Other Services (except Public Administration) (U.S.) — NAICS 81

A Histometrics rollup primer for a general investing audience — relevant to both public-market and private investors. It synthesizes the four already-written child subsector primers (811 Repair and Maintenance, 812 Personal and Laundry Services, 813 Religious/Grantmaking/Civic/Professional Organizations, 814 Private Households) against our ingested federal ground truth for this two-digit sector. It does not re-research the children from scratch. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's standard scheme for sorting economic activity [3]. Federal figures for this level are U.S. Census Bureau data; company, market-research, and demographic numbers are drawn from the child primers and labeled. Tickers and multiples are reserved for the investable-universe and how-to-invest sections.

---

1. Overview

NAICS 81 is the U.S. economy's "everything else" of services — the residual sector the classification created to hold service activity that fits none of the other nineteen sectors. Its own name says so: "Other Services (except Public Administration)" [3]. It gathers four subsectors that share no customers, no supply chains, and no economics:

• 811 — Repair and Maintenance: fixing what America already owns — cars, factory machines, medical scanners, appliances, boots.
• 812 — Personal and Laundry Services: services to the person and the household — haircuts, funerals, dry cleaning, uniform rental, pet care.
• 813 — Religious, Grantmaking, Civic, Professional, and Similar Organizations: the "membership and mission" economy — churches, foundations, charities, cause groups, clubs, unions, trade associations, and homeowners' associations (HOAs).
• 814 — Private Households: families that directly employ a nanny, housekeeper, gardener, or non-medical caregiver — the household is the legal employer.

Read as one sector on our federal ground truth, 81 is very large and among the most fragmented, local, and labor-intensive in the whole economy: roughly $720.9 billion in measured receipts, ~807,800 employer establishments, ~529,700 firms, and ~5.6 million paid workers [1][2]. Concentration is effectively zero — the four largest firms hold 4.6% of receipts and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a 0-to-10,000 concentration score) is 9.8 [2], lower than any of its own children and far below the ~1,500 that antitrust regulators call "concentrated." Average pay is about $43,500 a year [1], a low-wage service sector.

But the numbers hide the one fact that governs every investment question at this level: half of this sector is not for sale — to anyone. Two of the four children (811 repair, 812 personal/laundry) are genuine for-profit businesses you can own in slivers and that private equity (PE) actively rolls up. The other two (813 nonprofits, 814 households) are structurally un-ownable — a charity, church, union, or HOA has no shares and no acquirer, and a household is not a business at all. Together those two un-ownable children are ~47% of measured receipts and more than half of employment [2]. So the honest one-line map of Sector 81 is a spectrum from "buy a niche of it" to "you can only supply, finance, or house it." Section 2 lays that out; the rest covers the sector as a whole.

---

2. What's inside — the four children, and how they differ

NAICS 81 contains exactly four subsectors. Because they are unrelated businesses, the value of viewing them together is almost entirely the contrast — which is where a rollup primer earns its keep, so we lead with it. Federal data give size, share, and concentration; ownership form, "who pays," direction of travel, and "how to invest" are synthesized from the child primers — treat those rows as informed judgment [4][5][6][7].

(CR4 = four-firm concentration ratio, the revenue share of the four largest firms; HHI defined above. Share figures are each child's federal receipts, employment, and establishments as a percentage of the sector total [1][2]; internal CR4 figures are each child measured on its own [4][5][6].)

Four contrasts do the analytical work:

1. The ownability divide is the master fact. This is not a sector where you tilt a portfolio "toward Other Services." Two children are real for-profit industries you can own directly (811, 812); two are structurally un-ownable (813 nonprofits, 814 households) where no equity exists anywhere in the core and never will. Any read on Sector 81 as an investment is really a read on repair and personal services, plus a for-profit-adjacency read on the nonprofit and household worlds. Roughly half the sector's dollars and more than half its jobs sit in children you cannot buy.

2. The biggest child by the headline numbers is the least investable. By receipts, employment, and establishments, the largest child is 813 — the nonprofit membership-and-mission economy (~47% of receipts, ~48% of jobs) — and it has no listed pure-play anywhere because every operator is tax-exempt [6]. Size and investability point in opposite directions here. And 813's ~47% receipts share is itself understated, because church receipts are not counted at all (see Section 3).

