Landscaping Services (United States) — Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 561730. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S. government uses to group businesses.[1]

1. Overview

Landscaping Services is the business of installing and maintaining outdoor greenery and hardscape: mowing and fertilizing lawns, planting and pruning trees and shrubs, laying sod, building walkways and retaining walls, running irrigation, and — seasonally — plowing snow.[1] It is one of the most fragmented service industries in the country: roughly 118,000 employer businesses averaging about seven workers each, plus several hundred thousand one-person operators.[2][5] Federal statistics counted about $115 billion in employer-firm receipts in 2022.[3]

The industry matters because its demand is large, recurring, and only lightly cyclical on the maintenance side — a lawn needs cutting every week whether or not the economy is booming — yet it is so scattered that the four largest firms together hold just 7.4% of receipts.[3] That combination of steady cash flow and a wide-open runway to combine small operators is exactly what buyers of small businesses look for, and it has made landscaping one of the most active consolidation ("roll-up," meaning buy many small companies and merge them) targets of the past few years.[14][24]

Ways in differ sharply by investor type:

• Public-market investors have essentially one listed pure-play operator (BrightView) plus a handful of suppliers and equipment makers. Direct exposure is thin.[8][11]
• Private investors — private-equity (PE) funds, independent sponsors, search funds, families, and individuals — have the opposite problem: a nearly unlimited supply of small, ownership-transferable businesses.[14][24]

2. What it is and how it's structured

In scope (NAICS 561730). The industry sits in three practical layers:[1]

1. Recurring maintenance — mowing, pruning, fertilizing, seeding, spraying, irrigation upkeep, plant care, and seasonal services.
2. Enhancement and specialty work — tree and shrub care, irrigation installation, water management, hardscapes (walkways, retaining walls, decks, ponds), turf replacement, and snow-and-ice removal bundled with grounds contracts.
3. Development and installation — larger landscape projects tied to new construction, renovations, campuses, athletic facilities, and commercial properties.

What it excludes (adjacent NAICS codes):

• 541320 — Landscape Architectural Services: designing and planning landscapes without doing the installation (a professional-services activity).[1]
• 111421 — Nursery and Tree Production: growing plants and trees (agriculture).
• 444240 — Nursery, Garden Center, and Farm Supply Retailers: selling plants and supplies at retail.
• 238910 — Site Preparation Contractors (and the broader construction sector): excavation, land clearing, and stand-alone construction of walls, decks, fences, or artificial turf.
• 561790 — Other Services to Buildings and Dwellings: stand-alone snow plowing that is not combined with landscaping services.[6]
• Wholesale distribution of landscape supplies (e.g., SiteOne, below) sits in wholesale trade, not 561730 — it supplies landscapers rather than being one.

Ownership mix. The industry is overwhelmingly small and private. The Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard for 561730 is $9.5 million in average annual receipts, and the vast majority of firms fall well under it.[4] Structure runs in three rough tiers: (1) a very long tail of sole proprietors and local crews (a truck and a mower is nearly the entire barrier to entry); (2) regional operators, increasingly owned by PE platforms, families, or employees; and (3) a small number of national players. The federal statistics do not publish a national ownership-percentage breakdown, so none is estimated here — but public-company ownership is the rare exception, not the rule.

3. How big it is

Federal statistics for the employer portion of the industry (businesses with paid staff):

That works out to roughly $1.0 million in average revenue and about seven employees per firm — a tiny-business industry by any measure.[2][3] The lower first-quarter payroll versus the full-year figure is a fingerprint of the industry's seasonality: winter is the slow quarter across most of the country.[2]

The undercount caveat — a big one here. The figures above count only businesses with employees. Landscaping has an enormous informal, self-employed tail those numbers miss entirely. Our core federal extract contains no nonemployer figure for 561730, so none is used in the table above. However, the Census Bureau's separate Nonemployer Statistics program (a real Census dataset, outside our core extract) reported roughly 434,554 nonemployer — one-person, no-payroll — landscaping businesses in 2023, generating about $15.3 billion in additional receipts.[5] Add them in and the true business count is well over half a million, and the working population is above 1.2 million once self-employed owners are counted alongside the ~803,000 payroll workers.[2][5] Private market-research firms, using a broader scope that folds in nonemployer and some adjacent activity, put the whole U.S. industry near $186–189 billion.[7] For core facts this primer uses the Census/SBA figures; treat the larger private estimates as scope-dependent.

