Codington County, SD has 1.3× more painting and staining contractors with employees per resident than the national average.
Codington County, SD already has 4 painting and wall-covering contractors with employees — 1.4 per 10,000 residents, against 1.1 nationally. That's 1.3× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns 2023).
- In Codington County
- 4
- Per 10k residents
- 1.4
- National rate
- 1.1
- Ratio
- 1.3× more than average
Population 28,952. Ranked 2 of 7 South Dakota counties with enough painting & staining data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns ↗Codington County, SD had 4 painting and wall-covering contractors with employees in 2017 and 4 in 2023 — little changed. Nationally the count grew 9% over the same years.
What this doesn't tell you: Census counts how many exist each year, not how many opened or closed. A count that barely moves can still hide plenty of churn underneath it. 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 238320 covers painting and wall-covering contractors: interior and exterior painting, staining and paper hanging.
The blind spot: Most of this code is interior and whole-house painting. Deck and fence staining is a narrow slice of it, so the count says much less about that specific work than the headline suggests.
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 Codington County without something specific that the 4already 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 4 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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