Albany County, NY has 1.5× fewer landscaping and lawn-care businesses per resident than the national average.
Albany County, NY has 118 with employees and 264 without — 382 landscaping and lawn-care services in total, 12.0 per 10,000 residents against a national rate of 18.2. That's 1.5× fewer than average (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Albany County
- 118
- Per 10k residents
- 12.0
- National rate
- 18.2
- Ratio
- 1.5× fewer than average
Population 318,000. Ranked 9 of 62 New York counties with enough landscaping & lawn care data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Sources: US Census County Business Patterns ↗ (businesses with employees) and Nonemployer Statistics ↗ (sole proprietors). Every figure here is the two added together.
Albany County, NY has 92 more landscaping and lawn-care services than in 2017 — 290 then, 382 now, up 32%. Nationally the count grew 32% over the same years.
What this doesn't tell you: Census counts how many exist each year, not how many opened or closed. A rise of 92 could be 92 new businesses — or 100 openings and 8 closures. A year Census suppressed for this county is left out rather than counted as zero.
Series runs 2017–2023. Earlier vintages exist but are not comparable: Census changed which small counties it publishes after 2016, so including them would show counties losing an industry that never left.
Census code 561730 covers landscaping services: lawn maintenance and mowing, planting, tree and shrub work, and landscape design and installation.
The blind spot: The code mixes large landscape-installation firms in with routine mowing. A county can have several big design-and-build landscapers and still be short of anyone who will simply cut a lawn every two weeks.
What this doesn't tell you: A low count can mean an opening — or that there's less local demand for it. This counts how many businesses exist, including sole proprietors, but not how many customers want one. Treat it as a lead to check, not a verdict.
County Business Patterns counts only establishments with paid employees, which is why this page adds Nonemployer Statistics — the sole operators with no payroll, who are the majority in most of these trades. Both are counted above, and both are on census.gov if you want to check them.
Fewer of these per resident than the country average is a reason to look, not a reason to start. The two explanations the data cannot separate are “nobody has served this yet” and “there is less to serve here” — a county with few pool services may simply have few pools. The next step is not a business plan, it is ten phone calls to people in Albany County who would pay for it.
Census counts these as one industry, so the 118 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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