The concentration ratios (Section 8) confirm an extremely fragmented national market, but local market concentration can be far higher — landscaping is route-based and geographically constrained, so a dense operator can dominate a single metro even though no one dominates the country.

4. The investable universe

There is effectively one publicly traded U.S. company that is primarily a landscaper. Everything else large is private, employee-owned, or a supplier.

Public companies

BrightView reported fiscal 2025 maintenance-services revenue of $1.891 billion (including $210.8 million of snow removal) and development-services revenue of $789.1 million — roughly $2.68 billion combined.[8] Deere (NYSE: DE) also sells mowing and grounds equipment, another indirect angle. Treat Toro, Scotts, and Deere results as equipment/consumer read-throughs, not measures of the service industry itself.[12][13]

Major private operators and owners

Bottom line: public investors get thin, mostly indirect exposure; the great majority of industry profit accrues to private owners.

5. How the money works

Landscaping is a labor-driven, route-based service business. Operators make money in a few specific ways:

• Recurring maintenance contracts are the prize. Weekly or monthly mowing, fertilizing, and grounds-care contracts behave like an annuity — predictable, repeat revenue that keeps crews busy all season. Buyers pay far more for contracted recurring revenue than for one-off project work.[24][25]
• Route density is the key margin lever. The enemy is "windshield time" — crews driving between distant jobs. Clustering customers within tight routes cuts drive time and fuel and lifts billable stops per crew-day. Densifying routes typically adds a couple of margin points, and it is the single biggest reason a regional buyer can pay up for a local operator and still improve its economics.[24][25]
• Enhancement and development work adds higher-ticket bursts — plantings, irrigation, and hardscape on new or renovated properties — but it is lumpier and more tied to the construction cycle than maintenance.[8]
• Snow is a seasonal swing factor. Winter snow-and-ice removal fills the off-season but makes results weather-dependent; BrightView booked $210.8 million of snow revenue in FY2025, and a mild winter can dent a whole quarter.[8]

Labor is the core cost and constraint. For grounds-maintenance workers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a median annual wage of about $37,370 in 2024; the industry-specific wage table for 561730 showed a median hourly wage of $20.54 (May 2023).[26][27] Direct labor, materials, and delivery costs are the dominant expenses BrightView identifies for its segments.[8]

Margins. Advisers estimate that well-run maintenance operators earn roughly 14–22% EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — a proxy for operating cash profit), with residential mow-and-maintain at the higher end and commercial grounds a bit lower.[25] At national scale the margin is thinner: BrightView's two segments ran adjusted-EBITDA margins of 13.0% (maintenance) and 13.5% (development) in FY2025, and net income was $56.0 million on ~$2.68 billion of revenue — a low-single-digit net margin that shows how labor-heavy this industry is.[8] (Company-specific figures are benchmarks, not industry averages.)

What businesses sell for. Advisers put small residential "mow-and-blow" shops at roughly 3–4.5× SDE (seller's discretionary earnings, an owner-pay-adjusted profit measure); commercial, contract-heavy operators at 6–9× EBITDA; and national platforms with 85%+ contracted revenue at 8–10.5× EBITDA.[25] Shifting a book from mostly residential to mostly commercial contracts can lift the multiple dramatically — the core logic behind the roll-up wave.[24]

What operators and buyers watch: contract renewal/retention rates, recurring-revenue share, revenue per crew hour, route density, crew utilization and labor turnover, labor cost as a share of revenue, snow revenue normalized for weather, development backlog and project gross margin, and fleet age, capital spending, and free-cash-flow conversion.

6. What drives demand

• Commercial and institutional property upkeep. Offices, retail centers, hospitals, hotels, schools, golf courses, homeowners' associations (HOAs), apartments, campuses, parks, and municipalities all contract out grounds care. This segment is growing faster than residential and is BrightView's core.[7][8]
• Residential spending and housing activity. Roughly half to sixty percent of the market is residential.[7] Home values, household income, curb appeal, new construction, remodeling budgets, and the ongoing trend of households outsourcing yard work all feed demand; an aging population and dual-income households push more work to paid crews.
• Construction and redevelopment. New facilities, renovations, athletic complexes, and commercial development support design-build revenue — the more cyclical part of the industry.[8]
• Weather. Rain grows grass (more mowing); snow drives winter revenue; storms, heat, and pests raise tree- and plant-care work. Results swing with the season and the weather year.[8]
• Water policy and drought — a two-sided driver. In the arid West, water restrictions and utility "cash-for-grass" rebates (commonly $2–5 per square foot of removed lawn) push homeowners toward xeriscaping and drought-tolerant designs.[33] That reduces long-run mowing demand but creates one-time conversion and installation work plus ongoing drip-irrigation and native-planting maintenance.