3. "Who pays" splits four ways, not two. Repair (811) is paid by car owners, insurers, and businesses; personal services (812) by consumers; the nonprofit child (813) by donors, dues, grants, and investment income; and households (814) by the family itself, which earns no revenue at all — it is a cost centre. That means the usual investor lens (revenue growth, margin, multiple) only applies cleanly to two of the four children, and not at all to a church, a union, an HOA, or a family employing a nanny [6][7].

4. The undercount runs through all four, but for different reasons. Federal business statistics count only employer firms with payroll, and every child here has a large invisible tail: solo mobile mechanics and watchmakers in 811; booth-renting stylists and solo groomers in 812; volunteer-run and unstaffed nonprofits — plus religion, off-frame entirely in receipts — in 813; and households paying cash off the books in 814, which federal business data omits completely [7][8]. Sector 81 is likely the most under-measured sector in the economy: the ~$720.9 billion and ~5.6 million workers are floors, not totals (Section 3).

What ties the four together (why they share a sector). They are the classification's residual — activity that didn't belong under manufacturing, retail, finance, health care, and so on — so the binding thread is what they are not rather than what they are. Still, real family resemblances run across them: all four are overwhelmingly local, labor-intensive, and low-wage; all four are extraordinarily fragmented (the sector HHI of 9.8 is near the theoretical floor [2]); all four are badly undercounted by employer statistics; and in all four, investor value lives one layer up from the person doing the work — in the brand, route, real estate, trust, franchise, software, or payroll platform above the mechanic, stylist, funeral director, volunteer, or nanny. Those shared traits are why they sit under one sector; the differences above are why you would never underwrite them as one.

---

3. How big it is (the rollup)

Our federal ground-truth figures for the combined 81 sector:

(CBP = County Business Patterns, the Census Bureau's annual establishment count; EC = Economic Census, its five-yearly deep count. Note the vintage mix: receipts, firms, and concentration are 2022 EC; establishments, employment, and payroll are 2023 CBP — consistent in magnitude but not one synchronized snapshot, so do not compute a single-year margin from them.)

The children add up — and the gaps are informative. Three of the four for-profit/nonprofit children reconcile to the sector exactly on the countable employer metrics: establishments (226,009 + 272,787 + 309,008) and employees (1,383,304 + 1,556,668 + 2,676,522) sum precisely to 807,804 and 5,616,494, and annual payroll ($74.65B + $52.04B + $117.58B) ties exactly to $244.27B [1]. Receipts ($240.2B + $144.06B + $336.55B ≈ $720.81B) match the $720.85B total to within rounding [2]. The fourth child, Private Households (814), contributes essentially nothing to any of these lines — because CBP and the EC do not count households as businesses [7]. Firms are the one metric that does not tie cleanly: the children sum to ~529,799 but the sector reports 529,687, higher by ~112 — the handful of companies active in more than one subsector, counted once at the sector level. That tiny gap confirms operators almost never straddle these unrelated fields (a garage does not also run a funeral home or a trade association).

A quick profile from the ratios. The sector averages roughly 7 employees per establishment and average pay near $43,500 a worker — a very-small-business, low-wage service economy [1]. Two ratios must be read with care, because the receipts base is incomplete. Payroll runs about 34% of receipts — but that is inflated, because payroll includes the ~2.7 million people working in the nonprofit child (813) while receipts exclude religious organizations' money entirely (roughly ~$46 billion of religious payroll generates zero measured receipts) [1][2][6]. And receipts per firm (~$1.36 million) similarly understate the for-profit children and overstate nothing, because much of the employment sits in bodies whose "receipts" are donations and dues rather than sales. The clean, comparable figures at this level are the physical counts (establishments, employees, payroll); the revenue-based ratios are distorted by what the receipts line does and does not capture.

