Verifiable numbers on the home service market
We publish data you can safely cite: every row was opened at its primary source, quoted verbatim, and stamped with the date it was checked. Anything that did not hold up was removed — and listed.
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What a home-service lead costs, by platform
What Google Ads, Google Local Services Ads, Yelp, Thumbtack, and Meta actually charge for — quoted from each platform — plus the two industry benchmarks that put a dollar figure on a lead.
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Local Services Ads rules, quoted from Google
16 Local Services Ads rules quoted directly from Google's Help Center — categories, badges, background checks, disputes, and ranking — plus what changed when Google Guaranteed and Google Screened merged into Google Verified.
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Google Business Profile rules, quoted from Google
14 Google Business Profile rules quoted directly from Google's Help Centre, plus 4 commonly repeated rules Google has never published.
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How homeowners actually choose a contractor
Eleven verified numbers on how US homeowners search for, evaluate, and choose a home-service contractor, plus the eight famous claims about this exact topic that could not be confirmed anywhere.
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Consumer Review Rule: what 16 CFR 465 actually bans
16 rules from the FTC's Consumer Review Rule (16 CFR Part 465), Google, Yelp, and California law on what a business may and may not do with reviews — including the exact, currently-enforceable civil penalty per violation.
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AI search and local business: measured, not predicted
16 measured (not forecast) numbers on AI search behavior and crawler rules, each with the primary source and what it does and doesn't say about a local service business.
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How much Americans spend on home improvement, by source
Fourteen verified figures on what U.S. homeowners spend on improvement and repair, why the three most-quoted market-size totals ($859B, $611B, $603B) describe different things, and where two widely repeated door-replacement ROI numbers actually come from.
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What the home-service trades actually pay, by BLS
National median wages, headcount, and 2025-2035 job growth for ten home-service trades, from BLS OEWS wage data and the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
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How Fragmented the Home-Service Industry Really Is
How many home-service businesses exist, how small they really are by employee count, how many operate with no employees at all, and how many new ones survive — from Census SUSB, Census Nonemployer Statistics, Census Business Formation Statistics, BLS Business Employment Dynamics, and SBA Office of Advocacy.
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What businesses really spend on marketing, by universe
Marketing spend benchmarks from three primary sources — a survey of large firms, the IAB/PwC market-size report, and IRS sole-proprietor tax data — each row labelled with the population it actually describes.
How this is built
One rule: a number reaches the page only if we opened its primary source and could quote it word for word. No estimates, no averaging two sources into a third, nothing lifted from a “top 50 statistics” roundup.
Free to reuse
Published under CC BY 4.0: take the figures into your articles, reports and decks — with a link to the page you took them from. The link is not for us; it is how your reader reaches the primary source.
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