices still collect 66.0 percent of the industry’s $160.2 billion in receipts.

DSO consolidation is real, and it is concentrated in the mid-size classes that SUSB shows growing between 20 and 500 employees. But the sheer target inventory, more than 113,000 sub-20 practices, means the runway remains long even in the most talked-about healthcare roll-up in America. Our dental and DSO M&A multiples report covers pricing tiers, and the dental DSO PE roll-up tracker follows the active platforms.

8. Roofing contractors: CRS 88.6 (NAICS 238160)

Roofing counts 24,044 employer firms in the 2022 file. Average firm size is 8.53 employees. The under-20 firm share is 90.8 percent. Employment inside 500-plus firms is 7.2 percent, which is strikingly low given how much capital has entered the trade. Receipts per firm average $2.86 million, the highest in the top ten, because storm work and commercial re-roofs produce big revenue per crew. Small firms hold 40.6 percent of the industry’s $68.8 billion in receipts, a lower small-firm revenue share than the verticals above it, meaning the mid-size independent segment is unusually strong in roofing.

Current activity is the densest of any trade on this list: our roofing PE roll-up tracker follows 56 active platforms, and valuation tiers are in the roofing M&A multiples report. For the industry-structure question of how concentrated roofing itself is becoming, and which platforms hold what, The Roofing Brief maintains the definitive roofing industry concentration report, and we defer to their coverage on that angle rather than duplicate it. Our read of the Census side is simple: even with 56 platforms buying, the size distribution says the trade is still in the middle innings, not the late ones.

9. Landscaping and tree care: CRS 88.4 (NAICS 561730, shared code)

Honesty flag: NAICS 561730 covers the whole green industry, landscaping maintenance, design-build, lawn care, and tree services together, so landscaping and tree care are ranked as one row. The Census cannot split a tree crew from a maintenance crew and this table will not pretend to.

The combined code is enormous: 114,842 firms, the third-largest firm count in the table. Average firm size is 6.74 employees. The under-20 firm share is 94.3 percent. Employment inside 500-plus firms is 15.5 percent, mostly the national commercial maintenance companies and the largest tree care employers. Industry receipts ran $118.4 billion in 2022, with small firms holding 48.3 percent of that revenue.

The green industry is arguably the deepest add-on pool in all of home services, with over 108,000 sub-20-employee firms. Buy-side context is in the landscaping M&A multiples report, and the tree-side consolidation is tracked separately in our tree service PE roll-up tracker. For homeowners trying to understand what consolidation means for the people they hire, the consumer-side view of these trades lives at hmndp.org, which covers the same industries from the customer’s chair.

10. Outpatient behavioral health: CRS 88.4 (NAICS 621330)

Scope note before the numbers: this row is NAICS 621330, offices of mental health practitioners other than physicians. It captures therapist and counselor group practices. Facility-based behavioral health, the residential and hospital side under NAICS 622, is a different structure and is deliberately not blended in here.

The office-based segment counts 38,819 firms. Average firm size is 5.64 employees. The under-20 firm share is 94.5 percent. Employment inside 500-plus firms is 18.9 percent, the highest consolidated share in the top ten, driven by the venture-funded and PE-backed group platforms built since 2020. Receipts per firm average $538,000, the economics of small group practice.

Behavioral health is the top-ten vertical where the consolidated share is climbing fastest off a fragmented base, which makes timing the interesting variable rather than inventory. Our behavioral health PE roll-up tracker follows the active buyers, and regulatory risk in the sector is covered in our state AG healthcare PE enforcement tracker.

Ranks 11 through 21: the challenger tier

The next eleven rows all score between 83 and 89, close enough to the top ten that vertical selection inside this tier is more about business quality than about structure. A few observations, row by row, with the Census figures that drive each rank.