The undercount caveat — read before using $720.9 billion. These are employer statistics — businesses with payroll and an employer identification number — and every child understates its true footprint, for reasons that differ by child [7][8]:

• 811 & 812 exclude the enormous population of nonemployer, one-person operators the Census tracks separately — mobile mechanics and solo watchmakers in repair; booth-renting stylists, solo groomers, and home studios in personal services. Independent research suggests the true footprint of several grandchildren is materially larger than the employer line [4][5].
• 813 excludes the volunteer-run and unstaffed nonprofit tail (roughly half of U.S. congregations have no paid staff; well over 120,000 private foundations have no employees), and its receipts line omits religion entirely — the largest child by people [6]. For scale only (not this sector's receipts), total U.S. charitable giving was ~$592.5 billion in 2024 and foundation assets ~$1.5 trillion [6][14].
• 814 is off the federal business grid completely — households paying cash, with a "nanny-tax" compliance rate estimated near ~5%; the better gauges are household surveys (600,000+ workers directly employed by households) rather than business statistics [7][8].

Read $720.9 billion as the measured, employer, mostly-for-profit-and-staffed-nonprofit slice of a much larger activity base — not the whole thing. The federal file publishes no sector-wide profit, margin, or growth rate; where those appear below they come from company and trade sources, labeled as such.

Concentration is near-zero — the lowest of any child. The sector CR4 of 4.6% and HHI of 9.8 are below every child's own reading (811 5.4%, 812 10.2%, 813 9.3%) [2][4][5][6]. That is the arithmetic of combining four unrelated fields: the largest firms in the sector — the death-care and linen/uniform consolidators, the biggest repair roll-ups — are diluted into a $720 billion pool of half a million mostly tiny operators until they control barely a twenty-fifth of it. The blended figure describes none of the children; it describes how thoroughly a few large operators disappear into a sea of local businesses and un-ownable organizations.

---

4. The investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

Two facts frame every route in: (1) there is no listed pure-play, and no exchange-traded fund (ETF), for Sector 81 as a whole — it is too fragmented and too internally unrelated for one; and (2) public access is not evenly spread — it clusters in a few niches of the two for-profit children and thins to zero across the two un-ownable ones. No listed company reports on a clean NAICS basis, so never read a company's sales as sector or child market share.

(Tickers and scale below are for the how-to-invest lens only; all are company-wide, with the relevant repair/service line usually a slice of a bigger business. PE = private equity; AUM = assets under management; HOA = homeowners' association.)

The handful of cleanest listed operators in the entire sector — each a single niche, none a proxy for the whole:

• Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI) — the dominant North American funeral-and-cemetery operator; the one large, liquid, near-whole-grandchild proxy anywhere in the sector, but only for death care inside 812 [5][9].
• Cintas (Nasdaq: CTAS) and peers UniFirst (NYSE: UNF), Vestis (NYSE: VSTS) — the uniform/linen-rental nationals, the only listed operators in the laundry child of 812 (Cintas agreed in 2026 to acquire UniFirst, ~$5.5B, pending antitrust review) [5][9].
• Valvoline (NYSE: VVV) — a quick-lube retailer, the cleanest way to own any part of the repair child (811), but only the quick-service auto niche [4][10].
• Transcat (Nasdaq: TRNS) — an accredited calibration/repair roll-up in the electronic/precision corner of 811; the cleanest recurring-revenue small-cap, in one niche [4][10].

Where the indirect public bench sits, by child:

• 811 Repair — deep but indirect. Collision/glass operators of scale (Boyd, NYSE: BGSI; Driven, Nasdaq: DRVN; D'Ieteren, glass via Belron/Safelite) and the claims-software backbone CCC (Nasdaq: CCCS); the industrial aftermarket embedded in distributors, dealers, and original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) — Flowserve (NYSE: FLS), DXP (Nasdaq: DXPE), Applied Industrial (NYSE: AIT), Caterpillar, Deere [4][10].
• 812 Personal & Laundry — two lanes public, two private. Beyond SCI/Cintas: death-care peers Carriage (NYSE: CSV) and Matthews (Nasdaq: MATW); everything in personal care and "other personal services" is private, reachable only through micro-caps and adjacent names (Regis, Petco, the GLP-1 drug makers that captured the diet niche, the dating apps booked in the Information sector) [5][9].
• 813 Nonprofit/membership — NO pure-play; buy the plumbing. The un-ownable core is served by for-profit vendors: fundraising/nonprofit software Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB) — the closest thing to a single "813 proxy," but a software business first; the asset managers and trust banks earning fees on the ~$1.5 trillion foundation/donor-advised-fund base (BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, State Street, Charles Schwab); HOA services and specialty banks (FirstService, Nasdaq: FSV; Western Alliance; AppFolio); the conservation wing's environmental-services equities (Tetra Tech, AECOM, Waste Management, Clean Harbors); and events/information majors (Informa, RELX, Thomson Reuters) [6][11].
• 814 Households — NO pure-play; picks-and-shovels only. Nanny-payroll/tax-compliance fintech and care/home-services marketplaces (the on-target Care.com is now PE-owned and private), plus adjacent listed agency home-care names that ride the same aging-in-place demand under different codes [7][12].

