US residential cleaning market, mapped
Largest Cleaning Services in the US: 74,200 Establishments, Top 10 Hold Roughly 2.6%
By US location count, the 10 largest residential cleaning brands run about 2.6% of the market. Merry Maids leads recurring maid service at 327 locations. The remaining 72,000-plus establishments belong to single-crew independents.
The market, in three numbers
A long tail the headlines keep missing.
are single-crew independents
Around 70 percent of US residential cleaning establishments employ fewer than 5 people, the Census proxy for owner-operated, single-crew shops. One owner, one van, one route.
share held by the top ten brands
Merry Maids, Chem-Dry, Stanley Steemer, MaidPro, The Cleaning Authority, Molly Maid, Fish Window Cleaning, The Maids, Two Maids, and Maid Brigade combine for roughly 1,900 to 2,000 US locations.
chain or franchise affiliated
Roughly 12,000 to 13,000 US locations sit under a chain or franchise brand. That includes Neighborly, ServiceMaster Brands, Authority Brands, Belfor, and regional banners, not just the public majors.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns, NAICS 561720, 2023. Orbital classifier market Home Cleaning Services, June 2026 snapshot.
Methodology
Why our count moves and the published estimates do not.
The headline numbers you usually see in residential cleaning, the US Census County Business Patterns establishment count and the IBISWorld and Statista industry reports, are excellent for what they cover. They are also annual at best, lag by 18 months, and the buyer behind every storefront moves faster than that. We work location by location and refresh against the universe of US small businesses every month.
How the 74,200 figure is built
- Anchor on the public count. US Census County Business Patterns reports roughly 74,200 establishments under NAICS 561720 (Janitorial Services, residential cut) for the 2023 vintage. That is the verifiable establishment universe. Every other number on this page reconciles to it.
- Classify the location into the right market. A Stanley Steemer carpet truck and a Merry Maids recurring crew share a Google search but not a buyer. We classify into the Home Cleaning Services market and keep adjacent buckets (commercial janitorial, gutter protection, pool service, disaster restoration) separate.
- Resolve each location to a real operating business. A franchisee LLC under a Molly Maid sign is a different buyer than the franchisor. We surface both, and we keep them separate. The franchisor is one phone call. The franchisee is the procurement seat.
- Roll up the chains, carefully. Merry Maids and Stanley Steemer are clean rollups. Molly Maid, run by Neighborly franchisees, is harder; we publish the brand-count as a floor when the franchisee LLCs file under their own legal entity. The caveat is on the table, not hidden in a footnote.
- Find the owner. Most US residential cleaning establishments are owner-operated single-crew shops. Most of those owners do not have a polished LinkedIn presence. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we find owners across every long-tail vertical.
- Drop the dead pins. Closures, license lapses, sites rebranded after a sale. Annual reports keep them on for twelve to eighteen months. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. June 2026 is the snapshot quoted on this page. Two midsize franchise groups closed acquisitions in Q1 2026, and the franchise count for several Neighborly brands has been creeping up since 2024.
Want the source breakdown for a specific state, metro, or service segment (recurring maid, carpet, window, post-construction)? Ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the cleaning services actually are.
Florida, California, and Texas hold roughly 34 percent of US residential cleaning locations between them. Large suburban housing stock, vacation-rental turnover demand, and dual-income households do most of the work. New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina round out the top six.
| # | State | Locations | Share of US |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | 12,889 | 12.52% |
| 2 | California | 12,477 | 12.12% |
| 3 | Texas | 9,341 | 9.08% |
| 4 | New York | 5,002 | 4.86% |
| 5 | New Jersey | 3,579 | 3.48% |
| 6 | North Carolina | 3,493 | 3.39% |
| 7 | Pennsylvania | 3,459 | 3.36% |
| 8 | Georgia | 3,421 | 3.32% |
| 9 | Illinois | 3,041 | 2.95% |
| 10 | Ohio | 2,813 | 2.73% |
| 11 | Virginia | 2,717 | 2.64% |
| 12 | Massachusetts | 2,541 | 2.47% |
| 13 | Arizona | 2,527 | 2.46% |
| 14 | Michigan | 2,402 | 2.33% |
| 15 | Washington | 2,160 | 2.10% |
Top 15 states account for roughly 67 percent of US residential cleaning locations on the broader classifier cut. Source: Orbital classifier market Home Cleaning Services, June 2026 snapshot. State counts reflect Orbital's full locations graph and run wider than the Census NAICS 561720 employer-firm count because they include sole-proprietor records the Census does not capture.
