Rooming and Boarding Houses, Dormitories, and Workers' Camps (U.S.) — NAICS 7213

Short primer — single-child pass-through. At the four-digit level, NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) 7213 contains exactly one five-digit child, 72131, which in turn contains one six-digit industry, 721310. All three levels are defined identically. Everything here rolls up from that one industry. For the full treatment — company profiles, segment economics, demand drivers, regulation, and risks — read the 72131 primer (and, beneath it, 721310). This page gives the headline figures at the 7213 level and points you there.

1. Overview

NAICS 7213 covers the "group housing" niche that sits between hotels and ordinary apartments: workers' camps at remote mines and oilfields, off-campus dormitories and Greek houses, residential clubs, and old-fashioned rooming and boarding houses. Residents pay for a room — often with meals, housekeeping, or laundry bundled in — in a shared, managed facility that may be their principal home for the length of a job, a semester, or longer [1].

For an investor, the practical takeaway is that this is a small, fragmented measured industry with one genuinely investable growth story inside it — workforce accommodation (the modular "man camps" and remote lodges that house crews building mines, liquefied natural gas plants, critical-minerals projects, and, increasingly, remote data centers). The rest — student housing and rooming houses — is reached mostly through private markets, universities, and nonprofits, not public stock.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

The four-digit industry group 7213 rolls up a single five-digit industry, which itself rolls up a single national industry:

Because there is only one child (and one grandchild, 721310), 7213, 72131, and 721310 describe the same set of establishments — the classification simply carries the same definition up the tree. There is no aggregation across differing children and no residual "other" category to reconcile. In substance, the three underlying businesses are the same ones detailed in the child primer: workforce accommodation / workers' camps, off-campus dormitories and Greek housing, and rooming and boarding houses / single-room-occupancy buildings (SROs). Traveler hotels and motels, casino hotels, bed-and-breakfast inns, RV parks, and ordinary residential apartment rentals fall under other codes and are excluded [1].

3. How big it is (this level's figures)

These are our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 7213, and because the level has one child they equal the 72131 and 721310 figures. They come from two different reference years and should not be read as a single-period snapshot.

At roughly $2.0 billion in receipts across about 1,300 firms, this is a small industry by dollar count — smaller than a single large hotel chain. Note the unusual labor profile: about 7,500 paid employees against $2 billion of receipts, because camp operators outsource much on-site labor (catering, cleaning) and dormitories and rooming houses are thin on staff. Payroll is only about 13% of receipts. (CR is the concentration ratio — the combined revenue share of the largest N firms; the HHI is a standard concentration gauge, discussed in Section 8.)

The undercount is large and matters here. County Business Patterns and the Economic Census count only establishments with paid employees; they exclude the self-employed, nonemployer businesses, and most government operations [2]. That omits (1) on-campus university housing — millions of dormitory beds owned and run by colleges and classified under education, by far the biggest chunk of "dormitory" beds in America; (2) nonemployer rooming houses — individual landlords renting a few rooms with no payroll; and (3) the fact that the largest listed camp operator books most of its revenue abroad, so its scale does not flow into U.S. receipts [8]. Read the $2 billion as the measured U.S. for-profit core, not the full economic footprint of group housing, which is many times larger once campus and nonprofit beds are counted. Our data does not include national bed or room capacity, occupancy, average daily rate, same-property revenue, or operating margins for this code; those should not be inferred from receipts or employment.

4. Where value concentrates across the children

With one child, the investable map is identical to the child's. Value is thin in public markets and concentrated in workforce accommodation; student housing and rooming houses are private.

• Workforce accommodation (the investable core). Two U.S.-listed pure-plays — Target Hospitality (Nasdaq: TH) and Civeo (NYSE: CVEO) — plus Canada's Black Diamond Group (TSX: BDI) as a peer.
• Student housing (all private). Largest owners and operators include The Scion Group (~105,000 beds), Greystar, Landmark Properties, Core Spaces, Harrison Street, and Kayne Anderson. Blackstone (NYSE: BX) took the last public U.S. student-housing REIT (real estate investment trust), American Campus Communities, private for about $13 billion in 2022.
• Rooming houses / SROs. Overwhelmingly owned by individual landlords and nonprofit supportive-housing organizations; effectively no listed vehicle.

Full company profiles, scale figures, and adjacent names (site-catering majors such as Aramark, Compass Group, and Sodexo) are in Section 4 of the 72131 / 721310 primer [5][8][11][12].

5. How the money works

The core revenue equation is the same across segments — available beds or rooms × occupancy or utilization × rent or room rate, plus ancillary services — but the economics differ sharply by subsector. Workforce lodging charges a day rate per occupied bed that bundles catering, utilities, and security, and the best contracts are take-or-pay (multi-year commitments to pay for a block of rooms whether or not they are filled), which turns a cyclical, commodity-linked business into something closer to an annuity [7][8]. Student housing runs on rent-per-bed and pre-lease rates and is largely held as real estate, so returns are measured in net operating income and property yields. Rooming houses run on weekly or monthly room rent with very low overhead. Because so much of the value sits in owned real estate, asset-level cash flow, leverage, and debt maturities matter more to owners than any single hotel-style metric. See Section 5 of the child primer for the full mechanics.