Where the private/PE scale sits (most of the capital). In the for-profit children, PE is rolling up the shops directly — automotive mechanical and collision (multi-billion-dollar flows), calibration and medical servicing, industrial field-service, death-care homes, and linen routes [4][5][10]. In the un-ownable children, PE consolidates the plumbing instead — faith-tech and nonprofit software, outsourced-CIO firms for foundations, HOA-management platforms, and household-payroll fintech — because the core organizations themselves cannot be acquired [6][12].

Takeaway. A public-market investor can only ever buy a scattered handful of niches of this sector — SCI and Cintas in personal/laundry, Valvoline and Transcat (plus collision and industrial-aftermarket names) in repair, and for-profit proxies (Blackbaud, FirstService, asset managers) alongside the nonprofit and household worlds. There is no whole-sector security, no whole-child security in most of it, and roughly half the dollars are un-ownable by design. The real ownership of Sector 81 is private, local, and — for two of its four children — not ownership at all.

---

5. How the money works

Sector 81 has no single profit-and-loss logic, because its four children run on genuinely different money models. Knowing which one you are underwriting is the whole game:

• The for-profit local service operator (811, 812). A repair shop, salon, funeral home, or dry cleaner is a mostly fixed-cost location whose profit is capacity × utilization × ticket × repeat — billable technician or practitioner hours plus marked-up parts, run through a network of small sites, with skilled labor as the binding constraint [4][5]. Cash conversion is favorable (the customer pays at completion), margins are thin single digits, and because the work is a personal relationship, the customer often follows the individual, not the shop. The prize in the business-facing corners of repair is a recurring maintenance or calibration contract that turns break/fix work into an annuity.
• The nonprofit money models (813). Here a surplus is a surplus, not a profit, and no equity accrues, so the core is un-investable by construction [6]. Four sub-models run under that rule: donation-funded mission (religion, advocacy — scored on program-expense ratio and donor retention); fee-on-assets (a foundation must distribute ~5% of assets a year, and the capturable economics are the management fee skimmed off the ~$1.5 trillion base by whoever invests it); membership subscription (clubs, unions, professional and trade bodies — dues plus non-dues event, publishing, and certification income, a fixed-cost scale game); and mandatory assessments (HOAs — contractual, property-tied, non-cyclical). Investor income in every case is the for-profit vendor's software fee, payment take-rate, AUM fee, or event revenue — never the mission itself [6][11].
• The household as cost centre (814). A family that employs a nanny or caregiver buys back time and provides care; its "return" is cost-of-care against income and time saved, not revenue or margin [7]. The only monetizable revenue is in the surrounding layers — marketplace subscriptions, placement fees, recurring household-payroll/tax software, background checks, and insurance — classic recurring-revenue fintech and marketplace economics sitting on a large but only ~5%-formalized demand pool [7][12].

The through-line for investors. Across all four children, value accrues one layer up from the worker — in the brand, route, real estate, trust, franchise, software, payment rail, or payroll platform — because the service-delivery layer stays local, labor-bound, and relationship-driven. That is exactly why scale and density win in the layer above and why the winners are consolidators and vendors, not the shops. It is also why the standard investor lens (utility rate base, real-estate funds-from-operations, mining all-in-sustaining-cost) simply does not apply anywhere in Sector 81 — the economics are small-service-operator, nonprofit-flow, and household-cost-centre, not regulated-asset. For the for-profit children, diligence is operational (utilization, retention, ticket, contract mix, leverage); for the nonprofit and household children, the diligence is on the vendor's recurring revenue and switching costs, and on the Form 990 or payroll-formalization trend behind the demand.

