Cocke County, TN has 2.1× more cleaning and janitorial businesses per resident than the national average.
Cocke County, TN already has 5 with employees and 255 without — 260 janitorial and cleaning services in total, 69.8 per 10,000 residents against 32.7 nationally. That's 2.1× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Cocke County
- 5
- Per 10k residents
- 69.8
- National rate
- 32.7
- Ratio
- 2.1× more than average
Population 37,272. Ranked 53 of 54 Tennessee 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.
Cocke County, TN has 48 more janitorial and cleaning services than in 2017 — 212 then, 260 now, up 23%. Nationally the count grew 42% 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 48 could be 48 new businesses — or 56 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 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 is dominated by commercial janitorial contractors cleaning offices on contract, which is a different business from cleaning houses. A high count can mean the county has plenty of office cleaners and very few residential ones.
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 Cocke County without something specific that the 5already 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 5 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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