6. Demand drivers

Demand is segment-specific: workforce lodging tracks commodity and construction capital spending (oil, gas, iron ore, copper, lithium, LNG), with a fast-emerging new driver in AI (artificial intelligence) data-center construction and swing demand from government populations; student housing tracks university enrollment against a looming demographic "enrollment cliff"; rooming houses track the persistent affordable-housing shortage [7][8]. In short: student and long-term room rentals are more defensive; workers' camps offer more upside but far more cyclicality. Detail is in Section 6 of the child primer.

7. Regulation

There is no single federal regulator; oversight is layered, segment-specific, and heavily local — zoning, building, fire, and health codes; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's temporary-labor-camp standard (29 CFR 1910.142) for workers' camps; the Fair Housing Act and accessibility law for housing; and, for rooming houses, local codes that have historically suppressed SRO supply, with recent state house-sharing reforms pushing the other way [10][10][10]. Full detail in Section 7 of the child primer.

8. Consolidation

By the federal concentration measures above, the industry is fragmented, not concentrated: CR4 of 39.3% and an HHI of just 492.8 — well below the 1,500 threshold U.S. antitrust agencies treat as "unconcentrated" [3]. A long tail of small rooming houses and Greek houses keeps national concentration low even though a few large camp operators exist. Consolidation is nonetheless real at the top of each segment — workforce lodging around Target, Civeo, and Black Diamond; student housing hard into private hands since Blackstone's 2022 take-private of American Campus Communities [3][5][8][11][12]. See Section 8 of the child primer.

9. Risks

The key risks carry straight up from the child: cyclicality (camp demand rises and falls with client capital spending, and empty owned rooms still carry fixed costs and depreciation); customer and contract concentration (large resource, university, or government clients, whose contracts can be cut); occupancy / lease-up risk; capital intensity and financing exposure to interest rates; asset obsolescence of modular camps; policy and reputational risk around immigration lodging and labor camps; demographic risk for student housing; and measurement risk — because so much of the "industry" is university- or nonprofit-owned and only partly captured by employer statistics, public-market exposure is narrow and does not track the broader group-housing story [2][5][8]. Full list in Section 9 of the child primer.

10. How to invest and outlook

The cleanest listed exposure is workforce accommodation — Target Hospitality (Nasdaq: TH) for a U.S.-centric, increasingly contracted book; Civeo (NYSE: CVEO) as a global resource-lodging comparable with commodity and currency risk; Black Diamond Group (TSX: BDI) for a Canadian camp-plus-marketplace model [5][8][11]. There is no listed pure-play U.S. student-housing or rooming-house company, and hotel-company valuation multiples should not be applied to dormitories, camps, or rooming houses. Student housing is a private-markets story reached through funds, operators, and university public-private partnerships; the low end (SROs and supportive housing) is a direct-ownership or nonprofit play. The most important forward swing factor is workforce lodging's pivot from commodity cycles toward infrastructure construction — data centers and AI, critical-minerals mines, and LNG — where multi-year minimum-revenue contracts could smooth historically volatile earnings [7]. For the full public and private routes, an underwriting checklist, and the near-term outlook, see Section 10 of the 72131 / 721310 primer.

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Sources

Figures at this level are drawn from our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 7213 (identical to its single child, 72131, and grandchild, 721310). Numbered citations match the child primers' Sources list; the ones referenced above are:

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Manual — definition of 721310 and adjacent codes. https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, NAICS 721310 (2023) — establishments, employment, payroll; and CBP methodology on employer-only coverage. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 721310 — receipts, firms, concentration ratios, and HHI. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
4. Target Hospitality Corp., 2025 Form 10-K (SEC). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1712189/000110465926026351/th-20251231x10k.htm
5. Target Hospitality contract coverage — Lithium Nevada, data-center, and $750M AI-infrastructure awards (StockTitan / Investing.com, 2025–2026). https://www.stocktitan.net/news/TH/target-hospitality-announces-multi-year-workforce-hub-contract-4ib70284n02n.html
6. Civeo Corporation, 2025 Form 10-K (SEC) — operating segments (Australia, Canada) and contract structure. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1590584/000159058426000021/cveo-20251231.htm
7. Black Diamond Group Ltd., 2025 results and "Announces Closing of Royal Camp Services Acquisition" (GlobeNewswire, 2025). https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/11/12/3186858/0/en/Black-Diamond-Group-Limited-Announces-Closing-of-Royal-Camp-Services-Acquisition.html
8. Blackstone, "Blackstone Funds Complete $13 Billion Acquisition of American Campus Communities" (2022). https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-funds-complete-13-billion-acquisition-of-american-campus-communities/
9. The Scion Group, company overview; Statista, "Largest U.S. student housing owners by bed volume" (2025–2026). https://thesciongroup.com/
10. The Pew Charitable Trusts, "How States and Cities Decimated Americans' Lowest-Cost Housing Option" (2025) — SRO history and state house-sharing reforms. https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2025/07/how-states-and-cities-decimated-americans-lowest-cost-housing-option
11. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 29 CFR 1910.142 — Temporary Labor Camps. https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.142
12. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, "Housing Discrimination Under the Fair Housing Act." https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/fair_housing_act_overview
13. National Center for Education Statistics, Projections of Education Statistics to 2031. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/PES/current_tables.asp