---

6. What drives demand

The children answer to largely uncorrelated demand, which is Sector 81's one accidental virtue as a basket — but a few forces cut across all four.

Where the children diverge:

• 811 Repair rides the aging installed base — a record-old U.S. vehicle fleet (average ~12.8 years in 2025), an aging industrial machine base with a deferred-maintenance backlog, and a large stock of durable goods in the home — plus the repair-versus-replace switch that tilts toward repair when new-goods prices, tariffs, and financing costs rise [4][13].
• 812 Personal & Laundry runs on biological recurrence (hair grows, people die), demographics (the baby-boom aging into peak-mortality years lifts death-care volume), and outsourcing/employment (linen and uniform rental) — against secular decliners like traditional dry cleaning [5].
• 813 Nonprofit/membership tracks the size and stress of each constituency: religiosity and demographics (a slow, recently-decelerating decline in religious affiliation and legacy-club membership); wealth creation and the great wealth transfer (foundation and donor-advised-fund balances rise with equity markets); the news and appropriations cycle (episodic advocacy surges; record political spending in even years); and housing growth plus reserve mandates (HOAs grow non-cyclically) [6].
• 814 Households is among the most durable demand stories in the economy: the aging wave ("age in place," 61+ million Americans aged 65-plus, home-care employment projected up ~17% to 2034), dual-income family formation, the cost and scarcity of institutional alternatives, and immigration policy, which governs the supply — and therefore the wage — of a heavily foreign-born workforce [7][13].

Shared threads. Much of the sector is non-deferrable or recurring — you fix the car you depend on, hair grows, people die, HOAs assess, aging parents need care — which makes Sector 81 more recession-resilient than most consumer and business services. Two demographic currents touch all four at once but push different ways: aging lifts repair demand (older assets), death care, and household care, while thinning the membership of legacy congregations and clubs. And the whole sector shares one tail risk the rest of the economy mostly does not — a public-health shutdown, as 2020 showed when salons, repair bays, congregations, and much of this person-facing sector were ordered closed. Across every child, the ceiling is labor supply: skilled technicians, licensed practitioners, funeral directors, volunteers, and caregivers are all scarce and aging, capping how much work the sector can actually take.

---

7. Regulation

Sector 81 is lightly licensed but actively regulated by activity, in a patchwork that runs mostly through the states and differs sharply by child; there is no single federal regulator and no rate-setting body anywhere in it.

• 811 Repair is safety- and environmentally regulated rather than licensed: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refrigerant and used-oil rules, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) workplace-safety rules, and — the defining policy swing across the whole child — right-to-repair versus OEM control of parts, software, and diagnostic data (the Federal Trade Commission's Magnuson-Moss warranty stance, state auto and agricultural-equipment laws) [4].
• 812 Personal & Laundry turns on state occupational licensing (stylists, barbers, funeral directors), the federal FTC Funeral Rule and preneed/perpetual-care trust rules in death care, and EPA solvent (perchloroethylene phase-out) and antitrust review in laundry (the Cintas-UniFirst deal) [5].
• 813 Nonprofit/membership is regulated as tax-exempt organization, not business — the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and state attorneys general enforce 501(c)-series status, the Form 990 information return, the 5% foundation payout, charitable-solicitation registration, and campaign-activity limits — layered with sharp activity-specific law (antitrust for trade bodies, labor law for unions, campaign-finance law for political committees, state statutes and reserve mandates for HOAs) [6].
• 814 Households loads its regulation onto the household as employer: the Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage and overtime), the IRS "nanny tax" (Social Security/Medicare withholding above a low threshold), and a growing set of state Domestic Workers Bill of Rights laws [7].

Two themes cut across the sector. First, worker classification — booth-rental stylists, gig pet-sitters, independent field-service contractors, gig caregivers, and platform workers all lean on independent-contractor status, and any move to reclassify them as employees would raise costs across multiple children at once. Second, compliance is a cost that tilts the field toward scale — training, documentation, accreditation, waste handling, and trust administration all favor larger operators and the vendors that sell compliance as a product, which is a quiet driver of consolidation in the layer above the workers.

