We recently performed some basic county-by-county analysis of the contracting industry in California by appending our own data on licensed contractors in the State of California with US Census Data. Overall, there are 192,299 licensed contractors in the State of California. On average, a county in California has .0074 licensed contractors per capita (or approximately 162 people for every one licensed contractor) and .018 licensed contractors per owner occupied housing unit (60 units per contractor).
Overall, smaller counties (between 100k and 500k people) tended to have more licensed contractors per capita. Our current theory to explain this phenomenon is that smaller counties tend to have licensed contractors with fewer employees while larger counties (i.e. Los Angeles county) tend to have licensed contractors with more employees, which allows them to serve a greater population.
Of major counties in California (population of over 1m), Contra Costa County had the most licensed contractors per capita (.0064), followed closely by San Diego County (.0061) and Orange County (.0059) while Los Angeles County had the fewest contractors per capita (.004).
Additionally, we analyzed licensed contractors per owner-occupied housing unit and found that Orange County had the greatest number of contractors per owner-occupied housing unit in California (.017) while San Francisco County had the fewest licensed contractors per owner-occupied housing unit.
Interestingly, we were unable to detect any strong correlation between contractors per capita and median household income.
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