11. Optometry, CRS 88.3 (NAICS 621320). Optometry counts 18,708 firms averaging 7.95 employees each. The 500-plus employment share is 12.4 percent, well below dental’s public perception yet slightly above dental’s actual figure. Independent ODs still dominate the firm count at 93.7 percent under 20 employees, and the vision-platform wave is priced in our optometry M&A multiples report.

12. Glass and glazing, CRS 88.0 (NAICS 238150). A sleeper. Only 6,548 firms exist nationally, but the 500-plus employment share is just 3.1 percent, the single lowest consolidated share in the entire table. Receipts per firm average $2.76 million, real commercial revenue for a trade with essentially no national consolidator presence yet.

13. Law firms, CRS 87.8 (NAICS 541110). The largest firm count in the table at 156,583 firms. Non-lawyer ownership rules block conventional PE roll-ups in most states, so the fragmentation persists by regulation rather than by economics. Arizona’s alternative business structure regime and MSO workarounds are the cracks to watch.

14. Crane, rigging, and fencing, CRS 87.4 (NAICS 238990, parent code). The catch-all specialty trades code holds 39,784 firms with a 15.3 percent consolidated share. Parent-code caveat applies in both directions, since the code also contains billboard erectors and paver installers.

15. Septic services, CRS 86.4 (NAICS 562991). A dedicated code and a clean read: 3,826 firms, 93.3 percent of them under 20 employees. The absolute firm count is small, so platforms here run out of in-state targets quickly, a dynamic already visible in our septic PE roll-up tracker.

16. Collision repair, CRS 86.0 (NAICS 811121). The consolidators’ twenty-year head start shows: the 500-plus employment share is 20.4 percent, roughly double general auto repair’s figure. Still, 31,351 firms remain, which keeps the add-on pipeline full for the national platforms.

17. Excavation and site prep, CRS 84.9 (NAICS 238910). Heavy iron raises the entry bar, with receipts per firm averaging $3.68 million across 39,242 firms. The consolidated share is only 9.8 percent, and infrastructure spending gives the tier a demand tailwind, tracked in our excavation PE roll-up tracker.

18. Moving companies, CRS 84.4 (NAICS 484210). Van-line branding long ago organized the industry commercially without consolidating its ownership, leaving 9,083 firms and a 7.7 percent consolidated share.

19. RIA and investment advice, CRS 84.3 (NAICS 523930). The strangest structure in the tier: 97.1 percent of firms are under 20 employees, yet the 500-plus class already holds 35.5 percent of employment. Aggregators consolidated the top fast while the long tail of small advisories keeps growing. Deal pricing is in our RIA and wealth management multiples report.

20. Concrete contractors, CRS 83.7 (NAICS 238110). Structure similar to excavation: 22,440 firms, a 14.0 percent consolidated share, and $3.40 million average receipts per firm.

21. Funeral homes, CRS 83.1 (NAICS 812210). The oldest roll-up story in this report, dating to the 1990s consolidators, yet 10,725 firms persist with 91.2 percent of them under 20 employees. Demographics do the demand forecasting for you.

Ranks 22 through 31: the contested middle

The middle of the table is where consolidation is visibly underway but far from finished, and where the components of the score start disagreeing with each other. Row by row:

22. HVAC and plumbing, CRS 82.9 (NAICS 238220, shared code). The shared code still counts 107,004 firms, a giant add-on pool by any standard. But the 500-plus employment share has reached 18.0 percent, roughly five times the level in flooring or remodeling, which is the statistical footprint of a decade of platform building. Pricing tiers are in our HVAC and plumbing multiples reports, with the whole category rolled up in the home services M&A multiples report.

23. Machine shops, CRS 82.8 (NAICS 332710). An industrial outlier hiding among the trades: 17,130 firms with only an 8.2 percent consolidated employment share. Average firm size is 12.75 employees, small for a capital-equipment business. Reshoring demand meets a deep independent base here, priced in our precision machining multiples report.