Recurring commercial maintenance tends to be more resilient than residential discretionary work or one-off development. The mix by geography and service line matters more than any single national growth rate.

7. Regulation

Landscaping is lightly regulated as a business but touches several specific regimes, fragmented across federal, state, and local authorities:

• Immigration and seasonal-labor rules (the biggest one). The industry is the single largest user of the federal H-2B temporary non-agricultural worker visa — landscaping and groundskeeping have accounted for roughly a third of H-2B certifications in recent years. The program is capped at 66,000 visas a year against demand well above 200,000; in fiscal 2025 the government released nearly 64,716 supplemental visas to ease the shortfall. Employers must meet wage, recruitment, and worker-protection requirements, and the industry's trade group, the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP), has litigated recent H-2B rulemaking. The cap, the annual lottery, and I-9 work-authorization enforcement make labor supply a genuine policy risk.[28][29]
• Pesticide and fertilizer application. Under the federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), anyone who applies or supervises restricted-use pesticides (RUPs) for hire must meet state/federal certification requirements; states run the exams, licenses, and enforcement, and many add fertilizer, nutrient-runoff, and stormwater rules.[31]
• Equipment electrification. California's Assembly Bill (AB) 1346 barred sales of new gas-powered small off-road engines (SORE) — including most commercial mowers and leaf blowers — starting in 2024, and dozens of cities (especially in the San Francisco Bay Area) ban gas leaf-blower use outright. These rules force capital spending on battery equipment and charging.[30]
• Worker safety. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) flags major landscaping hazards — machinery, motor vehicles, heat and cold stress, chemicals and pesticides, noise, lifting, and falls — driving workers'-compensation and liability exposure.[32]
• Local overlay. Water-use ordinances, noise ordinances, prevailing-wage rules on public contracts, vehicle rules, permits, and standard wage-and-hour law round out the picture and vary materially by jurisdiction.

For investors, compliance diligence should cover wage-and-hour practices, immigration records, pesticide licenses, safety history, workers' compensation, vehicle operations, environmental claims, and customer-contract obligations.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

By the numbers, this is about as fragmented as U.S. industries get. The largest four firms hold just 7.4% of receipts, the top eight 9.6%, the top twenty 12.5%, and even the top fifty only 15.5% — and the industry's Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard concentration gauge that runs to 10,000) is a minuscule 18.1.[3] Barriers to entry are almost nonexistent at the bottom, so new one-person operators appear constantly, while scale advantages accrue only at the very top: national contracts, purchasing power, routing and field-service software, recruiting, and the ability to offer multiple services to the same property.

That gap is fueling an aggressive PE roll-up wave. Advisers track 90-plus PE-backed landscaping platforms, and roughly 100+ acquisitions closed across the U.S. and Canada in a recent nine-month stretch, the large majority PE-driven.[14][24] Recent deals illustrate the pace:

• Yellowstone Landscape took a significant minority investment from Neuberger Berman in December 2024 while Harvest Partners retained control.[17]
• HeartLand moved from Sterling Investment Partners to Pritzker Private Capital in 2023.[18]
• Perennial Services Group completed an equity recapitalization with Brentwood Associates in December 2025 — 25 add-on acquisitions since its 2022 formation.[23]
• Mariani Premier Group announced its 25th acquisition in 2025.[22]

The thesis is consistent: buy recurring-revenue local operators at low single-digit multiples, cluster them for route density, centralize purchasing/finance/recruiting/technology while preserving local brands, and re-rate the combined platform at 8–10× EBITDA.[24][25] The main execution risk is that integration damages service quality or drives crews and local managers to leave. Employee ownership (Davey) and management ownership (LandCare) are notable alternative models at the large end, and BrightView — after a 2024 recapitalization in which One Rock Capital Partners injected $500 million and installed new leadership under CEO Dale Asplund — has recently prioritized organic profitability over acquisitions.[9][16]