---

8. Consolidation

On the headline numbers this is one of the least-concentrated sectors in the economy (CR4 4.6%, HHI 9.8), and because the figures exclude the vast self-employed, volunteer, and household tail, the real market is even more fragmented [2]. But the children consolidate at very different speeds and, crucially, at different layers:

• 811 Repair and 812 Personal/Laundry — real, PE-led, at the operator layer in parts. These are the two children where scale genuinely compounds and where PE rolls up the shops directly: automotive mechanical and collision, calibration and medical servicing, industrial field-service, death-care homes, and linen routes — plus the marquee listed consolidators (SCI in funerals, Cintas in uniforms). Even here, most of the trade stays local and independent, with long runways still to run [4][5][9][10].
• 813 Nonprofit and 814 Households — the core barely consolidates at all. The organizations themselves are separate legal entities with no equity to acquire (813) or are households that do not combine (814). What consolidation exists is by attrition and affiliation among the nonprofits (churches close, lodges fold, small foundations merge) and by formalization among households (cash work shifting onto payroll platforms). All the real roll-up happens one layer up, in the for-profit plumbing — faith-tech and nonprofit software, outsourced-CIO firms, HOA-management platforms, and household-payroll fintech [6][7][12].

The recurring lesson is the same in all four: consolidation happens above the worker, not among the shops, and it is not automatic pricing power. Competition stays local, national concentration badly understates a crowded trade area, and the winners are the brands, routes, trusts, franchises, and software platforms that sit atop thousands of small operators or un-ownable organizations. PE is the common actor across the sector — buying the operators where it can (811, 812) and the plumbing where it cannot (813, 814).

---

9. Risks

Shared across the sector:

• Labor supply is the binding constraint everywhere. Skilled technicians, licensed practitioners, funeral directors, volunteers, and caregivers are all scarce and aging; the labor ceiling caps growth and inflates costs in every child [4][5][7].
• Worker classification. Reclassifying independent contractors as employees would raise costs simultaneously across repair field-service, booth-rental salons, gig pet and household care, and platform work, with back-tax and back-wage exposure [5][7].
• Thin margins and limited scalability. Rent, labor, utilities, and inputs are the whole cost stack in the service children; running fifty locations is rarely much cheaper per location than one, capping outside-investor returns, and roll-ups destroy value through overpaying, leverage, weak integration, and — above all — losing the people who carry the client book [5].
• Measurement opacity — the sector's signature flaw. Employer-only federal figures omit nonemployers, volunteers, and households, exclude religion from receipts entirely, and mix vintages; a listed "services" name almost always blends the target trade with much larger adjacent businesses. Both the size and the public "proxies" must be read with care [1][2][7][8].
• Leverage and rate sensitivity. Roll-up and vendor economics across all four children depend on affordable debt; higher rates slow deals and burden PE-backed platforms.

Concentrated in one child:

• 811 Repair — repair-versus-replace erosion (cheap imports), OEM lock-out if right-to-repair reverses, cyclicality in the industrial corner, and the long-run technology transition (electrification) [4].
• 812 Personal & Laundry — secular decline in pockets (dry cleaning, tanning, one-hour photo), key-person/client-book churn, discretionary trade-down, and antitrust scrutiny of the two consolidated grandchildren [5].
• 813 Nonprofit — secularization and aging membership, a top-heavy shrinking donor base, a 2025-26 government-funding shock to advocacy, litigation/abuse liability that can bankrupt an organization overnight, and the proxy-mismatch problem — every listed name earns only a slice of its revenue from serving these bodies, so company-wide factors swamp the theme [6].
• 814 Households — structural informality (~95% not fully tax-compliant), immigration policy as a supply-and-wage shock, affordability/cyclicality in discretionary housekeeping and childcare, and the fact that the most on-target business (Care.com) is now private [7].

---

10. How to invest, and the outlook

The sector is not a single trade — pick a child, know which capital market it lives in, and size for the fact that half of Sector 81 has no equity at all.

