Reupholstery and Furniture Repair (U.S.) — NAICS 81142

A Histometrics industry primer for public-market and private investors

Read this first — single-child level. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard code the U.S. government uses to group businesses. This page covers the five-digit NAICS industry 81142, which contains exactly one six-digit national industry: 811420, Reupholstery and Furniture Repair. Because the parent and its only child are the same set of businesses, the numbers here and there are identical, and this page is deliberately short. For the full treatment — unit economics, the investable universe, regulation, risks, and how to invest — read the 811420 primer. What follows is the rollup view and this level's own ground-truth federal figures.

1. Overview

Reupholstery and furniture repair is the trade of fixing, refinishing, and re-covering furniture instead of discarding it and buying new. A customer with a worn sofa, a scratched table, a water-damaged cabinet, or an inherited antique pays a shop for labor plus materials (fabric, leather, foam, springs, wood, finish). The typical operator is a one-person or single-shop business, not a corporation. It is a small, mature, and unusually fragmented skilled-craft service industry whose binding constraints are skilled labor, local density, quality control, and customer acquisition — not factory scale [1][2].

For investors the headline is blunt: there is no listed pure-play. Public exposure is indirect and immaterial; the real ownership routes are private — own or franchise a shop, build a regional platform, or own the higher-margin warranty and insurance-restoration layers that route work to shops. Section 4 sketches this; the 811420 primer develops it in full.

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

The five-digit industry 81142 has a single national industry beneath it:

When a five-digit NAICS industry has only one six-digit child, the two are definitionally the same population of businesses. Code 811420 covers establishments primarily engaged in reupholstering, refinishing, repairing, and restoring furniture [3]. It excludes furniture making (manufacturing, NAICS 337121/337122), furniture retailing (NAICS 449110), upholstery/carpet cleaning without repair (NAICS 561740), vehicle-seat reupholstery (automotive, NAICS 811121), and footwear/leather-goods repair (NAICS 811430) [3]. Because nothing else rolls into 81142, every figure below is simply the 811420 figure. See the child primer for the full scope and cross-references.

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

These are our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 81142 — and, because of the one-to-one mapping, for 811420. They measure employer businesses (firms with at least one paid employee). County Business Patterns (CBP) covers employer establishments; the Economic Census concentration series covers firms with payroll, so the reference years differ.

Average receipts per employer firm work out to roughly $415,000 [2], and average pay per worker to roughly $40,700 [1]. All figures come straight from our stats file for this level; no value here is suppressed or estimated.

Undercount caveat (important here). These employer figures materially understate the industry, because the trade is dominated by tiny and individual operators — many upholstery and furniture-repair businesses are one-person shops with no employees, counted only in the Census Bureau's separate Nonemployer Statistics program. Our ground-truth file supplies no nonemployer figure for this level, so no adjustment is made [4]. The child primer notes private research (e.g., IBISWorld) that does include the self-employed tail and puts the total market noticeably higher — read that gap as the nonemployer tail, and treat such third-party totals as approximate, not government counts [5].

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

With only one child, there is nothing to allocate across — value concentrates exactly where it does in 811420. In brief:

• No public pure-play. The industry is too fragmented and too small-operator to support a listed equity, and the largest identifiable brands are privately held. Public-market investors can only touch it through diluted furniture-lifecycle proxies — makers/retailers such as La-Z-Boy (ticker LZB), Ethan Allen (ETD), MillerKnoll (MLKN), Hooker Furnishings (HOFT), and Arhaus (ARHS) — for whom reupholstery is a rounding error [1].
• Private aggregators hold the real ownership. Franchise brands (Furniture Medic, now under TCB Franchising), warranty administrators (Guardsman, owned by The Amynta Group), and insurance-claims networks (itel) sit one layer above the local shops and earn fees or premium-versus-claims spread. Their ownership has rotated through private equity.

The full company-by-company table, tickers, and ownership history are in the 811420 primer.

5. How the money works

Identical to the child: a labor-driven service with a materials pass-through. Revenue on any job is billable labor (hours × rate) + marked-up materials; the margin lever is billable utilization of skilled labor, since materials are largely passed through. Skilled-labor scarcity is both the constraint and the moat — the work cannot be offshored and is hard to automate. Revenue arrives through five channels of rising quality: retail consumers (lumpy, discretionary), commercial/contract (repeatable), insurance and disaster restoration (recurring, less cyclical), warranty/protection-plan fulfillment (the most scalable, insurance-like economics), and antiques/high-end restoration (insulated from cheap imports). The 811420 primer works through unit pricing, the operating metrics that reveal quality, and franchise economics.

