How many roofing contractors are there by state? A 2026 data study

How many roofing contractor businesses the US has

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) survey counts business establishments by industry code every year. NAICS 238160, "Roofing Contractors," covers firms primarily engaged in installing, repairing and replacing roofs. The 2023 state-level file lists 25,519 such establishments across the 50 states and DC, employing 215,242 people and paying $15.19 billion in total annual payroll.

That is up from 24,532 establishments and 204,998 employees in the 2022 file, a 4.0% rise in establishments and a 5.0% rise in employment in one year. Total annual payroll rose faster still, 14.2% in the same period, which points to higher pay or pricier jobs per worker rather than the trade simply adding headcount.

Where roofing contractors cluster per capita

Raw counts mostly track population, so the more useful comparison is establishments per 100,000 residents. By that measure the leader is Colorado, with 15.7 roofing contractor establishments per 100,000 residents, more than double the national rate of 7.6. Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Montana round out the top five, all well above the national average.

Colorado's Front Range is widely known in the industry for severe, recurring hailstorms that trigger large waves of insurance-driven reroofing work each summer, which plausibly supports more local roofing businesses per resident than the national pattern would predict; we have not found a public figure sizing that demand specifically, so treat this as context, not a cited number. At the other end, New York, New Jersey, Mississippi and Nevada sit near 4 per 100,000, and the District of Columbia, with almost no single-family housing stock, is lowest at 0.9.

Most roofing businesses are small — except in Florida

CBP breaks establishment counts down by employment size class. Nationally, 20,487 of the 25,519 roofing contractor establishments, or 80.3%, have fewer than 10 people on staff, so this is a trade dominated by small, owner-operated crews almost everywhere.

Florida is the clear exception among the largest states: only 67.9% of its roofing establishments have fewer than 10 employees, versus 81.3% in California and 86.5% in Texas. Dividing each state's reported employment by its establishment count gives roughly 13.6 employees per establishment in Florida, compared with about 8.2 in California and 6.5 in Texas. A storm-exposed state with frequent large-scale, insurance-driven reroofing work after hurricanes is a plausible setting for bigger crews and regional firms to out-compete the smallest shops, though CBP does not report the cause directly.

What the payroll data shows

CBP also reports total annual payroll by industry. Dividing the 2023 national payroll ($15.19 billion) by the reported employment count (215,242) gives an average of about $70,550 per employee for the year, up from about $64,900 in 2022. Treat this as a rough, establishment-level figure, not a published wage rate: it mixes field roofers with office, sales and ownership payroll, and divides a full-year payroll figure by a single reference-week employment count.

We would normally cross-check this against the Bureau of Labor Statistics' occupational wage data for the roofer occupation specifically (SOC 47-2181), which reports a cleaner per-worker wage. bls.gov returned a 403 to every request this run, so that comparison is not in this post; if you need an occupational wage rather than an industry-payroll average, pull OEWS data for SOC 47-2181 directly from BLS.

What this means for staffing and after-storm calls

A trade where four in five businesses run under 10 employees, and where a hailstorm or hurricane can spike call volume for weeks at a time, is a trade where the owner or one or two office staff absorb most of the phone load. That makes a missed call during a storm surge expensive in a very direct way: competitors with an open line pick up the leads a small crew on a roof cannot answer.

1. 1

   Pull your own missed-call count before assuming a number

   Check your phone provider's call log for a full month, and separately for your last storm-response week, and count calls that went to voicemail or rang out. State and vendor averages are a poor substitute for your own number.

2. 2

   Separate storm-driven new leads from existing-job calls

   A homeowner calling about fresh hail or wind damage usually calls the next roofer on their list if nobody answers. An existing customer calling about a scheduled job is less likely to walk. Route and measure them differently.

3. 3

   Decide what a covered call should produce

   For a new storm lead, the useful outcome is a booked inspection or a captured name, number, address and damage description, not just a message taken.

4. 4

   Price the gap before buying coverage

   Multiply your estimated missed new-customer calls per month, weighted toward storm season, by your close rate and average job value to see what the gap is actually worth, then weigh that against the cost of an answering service or an AI receptionist like Lead Friendly's.

Methodology

• Establishment, employment and payroll counts: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns, 2023 state-level file (cbp23st.zip) and national file (cbp23us.zip), filtered to NAICS 238160, legal form of organization "total." 2022 comparison figures come from the equivalent 2022 files (cbp22st.zip, cbp22us.zip).
• Small-business share: establishments in CBP's "<5 employees" and "5 to 9 employees" size classes, summed and divided by total establishments, by state and nationally.
• Per-100,000 rate: state establishment count divided by the Census Bureau's Vintage 2023 state population estimate (POPESTIMATE2023), multiplied by 100,000.
• Average employees per establishment (California, Texas, Florida): state employment divided by state establishment count, both from the 2023 state CBP file.
• Average annual pay: national annual payroll (in dollars) divided by national employment, both from the 2023 national CBP file; 2022 figure computed the same way from the 2022 national file. This is an establishment-payroll average, not a published occupational wage.