The top ten brands
Largest US residential cleaning brands by US location count.
Truck signs are loud. The math is quiet. Ten brands, roughly 1,900 to 2,000 US locations, around 2.6 percent of the market. The remaining 72,000-plus establishments belong to brands outside the top 10, regional banners, and the deep long tail of single-crew independents.
| # | Brand | US locations | Parent / note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Merry Maids | 327 | ServiceMaster Brands. The largest US recurring-maid brand by employer-firm storefront count. Residential-only. |
| 2 | Chem-Dry | ~3,000 | Belfor Franchise Group. Carpet, upholstery, and tile cleaning franchise. Count reflects total US franchise units per the franchisor's public disclosure, ahead of every recurring-maid brand on unit basis. |
| 3 | Stanley Steemer | 259 | Privately held by the Bates family, Dublin OH. Carpet, upholstery, tile, and water-damage restoration. Largest US carpet-specialty brand on an employer-firm basis. |
| 4 | MaidPro | 242 | Authority Brands franchise. Recurring residential maid service across the US and Canada. |
| 5 | The Cleaning Authority | 240 | Authority Brands franchise. Recurring maid service with a detail-rotation system across visits. |
| 6 | Molly Maid | 237Filed in Orbital data as Service Brands International, the historical franchisor entity. | Neighborly franchise brand (Dwyer Group lineage). Recurring residential maid service. Floor estimate due to franchisee-LLC rollup limitations; actual count likely higher. |
| 7 | Fish Window Cleaning | 197 | Privately held franchise system. Residential and light-commercial window cleaning. Outside the recurring-maid segment but inside the home-cleaning buyer set. |
| 8 | The Maids | 160 | The Maids International, headquartered in Omaha NE. Recurring maid service, four-person-team model. |
| 9 | Two Maids | 128Filed in Orbital data as Two Maids & A Mop; brand was renamed to Two Maids in 2023. | Home Franchise Concepts. Recurring residential maid service, pay-for-performance pricing model. |
| 10 | Heaven's Best Carpet Cleaning | ~57 | Privately held franchise out of Rexburg ID. Low-moisture carpet, upholstery, and tile cleaning. Originally filed in Orbital data under a malformed brand string; correctly resolves to Heaven's Best. |
| * | Maid Brigade | 57 | Privately held franchise system, Atlanta GA. Recurring maid service with a green-cleaning certification programme. Sits at the threshold of the top 10 by employer-firm count. |
| * | CottageCare (rolled up) | 41 | CottageCare parent, Leawood KS. Recurring residential maid service. Filed in Orbital source data as CottageCare of Leawood; rolled to the parent. |
| * | Voda Cleaning & Restoration (rolled up) | 46+ | HorsePower Brands parent. Multi-service residential cleaning and restoration franchise. Filed in source data as Voda SW Florida; rolled to parent. Floor estimate, franchisee-LLC rollup applies. |
| * | ServiceMaster Restore | ~2,200 | Cited where the buyer scope includes disaster restoration. Excluded from the headline top-10 above because most residential-cleaning vendors treat disaster restoration as a separate market with different unit economics. |
As of June 2026, US open locations. Counts above are employer-firm storefront counts from Orbital's location graph (rank columns 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and footnotes) plus franchise-unit disclosure for Chem-Dry and the ServiceMaster Restore footnote, both of which run a higher-density franchise model than the Census employer-firm capture. Commercial janitorial franchises (Coverall, Jani-King, Jan-Pro) and adjacent services (gutter protection, pool service, pool construction) that appeared in the underlying source data have been excluded from this table because their buyer is not the residential cleaning buyer.
Our take
"Cleaning services" is two markets that public reports lump together.
We believe
Recurring maid service and disaster restoration share a NAICS bucket. They are not the same buyer.
