Clay County, MO has 1.2× more moving companies with employees per resident than the national average.
Clay County, MO already has 8 household and office moving companies with employees — 0.3 per 10,000 residents, against 0.3 nationally. That's 1.2× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns 2023).
- In Clay County
- 8
- Per 10k residents
- 0.3
- National rate
- 0.3
- Ratio
- 1.2× more than average
Population 260,150. Ranked 4 of 9 Missouri counties with enough moving services data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns ↗Clay County, MO has 2 more household and office moving companies with employees than in 2017 — 6 then, 8 now, up 33%. Nationally the count grew 15% 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 2 could be 2 new businesses — or 10 openings and 8 closures. It also can't see solo operators without employees, in any year.
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 484210 covers used-household-and-office-goods moving: local movers and long-distance van lines carrying furniture and belongings.
The blind spot: The code counts companies that own trucks and carry goods. Moving labor — supplying the people who load a truck the customer already rented — is a different business, and this number does not isolate it.
County Business Patterns counts establishments with paid employees. A solo operator with no payroll — the most likely competitor for most of these businesses — is invisible to it, in every county, including this one.
There are more of these per resident here than in the country at large. That is a genuine argument against starting one in Clay County without something specific that the 8already 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 8 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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