6. Demand drivers

The core driver is the customer's repair-vs-replace math: reupholstery commonly saves 30–70% versus an equivalent new piece, so quality furniture gets fixed while cheap pieces get discarded. Rising new-furniture prices — up roughly 25% since early 2020, with new U.S. import tariffs adding pressure from late 2025 — tilt the math toward repair. Sentimental/antique value, sustainability and the backlash against "fast furniture," insurance and catastrophe activity, commercial refresh cycles, and housing turnover round out demand. The chief headwinds are cheap imported/flat-pack furniture, do-it-yourself substitution, and a shrinking, aging pool of skilled upholsterers that caps how much demand the industry can serve. Full sourcing and figures are in the child primer.

7. Regulation

Light but real for a small-shop trade, and unchanged at this level. One federal rule reaches reupholsterers directly: the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) upholstered-furniture flammability standard (16 CFR Part 1640, based on California Technical Bulletin TB 117-2013). It covers furniture manufactured, imported, or reupholstered for sale — but reupholstery of a customer's own furniture for personal use is generally excluded. Add state/local "bedding and upholstered furniture" registration and law-tag labeling, plus routine Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) hazard-communication, wood-dust, and solvent (VOC — volatile organic compound) obligations. The 811420 primer details the labeling and compliance specifics.

8. Consolidation

This is one of the most fragmented industries in the federal data, and the concentration figures below are this level's ground truth:

An HHI near 10.5 sits close to the theoretical floor for an "unconcentrated" market — a near-atomistic field of local shops with no dominant player and effectively no industry-level pricing power. Service delivery stays stubbornly local (a sofa has to be worked on by hands nearby), so roll-ups cannot build factory-style scale; consolidation happens one layer up — through franchising, warranty and insurance-claims networks, and private-equity ownership of those aggregators. See the child primer for the players.

9. Risks

The same risks apply at this level as at 811420: structural demand decline at the low end from cheap imports and disposable furniture; a skilled-labor shortage that caps capacity and creates key-person risk; owner dependence and weak succession; input-cost inflation (fabric, foam, leather, freight); rework and reputation risk in a referral-driven trade; fragmentation that keeps margins thin and pricing power near zero; a compliance burden that is proportionally heavier for tiny shops; channel concentration for the warranty/insurance aggregators; and measurement difficulty from federal undercounting of very small operators [4]. Each is developed in the child primer.

10. How to invest and outlook

Because 81142 is 811420, the investment conclusion is the same. Public markets: treat this as a private-market industry — there is no clean listed play, only diluted furniture-lifecycle proxies that contribute little or nothing separately disclosed to consolidated earnings. Private markets (where the opportunity is): own or franchise a shop; build a regional platform by acquiring and professionalizing independents; own the higher-margin warranty/protection-plan and insurance-restoration/claims-network layers, which earn insurance-like economics on the premium-versus-claims spread; specialize up-market in antiques and commercial contract work; or finance the operators. The central diligence question is whether revenue survives the owner's departure.

Outlook: a modest tariff-and-sustainability tailwind to demand against a persistent skilled-labor ceiling on supply. The winners will be those that aggregate demand and route it efficiently (franchising, warranty and insurance networks) or that secure and retain craftspeople — not those betting on organic growth in a slowly shrinking, hyper-fragmented core. For the complete analysis, tables, and sources, see the primer for NAICS 811420.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 811420 (establishments, employment, payroll). 2025. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — concentration ratios and firm/receipts statistics, NAICS 811420 (firms, receipts, CR4/8/20/50, HHI). 2025. https://data.census.gov/profile/811420_-_Reupholstery_and_furniture_repair?codeset=naics~811420
3. U.S. Census Bureau. North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) 2022 — 811420 Reupholstery and Furniture Repair (definition and cross-references). 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=811420&year=2022&details=811420
4. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Nonemployer Statistics (businesses with no paid employees). 2024. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/2022-nonemployer-statistics.html
5. IBISWorld. Furniture Repair & Reupholstery in the US — Market Size, Number of Businesses, Employment. 2026. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-size/furniture-repair-reupholstery/1713/

For the complete numbered source list (references [5]– and –, covering SBA size standards, BLS wage data, franchise economics, the private aggregators, pricing, demand drivers, regulation, and public proxies), see the primer for NAICS 811420, from which the figures above are drawn.