24. Insurance agencies, CRS 82.6 (NAICS 524210). The same barbell as RIA: 97.0 percent of the 120,434 firms are under 20 employees, yet the 500-plus class holds 35.4 percent of employment. The national brokers consolidated the top decades ago while the independent agency channel keeps replenishing the bottom, and our insurance agency M&A multiples report tracks what the aggregators pay for the middle.

25. Self storage, CRS 82.6 (NAICS 531130). The most bimodal row in the table, covered in detail below. Firms under 20 employees are 97.8 percent of the count, while 40.2 percent of employment already sits with the REIT-scale operators.

26. Electrical contractors, CRS 81.1 (NAICS 238210). The third-biggest trade by firm count at 79,611 firms. The consolidated share is 21.6 percent, the highest of the big three mechanical trades, pulled up by large commercial and industrial contractors rather than by residential platforms. Receipts per firm average $3.11 million, and pricing tiers for the trade are in our electrical M&A multiples report.

27. Car wash, CRS 80.7 (NAICS 811192). The express-tunnel building boom shows up clearly: 23.9 percent of employment sits in 500-plus firms, and the establishment count runs well ahead of the firm count as chains multiply sites. That said, 15,675 firms remain, most of them single-site operators.

28. Commercial property management, CRS 80.4 (NAICS 531312). The 15,914 nonresidential managers carry a 26.5 percent consolidated share, reflecting the global brokerage-affiliated managers at the top. The independent middle is where the deals happen.

29. Well drilling, CRS 80.4 (NAICS 237110, parent code). Parent-code flag applies, since water well drillers share the code with water and sewer line contractors. The code averages $6.06 million in receipts per firm, heavy-civil economics, with an 11.5 percent consolidated share across 10,602 firms.

30. Pest control, CRS 78.6 (NAICS 561710). The most consolidated route-service trade, covered in detail below. The 35.8 percent large-firm employment share is what two dominant strategics plus decades of tuck-in buying look like in a size distribution.

31. Residential property management and HOA management, CRS 78.3 (NAICS 531311). The code counts 40,091 firms with a 29.2 percent consolidated share. Our own HOA and community association management PE tracker finds the top two national managers hold roughly 11 percent of the professionally managed base, a firm-level concentration figure SUSB cannot produce, which is exactly why the tracker and the league table are designed to be read together.

What the middle of the table says

Three middle-table patterns deserve a paragraph each, because they cut against common assumptions.

HVAC and plumbing are not the most fragmented trades anymore. The shared NAICS 238220 row ranks 22nd with a CRS of 82.9. The trade with the most PE attention is, predictably, no longer the trade with the most untouched structure. The verticals that now outrank it, flooring, painting, and remodeling, are where HVAC’s structure stood a decade ago.

Pest control is the most consolidated route-service trade. It ranks 30th with a CRS of 78.6, far above any other home-service route business in consolidated share. The 12,700-plus small firms that remain are being bought into a market where exit optionality is proven, which supports pricing, and our pest control PE roll-up tracker follows who is paying it.

Self storage shows what a bimodal industry looks like. It ranks 25th with a CRS of 82.6, but the components disagree with each other more than in any other row: 97.8 percent of firms are sub-20-employee operators, while 40.2 percent of employment already sits in 500-plus firms. The REITs consolidated the top while thousands of single-facility owners persist at the bottom. Fragmentation measured by firm count and fragmentation measured by employment are different questions, and self storage is the row that proves you need both.

Ranks 32 through 39: the maturing tier

Between the contested middle and the bottom ten sits a band of industries where consolidation is clearly advanced but not finished. The signature of this tier is divergence between firm counts and employment shares.

32. Accounting and CPA firms, CRS 74.2 (NAICS 541211). The under-20 firm share is 95.3 percent, top-ten fragmentation by that measure alone. But the 500-plus employment share is 48.8 percent, because the national firms employ enormous staffs. PE entered the profession’s mid-market aggressively after 2021, and our CPA and accounting firm multiples report tracks what that has done to pricing.

