San Juan County, WA has 1.9× more cleaning and janitorial businesses per resident than the national average.
San Juan County, WA already has 10 with employees and 103 without — 113 janitorial and cleaning services in total, 60.7 per 10,000 residents against 32.7 nationally. That's 1.9× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In San Juan County
- 10
- Per 10k residents
- 60.7
- National rate
- 32.7
- Ratio
- 1.9× more than average
Population 18,605. Ranked 32 of 32 Washington counties with enough cleaning services 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.
San Juan County, WA has 12 fewer janitorial and cleaning services than in 2017 — 125 then, 113 now, down 10%. Nationally the count grew 42% over the same years.
San Juan 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 12 could be 12 closures — or 20 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 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 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 San Juan 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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