Humboldt County, CA has 1.5× more landscaping and lawn-care businesses per resident than the national average.
Humboldt County, CA already has 31 with employees and 345 without — 376 landscaping and lawn-care services in total, 28.1 per 10,000 residents against 18.2 nationally. That's 1.5× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Humboldt County
- 31
- Per 10k residents
- 28.1
- National rate
- 18.2
- Ratio
- 1.5× more than average
Population 134,009. Ranked 50 of 53 California counties with enough landscaping & lawn care 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.
Humboldt County, CA has 49 fewer landscaping and lawn-care services than in 2017 — 425 then, 376 now, down 12%. Nationally the count grew 32% over the same years.
Humboldt 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 49 could be 49 closures — or 57 closures and 8 openings. 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 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 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 Humboldt County without something specific that the 31already 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 31 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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