Public routes are thin and scattered, concentrated in the two for-profit children. There is no whole-sector stock and no ETF.

• Cleanest exposures: SCI (a near-whole-child death-care proxy) and Cintas / Vestis / UniFirst (linen-uniform) inside 812; Valvoline (quick-lube) and Transcat (calibration) inside 811 — each a single niche, not a sector bet [4][5][9][10].
• Indirect operator exposure: collision/glass and industrial-aftermarket names in repair (Boyd, Driven, CCC, Flowserve, DXP, Applied, Caterpillar, Deere); death-care peers (Carriage, Matthews) [4][5][10].
• For-profit proxies to the un-ownable children: Blackbaud (the closest single "813 proxy," a software company first), asset managers and trust banks on the ~$1.5 trillion foundation/DAF base, FirstService and HOA specialty banks, conservation-linked environmental-services equities, and household-payroll/care-marketplace fintech for the 814 read-through — always sized as segment or adjacent exposure, never a pure play [6][7][11][12].
• What to compare in the for-profit names: enterprise value to EBITDA, free-cash-flow yield, organic same-store/same-branch growth, contract-versus-break-fix mix, capital spending, and net leverage — and never treat a franchisor's system-wide sales as its own revenue [4][5].

Private routes are where most of the sector actually lives — and the only realistic way into two of the four children:

• Own or build a for-profit operation (a repair shop, salon, funeral home, laundromat, calibration lab) or roll several into a local platform; entry multiples on small independents are low and the value creation is combining them into a platform that re-rates at exit. Diligence is local and operational — normalize owner labor, and verify technician/practitioner retention above all [4][5].
• Buy a franchise or a multi-unit franchisee position in the service children, reading the Franchise Disclosure Document closely [5].
• Back the layer above the workers — the real estate, franchising, routes, trusts, and platforms — which is the only way to deploy meaningful capital against the nonprofit and household children: vendor software and payments, foundation/HOA asset management and specialty banking, community-association management, and household-payroll formalization [6][7][11][12].
• For the nonprofit child specifically, the "private" route is often to fund or serve — grants, program-related investments, donor-advised funds — with diligence on the Form 990 (reserves, donor concentration, program ratio, key-person risk) [6].

Outlook. Sector 81 is a large, durable, defensive, and hyper-fragmented residual of the economy whose four children will not move together. Repair (811) grinds higher on a record-old installed base and the repair-versus-replace switch, with a long PE runway. Personal and laundry (812) stays stable and defensive — death care rising on demographics, linen/uniform on outsourcing, dry cleaning slowly declining. Nonprofit/membership (813), the largest child, is a permanently un-ownable money-mover where investable value keeps migrating outward to the for-profit plumbing — grantmaking compounding with markets, HOAs growing non-cyclically, religion and legacy clubs in slow decline. Households (814) carry about as durable a demand backdrop as exists (aging plus dual-income formation) while staying atomized, informal, and non-investable in raw form — the thesis is "buy the formalization," not the households. Across all four the swing factors are the same: labor supply is the ceiling on how much any operator can grow, worker-classification and tax policy sit over the whole sector, and value accrues to whoever wins the layer above the worker — the brand, route, land, trust, franchise, or platform — not to the industry growing. For a public-market investor, Sector 81 is a scattered handful of niche securities, buyable only in slivers, with roughly half of it off-limits by design; for private and operator-investors, the for-profit half — steady cash flow, cheap entry, retiring sellers, low institutional competition — is the whole attraction, capped everywhere by the skilled-labor ceiling.

---

Sources

This is a rollup page. Its headline figures for NAICS 81 (receipts, firms, establishments, employment, payroll, concentration) come from OUR ingested federal ground-truth file for this sector; company, ownership, market-size, and demand figures are synthesized from the four child subsector primers (811 / 812 / 813 / 814), renumbered here.