33. Physical therapy, CRS 73.0 (NAICS 621340, bundled code). The code bundles PT with occupational and speech therapy, so read with that flag. The consolidated share is 40.9 percent, the visible result of the national PT platform era, with remaining independents tracked in our physical therapy roll-up tracker and priced in the PT multiples report.

34. Veterinary, CRS 71.8 (NAICS 541940). The most instructive comparison to dental in the table. Vet shows a 36.0 percent consolidated employment share against dental’s 8.1 percent, despite similar practice economics. Corporate consolidators simply moved faster in animal health, a story our veterinary practice multiples report quantifies at the deal level. Dental owners should study this row: it is a preview of their own industry a decade further along the same road.

35. Restoration and remediation, CRS 71.5 (NAICS 562910, bundled code). The bundled code mixes property restoration with environmental remediation, so the 31.8 percent consolidated share overstates concentration in the disaster-response segment specifically. Franchise systems complicate the firm counts here too, since franchisees appear as independent firms.

36. Janitorial, CRS 71.3 (NAICS 561720). Big everywhere: 62,970 firms, over a million employees, and a 43.1 percent consolidated share. The national facility-services companies took the commercial contracts decades ago, leaving route-scale residential and small-commercial cleaners as the fragmented remainder.

37. Tool and die, CRS 70.7 (NAICS 333514). The smallest firm count in the report at 1,950 firms. Scarcity, an aging owner base, and reshoring demand make this a supply-constrained market, covered in our tool and die multiples report.

38. Industrial distribution, CRS 70.5 (NAICS 423840). Receipts per firm average $16.3 million, the third-highest revenue density in the table behind staffing and structural metal fabrication. Distribution consolidates through working-capital advantages rather than labor arbitrage, and the remaining 5,779 independents are analyzed in our industrial distribution multiples report.

39. Tire dealers, CRS 70.3 (NAICS 441320, retail code). Flag noted: this is a retail-trade code that includes the service bays attached to tire stores. The 500-plus employment share is 51.3 percent, the footprint of national chains and manufacturer-owned stores, with the independent remainder priced in our tire service multiples report. Machine shops, one aisle over in the industrial economy, score 12.5 points higher, a gap worth remembering when someone pitches “automotive aftermarket” as one homogeneous thesis.

The 10 verticals with the least consolidation runway

These are ranks 40 through 49. None of them are bad industries. They are industries where the fragmentation pitch is stale, where platform math depends on share-shift or capability plays rather than abundant cheap add-ons.

40. Garage door services, CRS 70.1 (NAICS 238290, parent code). The parent code, Other Building Equipment Contractors, shows a 35.6 percent large-firm employment share, though elevator contractors inside the same code inflate that figure beyond what pure garage door structure would show. The garage door consolidation itself is well advanced, as our garage doors PE roll-up tracker documents.

41. Quick lube, CRS 69.2 (NAICS 811191). Only 4,269 firms remain, and 51.2 percent of employment sits in 500-plus companies. Franchise systems and two large strategics did the consolidating years ago. Remaining independents trade on real estate and unit density, covered in our quick lube M&A multiples report.

42. Dermatology, CRS 68.2 (NAICS 621111, parent code, heavy flag). This row scores all physician offices because dermatology has no SUSB code of its own, so read it as “physician practice structure,” not as dermatology precisely. The parent shows a 48.8 percent large-firm employment share, the health-system employment wave in one number. Specialty-level deal data lives in our dermatology M&A multiples report instead.

43. MSP and IT services, CRS 67.3 (NAICS 541512, parent code). The code counts a healthy 49,252 firms, but 58.1 percent of employment already sits in 500-plus companies, because the same code houses the global consulting integrators alongside 10-person MSPs. The MSP sub-segment is more fragmented than the code average, a nuance the MSP multiples report and the broader IT managed services report handle at deal level.

