Swain County, NC has 2.9× more cleaning and janitorial businesses per resident than the national average.
Swain County, NC already has 3 with employees and 128 without — 131 janitorial and cleaning services in total, 94.1 per 10,000 residents against 32.7 nationally. That's 2.9× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
Swain County, NC already has plenty of these. There is no shortfall to measure, so there is no figure to print.
Businesses per 10,000 residents · national rate = 100% · axis 0–200%
This column is off the top of the axis. Swain County, NC has 2.9× more than the national rate for this category, which is past where this plot stops drawing.
The shaded band is the range Scoutway treats as ordinary. A county inside it is average, and the difference from the national rate is not an argument in either direction.
US Census County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023 · NAICS 561720. This counts how many of these businesses there are — not how many people want one. Ask around before you spend anything.
- In Swain County
- 131
- Per 10k residents
- 94.1
- National rate
- 32.7
- Ratio
- 2.9× more than average
Population 13,923. Ranked 73 of 74 North Carolina 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.
No Census figure for 2022. The dashed span is a break in the data, not a measured path.
Swain County, NC has 13 more janitorial and cleaning services than in 2020 — 118 then, 131 now, up 11%. Nationally the count grew 13% 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 13 could be 13 new businesses — or 21 openings and 8 closures. A year Census suppressed for this county is left out rather than counted as zero.
Series runs 2020–2023. 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 cannot tell a solo house cleaner from a commercial janitorial contractor cleaning offices on contract — they are one industry to Census. Most of the count is sole proprietors, but it still can't tell you whether a county's cleaners do homes or offices, so a high count doesn't mean residential demand is covered.
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 Swain County without something specific that the 131already 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 131 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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