1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns (CBP), 2023 — NAICS 81 (establishments 807,804; paid employees 5,616,494; annual payroll ~$244.27B; Q1 payroll ~$59.01B). Histometrics-ingested federal ground truth for 81. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms (EC2200SIZECONCEN), NAICS 81 (firms 529,687; receipts ~$720.85B; CR4 4.6% / CR8 6.9% / CR20 11.0% / CR50 15.6%; HHI 9.8). Histometrics-ingested federal ground truth for 81. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
3. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 NAICS Definitions — sector 81 "Other Services (except Public Administration)" and subsectors 811 / 812 / 813 / 814; residual-sector scope; CBP and Nonemployer Statistics coverage and exclusions. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=81&year=2022
4. Histometrics child subsector primer — NAICS 811 Repair and Maintenance (receipts ~$240.2B; CR4 5.4%, HHI 9.9; automotive/industrial/electronic/household repair; Valvoline, Transcat, Boyd, Driven, CCC, Flowserve, DXP; PE roll-ups; aging-fleet and right-to-repair drivers). Synthesis source; numbering consolidated here.
5. Histometrics child subsector primer — NAICS 812 Personal and Laundry Services (receipts ~$144.06B; CR4 10.2%, HHI 36.8; personal care/death care/laundry/other personal; SCI, Cintas, UniFirst, Vestis, Carriage, Matthews; FTC Funeral Rule, perc phase-out, worker classification). Synthesis source.
6. Histometrics child subsector primer — NAICS 813 Religious, Grantmaking, Civic, Professional, and Similar Organizations (receipts ~$336.55B, religion off-frame; CR4 9.3%, HHI 35.1; ~$1.5T foundation assets; Blackbaud, FirstService, asset managers, environmental-services and events proxies; tax-exempt regulation). Synthesis source.
7. Histometrics child subsector primer — NAICS 814 Private Households (no federal business statistics; 600,000+ workers by household survey; ~5% nanny-tax compliance; care marketplaces and household-payroll fintech; aging-in-place and immigration drivers). Synthesis source.
8. U.S. Census Bureau / U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. County Business Patterns and Economic Census methodology (employer-only scope; self-employed, volunteer, and household activity excluded); Nonemployer Statistics (private households excluded); QCEW coverage notes. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/about/faq.html
9. Death-care and linen/uniform listed operators — Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI), Carriage Services (NYSE: CSV), Matthews International (Nasdaq: MATW); Cintas (Nasdaq: CTAS), UniFirst (NYSE: UNF), Vestis (NYSE: VSTS); Cintas–UniFirst ~$5.5B merger pending antitrust review. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings; via child primer 812. https://www.sec.gov/
10. Repair listed operators — Valvoline (NYSE: VVV), Transcat (Nasdaq: TRNS), Boyd Group (NYSE: BGSI), Driven Brands (Nasdaq: DRVN), CCC (Nasdaq: CCCS), Flowserve (NYSE: FLS), DXP (Nasdaq: DXPE), Applied Industrial (NYSE: AIT), Caterpillar, Deere; auto-repair PE consolidation. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings; via child primer 811. https://www.sec.gov/
11. Nonprofit-adjacency listed proxies — Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB); asset managers/trust banks on the ~$1.5T foundation/DAF base (BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, State Street, Charles Schwab); FirstService (Nasdaq: FSV), Western Alliance, AppFolio; environmental services (Tetra Tech, AECOM, Waste Management, Clean Harbors); events/information (Informa, RELX, Thomson Reuters). Via child primer 813. https://www.sec.gov/
12. Household-adjacency proxies — care and home-services marketplaces and household-payroll/tax-compliance fintech (Care.com, now private after PE acquisition); adjacent listed agency home-care operators (NAICS 624120/621610). Via child primer 814. https://www.sec.gov/
13. Demographic and installed-base anchors — S&P Global Mobility (average U.S. vehicle age ~12.8 years, 2025); U.S. Census Bureau (61.2M Americans aged 65+, 2024 ACS); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (home-health/personal-care-aide employment +17%, 2024–2034; industrial and repair occupational outlook). Via child primers 811, 812, 814. https://www.bls.gov/
14. Giving USA Foundation / Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy; Candid; U.S. Small Business Administration. Giving USA 2025 (2024 total U.S. giving ~$592.5B; ~$146.5B to religion); foundation assets ~$1.5T; SBA size standards for the 81-series children. Context only, not this sector's receipts; via child primer 813. https://givingusa.org/