Home cleaning is split into two markets that public reports lump together: residential maid services (Merry Maids, MaidPro, Molly Maid, Two Maids, roughly 6,000 combined locations across the named recurring-maid brands and their long-tail franchisees) and disaster restoration (ServPro, ServiceMaster Restore, Belfor, Chem-Dry, roughly 9,000 combined locations). The two have nothing in common: maid services bill 80 to 200 dollars per recurring visit, restoration averages 4,000 dollars per claim, mostly insurance-paid. If you sell software into "cleaning services," confirm which market the buyer is in before quoting; the operational and financial profiles are different categories.
That gap matters when you choose your motion. A field service management vendor that priced for restoration ACV walks into a maid-service demo and watches the prospect's eyes glaze. The same vendor that priced for maid service tries to win a Belfor branch and gets told the deal is procurement-led, six months long, and not closing on a credit card. Pick the segment first, then prospect.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 74,200 establishments.
This page is for the teams selling into residential cleaning operators, not the operators themselves. If you ship one of the categories below, the long-tail map is what your AE team has been asking for.
Field service management platforms
Jobber, Housecall Pro, Launch27, ZenMaid, BookingKoala, and the next wave of route-and-recurring-visit scheduling tools selling the upgrade off a Google Sheet.
Cleaning chemical and equipment distribution
Imperial Dade, HD Supply Facilities Maintenance, regional jan-san distributors, and the equipment brands selling backpack vacuums, microfiber programs, and EPA-listed disinfectants.
Recurring billing and payments
Stripe Connect resellers, vertical payments platforms, and the recurring-billing tools selling subscription cleaning plans, tipping flows, and on-the-truck card capture.
Financing, lending, and M&A advisors
Equipment lenders, working-capital providers, and the search funds that have spent two years building a list against the long tail of single-crew owners. The owner contact is the asset.
Marketing, SEO, and lead-gen
Local SEO agencies, Google Local Service Ads managers, and the directory layer (Thumbtack, Angi, HomeAdvisor for service-pro acquisition) selling leads to operators who built their books on referrals.
Hiring, scheduling, and payroll
Hourly-workforce ATS tools, Spanish-first onboarding platforms, and payroll providers built for high-turnover crew teams. The owner is the budget holder and usually the bookkeeper.
Insurance, bonding, and compliance
Small-business insurance brokers, bonding providers, and the compliance-onboarding tools selling background-check programs to owners whose crews enter homes alone every day.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the market insights index, the broader by-industry email lists, the sister US pest control universe page, and the largest HVAC companies map for the trades family.
Plain-spoken
When the cleaning services dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You sell exclusively to enterprise commercial janitorial buyers. If your motion targets ABM, Aramark, City Wide, Coverall, Jani-King, or Jan-Pro at the corporate or master-franchisee tier, this list is not your shape. The residential cleaning map and the commercial janitorial map are different datasets with different buyers. Ask for the commercial cut.
You sell to homeowners directly. Consumer cleaning lead-gen sites, end-user apps, and household-product brands want a residential household dataset, not B2B owner contacts. Different category.
Your sales motion only fires above $50k ACV. The long tail of single-crew operators rarely writes a five-figure annual check on day one. A 6-truck Merry Maids franchisee can do it. A solo owner with two crews almost never can. Call us when an enterprise-only motion stalls and you need a mid-market overlay.
You need real-time licensing or bonding status. State and municipal licensing portals publish that with appeal periods and reinstatement windows that move daily. We refresh monthly, which is the right cadence for prospecting and the wrong cadence for compliance gatekeeping.
The honest version
Why most cleaning services vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "largest cleaning services in the US," the top result is almost always an IBISWorld extract or a Statista list, with the rest of the page filled out by a franchise-aggregator blog that copied the franchisor's own marketing page. IBISWorld and Statista are excellent for what they do, which is size the market on revenue and an estimated establishment count. That is the right lens for an investor deck. It is not the right lens for figuring out which 30,000 owner-operators your AE team should call this quarter.
The first problem is the lump. Public reports mix residential maid service, carpet and upholstery cleaning, window cleaning, post-construction cleanup, vacation rental turnovers, and disaster restoration into one "cleaning services" headline. By revenue, that headline is dominated by ServiceMaster Brands, Belfor, and Neighborly, the franchise holding companies. By US locations, the top 10 brands run about 2.6 percent of the establishment count. The other 97 percent is somebody else's van.
