Shelby County, TN has 2.1× more landscaping and lawn-care businesses per resident than the national average.
Shelby County, TN already has 200 with employees and 3,377 without — 3,577 landscaping and lawn-care services in total, 39.1 per 10,000 residents against 18.2 nationally. That's 2.1× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Shelby County
- 200
- Per 10k residents
- 39.1
- National rate
- 18.2
- Ratio
- 2.1× more than average
Population 913,909. Ranked 72 of 74 Tennessee 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.
Shelby County, TN has 893 more landscaping and lawn-care services than in 2017 — 2,684 then, 3,577 now, up 33%. Nationally the count grew 32% 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 893 could be 893 new businesses — or 901 openings and 8 closures. 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 Shelby County without something specific that the 200already 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 200 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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