Bell County, KY has 1.4× more cleaning and janitorial businesses per resident than the national average.
Bell County, KY already has 4 with employees and 104 without — 108 janitorial and cleaning services in total, 46.5 per 10,000 residents against 32.7 nationally. That's 1.4× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
Bell County, KY already has plenty of these. There is no shortfall to measure, so there is no figure to print.
Businesses per 10,000 residents · national rate = 100% · axis 0–200%
The shaded band is the range Scoutway treats as ordinary. A county inside it is average, and the difference from the national rate is not an argument in either direction.
US Census County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023 · NAICS 561720. This counts how many of these businesses there are — not how many people want one. Ask around before you spend anything.
- In Bell County
- 108
- Per 10k residents
- 46.5
- National rate
- 32.7
- Ratio
- 1.4× more than average
Population 23,208. Ranked 42 of 42 Kentucky counties with enough cleaning services 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.
Bell County, KY has 65 fewer janitorial and cleaning services than in 2017 — 173 then, 108 now, down 38%. Nationally the count grew 42% over the same years.
Bell County moved against the national direction over these years. That is the part worth asking about locally — the data says it happened, not why.
What this doesn't tell you: Census counts how many exist each year, not how many opened or closed. A drop of 65 could be 65 closures — or 73 closures and 8 openings. 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 561720 covers janitorial and cleaning services — everything from commercial office-cleaning contractors to residential house-cleaning companies, counted as one industry.
The blind spot: This code cannot tell a solo house cleaner from a commercial janitorial contractor cleaning offices on contract — they are one industry to Census. Most of the count is sole proprietors, but it still can't tell you whether a county's cleaners do homes or offices, so a high count doesn't mean residential demand is covered.
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.
There are more of these per resident here than in the country at large. That is a genuine argument against starting one in Bell County without something specific that the 108already operating do not have. It is not fatal — a crowded category can still have a bad-service niche — but “there is room” is not the argument available to you here, and any tool that tells you otherwise is guessing.
Census counts these as one industry, so the 108 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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