44. Security integration, MSSP, and fire and life safety, CRS 66.4 (NAICS 561621, shared code). A 49.7 percent large-firm employment share reflects the national alarm and monitoring giants. The integrator middle market is where deals actually happen, and MSSP pricing runs richer than the code’s structure would suggest.

45. IT facilities management, CRS 64.4 (NAICS 541513). Just 4,950 firms, with 53.1 percent of employment consolidated. Outsourced IT operations went corporate long ago.

46. Structural metal fabrication, CRS 59.7 (NAICS 332312). Average firm size is 34.7 employees, the largest of any trade in the table, because fabrication requires shops, cranes, and steel inventory. Only 65.5 percent of firms are under 20 employees, the second-lowest small-firm share ranked. Capital intensity did the consolidating before PE arrived. Deal context is in our metal fabrication multiples report, with the adjacent and more fragmented machine shop segment ranked 23rd, 23 spots higher.

47. Waste hauling, CRS 59.6 (NAICS 562111). The 500-plus employment share is 58.6 percent, the footprint of the two national publics plus the large regionals. The remaining 6,993 haulers are genuinely scarce assets, which is why they trade well, as our waste hauling PE roll-up tracker shows. Low runway score, strong seller’s market: the two facts are causally linked.

48. Home health, CRS 51.6 (NAICS 621610). Average firm size is 55.6 employees, and only 65.3 percent of firms are under 20 employees, the second-lowest in the table. Payer dynamics forced scale early. The buyers tracked in our home health PE roll-up tracker are executing a reimbursement and density thesis, not a fragmentation thesis, and sellers should price accordingly.

49. Temporary staffing, CRS 28.2 (NAICS 561320). The bottom of the table by 23 points. The average staffing firm employs 249 people, an artifact of temps being counted on the staffing firm’s payroll. Employment inside 500-plus firms is 81.8 percent. Independent boutiques get bought for niche, client book, or geography, never for “fragmentation,” and our staffing valuation multiples report prices exactly those angles.

Five patterns that hold across the whole table

Zoom out from the individual rows and the 49 industries organize themselves into a clear hierarchy of sectors. The 49 ranked codes together contain 1,852,808 employer firms. They employ 23.5 million people. Their combined 2022 receipts were $4.67 trillion. Within that universe, five structural patterns repeat.

Construction trades are the most fragmented sector in the American economy. The twelve construction-trade rows in this table post a median Consolidation Runway Score of 86.2. Their average 500-plus employment share is just 12.5 percent, half or a third of every other sector group. Whatever the reason, licensing friction, geographic loyalty, or the stubbornness of owner-operators, the trades have resisted scale longer than any comparable part of the service economy, and the top of this league table is dominated by them.

Route-based home services consolidate faster than project-based ones. The route businesses in this table, landscaping through janitorial, carry a mean consolidated share of 25.2 percent, roughly double the construction-trade average. Recurring visits produce recurring revenue, and recurring revenue attracts platforms. The corollary is that the remaining project-based trades, remodeling, flooring, painting, and glass, are where the structure is most untouched, precisely because their revenue is hardest to underwrite.

Healthcare fragmentation depends entirely on the payer. The eight healthcare rows span from behavioral health at a CRS of 88.4 down to home health at 51.6. The dividing line is reimbursement complexity: cash-pay and simple-billing specialties like dental, optometry, and med spas stay fragmented, while Medicare-dependent segments like home health were forced to scale a generation early. Any healthcare roll-up thesis should start by asking which side of that line the specialty sits on.

Professional and financial services show barbell structures. The seven professional and financial rows carry a mean consolidated share of 47.3 percent, the highest of any sector group, yet several of them also post small-firm shares above 95 percent. Accounting, insurance, and RIA all exhibit the same shape: giants at the top, tens of thousands of tiny practices at the bottom, and a thinning middle. Roll-ups in these industries are middle-market manufacturing operations, assembling mid-size firms out of small ones faster than the giants can absorb them.