9. Risks

• Labor availability and cost. Physically demanding, seasonal work competing with better-paying jobs; any tightening of H-2B or immigration enforcement hits crew supply directly, and wage inflation compresses a low-margin model.[26][28]
• Weather and seasonality. Mild winters cut snow revenue; drought reshapes demand; a wet or dry year swings mowing volumes.[8]
• Cyclicality on the project side. Development and commercial-construction work is sensitive to interest rates and the real-estate cycle; maintenance is far more defensive.[8]
• Low switching costs / customer retention. Maintenance contracts are easy to rebid, cancel, or reprice, so churn and price competition are constant, especially in residential.[24]
• Input and equipment costs. Fuel, fertilizer, chemicals, plants, vehicles, insurance, and the forced shift to battery equipment in regulating states raise operating and capital needs.[30]
• Safety and liability. Tree work, machinery, vehicles, pesticides, and hardscape construction can create severe claims.[32]
• Roll-up execution and leverage. Many consolidators carry meaningful debt; integrating dozens of small acquisitions is operationally hard, and a rate or demand shock could pressure the more-leveraged platforms.[24]
• Long-run water conservation could permanently shrink lawn-maintenance demand in the arid West even as it creates conversion work.[33]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (limited).

• BrightView (BV) is the only listed U.S. pure-play landscaper and the most direct stock-market exposure. Watch maintenance retention, organic growth, labor productivity, snow-normalized results, development margins, capital spending, debt, and free cash flow.[8]
• SiteOne (SITE) is the dominant upstream distributor — an "arms-supplier" angle analyzed through sales growth, gross margin, inventory, branch productivity, and contractor demand.[11]
• Toro (TTC), Deere (DE), and Scotts Miracle-Gro (SMG) sell the equipment and inputs the whole industry buys, but are primarily equipment/consumer-products companies, not service proxies.[12][13]
• Davey Tree is SEC-reporting but employee-owned and not tradable on an exchange, so it is not practically investable by outsiders.[16]

Private routes (where most of the value is). The realistic ways to own this industry are private: investing in or co-investing alongside the PE platforms consolidating it; backing an independent sponsor or search fund acquiring a regional operator; buying a local business outright (the low barrier that hurts incumbents helps acquirers); providing private credit to leveraged platforms; or buying into a franchise system (e.g., Weed Man, Lawn Doctor, Spring-Green, U.S. Lawns). Commercial, contract-heavy, route-dense operators command the best valuations and are the preferred targets.[24][25] The most important diligence questions: how much revenue is truly recurring and how often is it repriced; what are retention, route density, labor turnover, and revenue per crew hour; are payroll, immigration, pesticide, safety, insurance, and vehicle records clean; how much profit depends on owner add-backs, favorable weather, or one-time projects; what fleet spending is required; and can debt be serviced through a weak development or snow season.

