Ouray County, CO has 1.9× more landscaping and lawn-care businesses per resident than the national average.
Ouray County, CO already has 10 with employees and 8 without — 18 landscaping and lawn-care services in total, 34.7 per 10,000 residents against 18.2 nationally. That's 1.9× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Ouray County
- 10
- Per 10k residents
- 34.7
- National rate
- 18.2
- Ratio
- 1.9× more than average
Population 5,185. Ranked 35 of 39 Colorado counties with enough landscaping & lawn care data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns ↗Ouray County, CO has 5 more landscaping and lawn-care services with employees than in 2017 — 5 then, 10 now, up 100%. 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 rise of 5 could be 5 new businesses — or 13 openings and 8 closures. 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.
There are more of these per resident here than in the country at large. That is a genuine argument against starting one in Ouray County without something specific that the 10already 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 10 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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