Scarcity and runway are opposite ends of the same trade. Industries with low scores, waste hauling, home health, tool and die, tend to have few remaining independents, which makes each one more valuable. Industries with high scores have abundant targets and therefore competitive pricing pressure on the sell side. Neither end is “better.” They are different investment products: the top of the table sells inventory, the bottom sells scarcity, and the mispriced deals live where the market applies the wrong mental model to the row in question.

The sector medians are worth restating as a single citable ladder. Construction trades: 86.2. Route home services: 82.5. Automotive services: 80.7. Healthcare: 80.7. Professional and financial services: 74.2. Industrial and manufacturing services: 70.6. All medians are computed across the ranked rows in each group from the same SUSB 2022 source file as the rest of this report.

What the score means if you own a business in these industries

Sellers should read the table backwards. A high Consolidation Runway Score means buyers have many alternatives to acquiring you, so premium pricing has to be earned with recurring revenue, management depth, or density that competitors lack. A low score means you are scarce inventory. The 6,993 remaining independent waste haulers face a fundamentally friendlier negotiation than the 132,711 remodelers, because every passing year removes more of the hauler’s competition for buyer attention while remodeling’s target pool barely shrinks.

Timing logic follows the same curve. Verticals in the challenger tier and above are early enough that platform entry keeps expanding the buyer pool each year. Verticals in the maturing tier tend to see buyer lists consolidate into a handful of well-capitalized platforms, which concentrates negotiating power on the buy side even as headline multiples stay firm. The mechanics of how those buyers behave at each stage are covered in our guide to lower middle market private equity.

One warning applies everywhere: the CRS describes your industry, not your company. A 4-employee firm in the most fragmented vertical in America is still, statistically, the modal business in this dataset, and modal businesses transact at modest prices. The score tells you when the wave is coming through your trade. What you get paid when it arrives depends on what you built before it did.

How to use the league table with our deal data

The league table measures structure. It cannot see ownership, and it lags live deal flow by design, since the Census publishes on a multi-year cycle. So pair each row with two live layers: the sector’s M&A multiples report for pricing, and the sector’s PE roll-up tracker for buyer activity, all indexed in the PE platforms by sector guide. A useful mental model: the CRS tells you how much inventory is left, the tracker tells you how many buyers are competing for it, and the multiple tells you what that ratio currently costs. High CRS with a short tracker list, as in flooring or painting, is the early-cycle quadrant. Low CRS with a long tracker list, as in home health, is the late-cycle quadrant. Roofing, with a high CRS and a 56-platform tracker, is the rare vertical that is somehow still in both.

We also maintain a narrative companion to this table covering fragmented industries ripe for consolidation and a directory of the most active PE platforms for readers who want names rather than distributions.

Download the dataset

The full 49-row dataset behind this report is available as a CSV, including the columns the league table above omits for readability: establishment counts, total employment, employment inside the under-500 class, receipts per firm, the sub-20-employee receipts share, and each row’s A, B, and C components. Every figure traces to the Census SUSB 2022 national file, and the CSV is licensed for reuse with attribution to CT Acquisitions.

Download the Industry Fragmentation League Table 2026 dataset (CSV, 49 rows)

Related research

This league table is one of five structural reports we published together, each built on a different federal dataset. Read them as a set:

• The Succession Cliff Report 2026: how many owners in each vertical are approaching retirement without a buyer.
• The Business Churn Report 2026: formation and closure rates by industry, the flow behind this report’s stock.
• SBA Loan Default Rates by Industry 2026: which of these verticals lenders actually trust, and which they price for failure.
• The Skilled Trades Wage Atlas 2026: the labor-cost side of every trade ranked above.
• Private Equity Platforms by Sector 2026: the buyer directory that pairs with every row in this table.

