Durham County, NC has 1.3× more cleaning and janitorial businesses with employees per resident than the national average.
Durham County, NC already has 89 janitorial and cleaning services with employees — 2.6 per 10,000 residents, against 2.0 nationally. That's 1.3× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns 2023).
- In Durham County
- 89
- Per 10k residents
- 2.6
- National rate
- 2.0
- Ratio
- 1.3× more than average
Population 337,238. Ranked 61 of 73 North Carolina counties with enough cleaning services data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns ↗Durham County, NC has 33 fewer janitorial and cleaning services with employees than in 2017 — 122 then, 89 now, down 27%. Nationally the count grew 14% over the same years.
Durham 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 33 could be 33 closures — or 41 closures and 8 openings. 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 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 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 Durham County without something specific that the 89already 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 89 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
Get the county numbers for your town, free.