The Home Improvement Opportunity Gap

Owners are told to expand where the growth is. But growth attracts contractors faster than it builds old houses, and old houses are where remodeling and repair work lives. This index divides each metro's pre-1980 owner-occupied homes by its contractor establishments (employer firms plus sole proprietors, which most rankings cannot see) to show where the work is concentrated relative to the businesses competing for it.

The extremes: fifty homes per contractor, or three

The divide: old-housing metros vs boom metros

The pattern is regional, and it is the opposite of the conventional advice. Northeast and Midwest metros, with decades of housing stock and a trades base that has grown slowly, sit at the top. The booming South sits at the bottom: its contractor base has grown even faster than its housing has aged. A handful of expensive Western metros (San Jose, San Francisco, Honolulu) sit high too: old stock and comparatively thin contractor supply, with very high home values.

Does market size predict opportunity? No, and that is the point

Choosing a market by population, or by growth headlines, is choosing on variables that carry no information about how contested the work is. (Beyond the top 100, the tilt actually runs weakly against size: across all 924 metro and micro areas, smaller markets skew slightly higher on homes per contractor, rank correlation −0.14.)

Two different kinds of high-opportunity metro

The metros at the top of this index are not one story. Two very different profiles land there, and they imply different businesses:

We report these two profiles as observations from the data. Why coastal contractor supply is thin relative to stock is a question this dataset cannot answer, so we do not speculate.

All 100 metros, by tier

Click a column header to sort. "Homes per contractor" = pre-1980 owner-occupied homes per contractor establishment, ± the 90% interval.

How we measured this

Population

The 100 largest US metropolitan areas by population, excluding San Juan, Puerto Rico, for which comparable establishment data is not published.

What we count as demand

Owner-occupied homes built before 1980, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (2020 to 2024 five year estimates, table B25036). Older homes need more work, and owner-occupied homes are the ones whose owners pay for it. We use pre-1980 rather than "40 years and older" because the survey reports year built in decade buckets and a 40-year cutoff falls inside one of them.

What we count as supply

Contractor establishments in NAICS 238, specialty trade contractors: employer firms from County Business Patterns plus sole proprietors from Nonemployer Statistics, both 2023. Sole proprietors are about three quarters of the field, so any measure that leaves them out describes a different market.

The metric

Pre-1980 owner-occupied homes divided by contractor establishments: how many older homes there are for each business able to work on them. It is an index built from housing stock, not a measure of observed remodeling spending.

Verification

The headline figures were reproduced by two independent computation paths (different demand derivation, different supply aggregation) with zero mismatches across all 100 metros. The implied median age of owner-occupied homes in our data, 42 years, matches the National Association of Home Builders' independently published 2024 figure exactly. Results are stable under alternative age cutoffs (pre-1970, pre-1990), an employment-based capacity measure, the 2022 supply vintage, and an all-housing-units demand base. Buffalo ranks highest and the same Sun Belt metros rank lowest under every variant.

Sources

• US Census Bureau: American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five year (tables B25036, B25077, B19013, B25001, B01003, public domain.
• US Census Bureau: County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 238 employer establishments, public domain.
• US Census Bureau: Nonemployer Statistics 2023 (NAICS 238 sole proprietors, public domain.
• External validation: median owner-occupied home age per NAHB (2024); metro remodeling spending context per Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (cited in prose; their published metro estimates cover 20 metros).

Changelog

v1.0.1, 4 Aug 2026. Fixed the per chart PNG download, which exported only a cropped corner of each chart; downloads now include the chart title and source line. No numbers changed.
v1.0, 30 Jul 2026. First publication. Numbers that move on refresh will be logged here with a cause.

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