The second problem is that enterprise B2B databases roll up by parent and lose the buyer. They show "ServiceMaster Brands" as one customer at the Atlanta HQ and the 327 Merry Maids franchisees collapse into a single row. The actual buyer for most residential cleaning vendor categories is a franchisee, a regional operator, or an independent owner who never reports up to corporate procurement. Statista sees the revenue but not the procurement seat. Generalist databases see the parent but not the franchisee. The location-level view sees both.
The third problem is the rollup quality on the source side. The Orbital data underlying this page started with a list that mixed pool service, gutter protection, and B2B janitorial into the home-cleaning bucket. We had to drop Pinch A Penny Pool Patio Spa, LeafFilter, Premier Pools, Blue Haven Pools, and Leafguard before the table told the right story, and we had to move City Wide, Coverall, Jani-King, and Jan-Pro into a commercial-janitorial sister bucket. If your vendor data provider has not done that cleanup, you are dialing pool guys when you wanted maid-service owners. US Census County Business Patterns NAICS 561720 is the establishment anchor; this page is the location-level layer on top.
Questions
Before you ask sales about cleaning services data.
How many cleaning services are there in the US?
There are roughly 74,200 active US residential cleaning establishments based on the US Census County Business Patterns data for NAICS 561720 (Janitorial Services, residential), 2023 vintage. Orbital's location-by-location map for the Home Cleaning Services market lines up within the public-source band. Around 70 percent of those establishments employ fewer than 5 people, which is the rough proxy for single-location operators.
How is Orbital's count different from IBISWorld or Statista?
IBISWorld and Statista publish annual industry reports anchored on revenue and an estimated establishment count. Those are useful for market sizing. They do not name a single buyer. This page anchors on the same establishment number from US Census NAICS 561720 and adds the location-level layer most vendors actually need: brand, parent, service mix, and a named owner for each independent operator. Two views, two jobs.
Who is the largest residential cleaning brand by US locations?
By US storefront count, Merry Maids (327 locations, ServiceMaster Brands) leads the recurring-maid segment. Stanley Steemer (259) leads carpet and upholstery. Chem-Dry (about 3,000 US franchise locations, owned by Belfor) leads on a brand basis when measured by franchise unit count rather than employer-firm count. The three sit in different service segments, so the right answer depends on which segment your buyer is in.
How concentrated is the residential cleaning market?
Very low concentration. The 10 largest US residential-cleaning brands run roughly 1,900 to 2,000 employer-firm locations combined, against an establishment universe of about 74,200. That is around 2.6 percent of the market by location. The Census reports that the average janitorial-services establishment has fewer than 5 employees, which means the long tail is genuinely a tail of owner-operators with 1 to 3 crews each.
Can I filter by state, metro, or service type?
Yes. The dataset is filterable by state, metro, ZIP, chain affiliation, parent company, and service mix (recurring maid, deep clean, move-in or move-out, carpet and upholstery, window, post-construction, vacation rental turnovers, disaster restoration). Florida, California, and Texas together hold roughly 34 percent of US locations, so most vendors start with those three and add their named target metros. Tell us the cut you want when you request the sample.
How is this list refreshed?
Orbital refreshes the location graph against the universe of US small and mid-market businesses on a rolling monthly schedule. The June 2026 snapshot is the one quoted on this page. US Census County Business Patterns publishes annually with an 18-month lag at any given point. IBISWorld and Statista publish on a 12 to 18 month cycle. Counts on this page move when establishments open, close, change hands, or rebrand.
When is this dataset the wrong fit?
Three cases. First, if you sell exclusively to enterprise commercial janitorial buyers (City Wide, ABM, Aramark), you want a different dataset; this page maps the residential side. Second, if you sell to homeowners directly, you want consumer data, not B2B owner contacts. Third, if your sales motion only fires above 50,000 dollars in annual contract value, the long tail of single-crew operators will not fit your unit economics. Save your budget and call us when an enterprise-only motion stalls.
Why split residential cleaning from disaster restoration?
Recurring maid service bills 80 to 200 dollars per visit, paid out of household discretionary income. Disaster restoration averages around 4,000 dollars per claim, paid mostly by insurance carriers. The two markets share a NAICS code in some classifications and a customer search on Google, but the buyers, the unit economics, and the procurement cycle are different categories. Public reports lump them. Your AE pipeline should not.
See the cleaning services dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states, service segments, or chain affiliations you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
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