Hamlin County, SD has about as many landscaping and lawn-care businesses per resident as the national average.
Hamlin County, SD has 4 with employees and 7 without — 11 landscaping and lawn-care services in total, 17.1 per 10,000 residents, about the national rate of 18.2 (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Hamlin County
- 4
- Per 10k residents
- 17.1
- National rate
- 18.2
- Ratio
- About the national rate
Population 6,450. Ranked 11 of 25 South Dakota counties with enough landscaping & lawn care data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns ↗Hamlin County, SD had 4 landscaping and lawn-care services with employees in 2017 and 4 in 2023 — little changed. Nationally the count grew 16% 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 561730 covers landscaping services: lawn maintenance and mowing, planting, tree and shrub work, and landscape design and installation.
The blind spot: The code mixes large landscape-installation firms in with routine mowing. A county can have several big design-and-build landscapers and still be short of anyone who will simply cut a lawn every two weeks.
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.
Hamlin County sits close to the national rate for this category, which means this number is not an argument in either direction. Supply here looks ordinary. If you want to start this business, the case has to come from something this measurement cannot see — pricing, service quality, or a neighbourhood nobody covers.
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.
Get the county numbers for your town, free.