Outlook. The industry is likely to keep growing at a steady mid-single-digit pace, supported by recurring maintenance demand, continued outsourcing of yard work, and commercial property upkeep.[7] Consolidation should continue as long as the multiple gap between small operators and scaled platforms persists, though higher interest rates temper the pace and pricing of deals.[24] The two swing variables to watch are labor/immigration policy (H-2B supply drives crew availability and wage inflation) and equipment electrification (a capital cost that favors larger, better-capitalized operators).[28][30] Maintenance-heavy models offer defensiveness; development- and snow-exposed revenue adds volatility. Net: returns depend less on headline market growth than on pricing discipline, crew retention, route density, compliance, and acquisition integration. For public investors the opportunity set stays narrow; for private investors the fragmented, cash-generative structure remains one of the more attractive small-business consolidation stories in the U.S. economy.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, NAICS 2022 — 561730 Landscaping Services (industry definition and scope). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=561730&input=561730&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 561730 — establishments, paid employees, annual and first-quarter payroll). https://data.census.gov/table/CBP2023.CB2300CBP
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms (NAICS 561730 — receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
4. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (2023; NAICS 561730 = $9.5 million average annual receipts). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. U.S. Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2023 / gig-economy analysis (NAICS 561730 nonemployer establishments and receipts), 2025. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/07/nes-gig-economy.html
6. U.S. Census Bureau, NAICS 2022 — 561790 Other Services to Buildings and Dwellings (stand-alone snow plowing). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=561790&input=561790&year=2022
7. IBISWorld / Grand View Research / Mordor Intelligence, U.S. Landscaping Services Market Size & Split (~$186–189B; residential vs. commercial), 2025. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/number-of-businesses/landscaping-services/1497/
8. BrightView Holdings, Inc., Form 10-K, fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 (segment revenue, snow, adjusted EBITDA, net income). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734713/000119312525288109/bv-20250930.htm
9. One Rock Capital Partners, BrightView Appoints Dale A. Asplund as CEO and Announces $500 Million Strategic Investment, 2024. https://www.onerock.com/news/brightview-appoints-dale-a-asplund-as-chief-executive-officer-and-announces-500-million-strategic-investment-from-one-rock-capital-partners/
10. StockAnalysis, BrightView Holdings (BV) market capitalization, 2026. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/bv/
11. SiteOne Landscape Supply, Inc., Form 10-K, fiscal year ended December 28, 2025 (net sales, 670+ branches; largest U.S. wholesale landscape-supply distributor). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650729/000165072926000005/site-20251228.htm
12. The Toro Company, 2025 Annual Report. https://www.thetorocompany.com/investors
13. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, Form 10-K, fiscal year ended September 30, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/825542/000082554225000022/smg-20250930.htm
14. Landscape Management, 2024 LM150 and Record deal activity in landscaping (Davey Tree ~$1.84B 2024 revenue; BrightView LM150 #1; 90+ PE platforms), 2024–2025. https://www.landscapemanagement.net/2024-lm150-onward-and-upward/
15. Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, TruGreen portfolio profile (majority ownership; ~$1.5B revenue; 2.3M+ customers). https://www.cdr.com/portfolio/trugreen
16. The Davey Tree Expert Company, Employee Ownership. https://www.davey.com/about/employee-ownership/
17. Harvest Partners, Yellowstone Landscape Announces Minority Investment from Neuberger Berman Capital Solutions, 2024. https://harvestpartners.com/news/yellowstone-landscape-announces-minority-investment-from-neuberger-berman-capital-solutions/
18. Pritzker Private Capital, Pritzker Private Capital Acquires HeartLand, 2023. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231214083533/en/Pritzker-Private-Capital-Acquires-HeartLand
19. LandCare, About Us (management ownership from 2019). https://landcare.com/about-us/
20. Ruppert Landscape, History (private; founder and management ownership). https://www.ruppertlandscape.com/about/history/
21. Apax Partners, Apax Funds to Acquire SavATree, 2021. https://www.apax.com/news-views/apax-funds-to-acquire-savatree/
22. Mariani Premier Group, Press Releases (25th acquisition, 2025). https://marianipremiergroup.com/press-releases/
23. Tenex Capital Management, Tenex Completes Recapitalization of Perennial Services Group (Brentwood Associates recap; 25 add-ons since 2022), 2025–2026. https://www.tenexcm.com/news-article/tenex-capital-management-completes-the-recapitalization-of-perennial-services-group
24. Hyde Park Capital / Landscape Management, Landscaping Services M&A and private-equity roll-up activity, 2025. https://www.hydeparkcapital.com/insights/industry-reports/landscaping-services-market-insights-fall-2025/
25. First Page Sage / CT Acquisitions, EBITDA Multiples and Margins for Landscaping Companies, 2025–2026. https://firstpagesage.com/business/ebitda-multiples-for-landscaping-companies/
26. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook — Grounds Maintenance Workers (median annual wage ~$37,370 in 2024). https://www.bls.gov/ooh/building-and-grounds-cleaning/grounds-maintenance-workers.htm
27. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS, May 2023 — NAICS 561730 (industry median hourly wage $20.54). https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/naics5_561730.htm
28. American Immigration Council / USCIS, The H-2B Program and FY2025 supplemental H-2B visas (landscaping = largest user; 66,000 cap; ~64,716 supplemental; NALP litigation), 2024–2025. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-dol-make-nearly-65000-additional-h-2b-visas-available-for-fiscal-year-2025
29. U.S. Department of Labor, H-2B Temporary Non-agricultural Program (wage, recruitment, worker-protection requirements). https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2b
30. California Assembly Bill 1346 (small off-road engine sales ban, effective 2024) and municipal gas leaf-blower use bans, 2023–2025. https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/show/1612-leaf-blower-ban-explained/
31. U.S. EPA, Certification of Pesticide Applicators (FIFRA; 40 CFR Part 171). https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/how-get-certified-pesticide-applicator
32. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Landscape and Horticultural Services: Hazards and Solutions. https://www.osha.gov/landscaping/hazards
33. SoCal Water$mart / regional water agencies, Turf Replacement ("cash-for-grass") rebate programs, 2025. https://socalwatersmart.com/en/residential/rebates/available-rebates/turf-replacement-program/rebate-eligibility-requirements/