For pricing in a specific vertical, the multiples fleet covers most of the table: home services, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, auto repair, automotive services, healthcare services, dental and DSO, med spa, optometry, physical therapy, veterinary, dermatology, CPA and accounting, RIA and wealth management, insurance agencies, MSP, IT managed services, MSSP, metal fabrication, precision machining, industrial distribution, tire service, quick lube, tool and die, and staffing.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Consolidation Runway Score?

A 0-to-100 index of how structurally fragmented a service industry is, computed from Census SUSB firm-size data. It weights the share of firms under 20 employees at 40 percent, the share of employment outside 500-plus-employee firms at 35 percent, and inverted log average firm size at 25 percent. Higher scores mean more consolidation runway.

What data is the league table built from?

Exclusively from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses, 2022 reference year, national NAICS by enterprise employment size file. No broker estimates, no trade association surveys, no modeled figures.

Why does a 2026 report use 2022 data?

Because 2022 is the most recent SUSB vintage published, and it is also an Economic Census year, so it carries receipts data that adjacent years lack. Industry size structure moves slowly, but readers should assume the most active roll-up verticals have concentrated somewhat further since measurement.

Why do HVAC and plumbing share one row?

NAICS 238220 covers plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors as a single code, and the Census does not publish a split. Any source quoting separate HVAC and plumbing firm counts from federal data is allocating, not measuring. We rank the shared code and label it as shared.

How is the CRS different from HHI or a top-4 concentration ratio?

HHI and CR4 need firm-level market shares, which SUSB does not publish. The CRS is a size-distribution proxy: it captures how much of an industry lives in small firms rather than which specific companies dominate. For firm-level concentration in specific verticals, see our sector trackers, such as the HOA management tracker, which measure named-company share directly.

Which service industry is the most fragmented in America?

Residential remodeling, NAICS 236118, with a CRS of 97.8. The row combines 132,711 firms with an average size of 3.49 employees. Its large-firm employment share is 3.7 percent, among the most fragmented readings in the table on every component.

Which vertical has the least consolidation runway?

Temporary staffing, NAICS 561320, at a CRS of 28.2. Its structure is dominated by large enterprises, partly as a payroll-accounting artifact of the staffing model and partly from decades of genuine consolidation.

Does a high score automatically make a good roll-up target?

No. Fragmentation is inventory, not economics. Remodeling scores highest partly because project revenue and key-person risk have defeated consolidators so far. The strongest theses pair a high CRS with recurring revenue, route density, or regulatory moats, which is a judgment layer this table deliberately leaves to the reader.

Why are receipts shown but not included in the score?

SUSB publishes receipts only for years ending in 2 or 7, tied to the Economic Census. A score built on receipts could not be recomputed annually, so revenue figures are provided as context and the score uses employment-based components only.

Can I cite this table?

Yes, with attribution to CT Acquisitions and the underlying Census SUSB 2022 file. Every figure is reproducible from the public source data using the formula documented in the methodology section.

Disclaimer

This report is published for informational and research purposes only. It is not investment advice, legal advice, tax advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any business or security. The Consolidation Runway Score is a structural index built from public Census data; it does not predict returns, valuations, or deal outcomes in any specific transaction. Readers should verify all figures against the linked source files and consult qualified advisers before acting on anything in this report. CT Acquisitions and its affiliates may participate in transactions in the industries discussed.

Build notes

Data vintage: SUSB 2022 annual, national file, downloaded from census.gov on July 16, 2026. All 49 ranked rows computed with the documented CRS formula; no suppressed cells affected the three inputs used. Six industries publish collapsed upper size classes in the detailed file, which does not affect the “under 20,” “under 500,” or total rows this score uses. Copy audit: zero em dashes, zero en dashes, and zero hits against the CT voice-gate exclusion set. Every numeric claim in this report carries a named source, either the Census SUSB 2022 file or a linked CT Acquisitions tracker page.