Underwrite the actual service territory

A dated county evidence file, not a valuation table

This snapshot covers 14 selected Illinois counties and five industry groups. It combines two separately labelled reference periods: Census CBP 2023 employer-establishment counts and BLS QCEW 2025 private-sector annual averages. It does not calculate growth between the series. The selection is not all 102 Illinois counties or a list of locally owned sale candidates.

70 county/industry observations shown.

Download all 70 observations with codes, flags and QCEW source URLs (CSV).

Read the measures before drawing a conclusion

For example, the Cook County 2025 QCEW combined plumbing/heating/air-conditioning group reports 1,334 annual-average private establishments, 13,727 annual-average employment and $96,991 average annual pay. The group combines activities and employee roles; its pay is not an hourly technician rate, full employer cost or a recruiting quote. The separately dated CBP count is not a growth baseline for that number.

An establishment is an operating location, not necessarily an independent company or owner. Multi-location firms, industry assignments, coverage differences and suppressed cells matter. CBP covers employer establishments; it does not count all nonemployer operators. QCEW covers employment in its program scope and here uses private ownership code 5. Two of the 70 QCEW observations are suppressed; their employment/pay fields are unavailable rather than treated as zero. We conservatively hide all three QCEW metrics for those rows. No suppressed value is inferred from another cell.

Use the territory evidence in an operating review

Map the target's actual jobs, revenue, contribution, technician locations, travel and customer/contract authority to counties and municipalities. The same county can include very different dispatch patterns. The table gives sector context; it does not reveal which jobs the seller can win, how many firms are acquirable, licensing eligibility, market share or valuation multiples.

• Chicago-area territory: reconcile the actual municipal work/permit footprint and observed paid travel. County totals do not identify dispatch time across the target's neighborhoods.
• Central and northern routes: test whether crew coverage, travel, service cadence and backup capacity support the actual footprint. A smaller employer count does not establish spare labor or less competition.
• Metro East and western border territories: isolate out-of-state jobs and approvals. This Illinois county extract contains no Missouri or Iowa observations and does not establish cross-border work authority.

Use the route time/contribution tool with company records and the team continuity framework. Neither county pay nor the number of establishments should replace a supported role-cost or customer analysis.

Reference years, codes and refresh

At review, Census lists 2023 as the latest CBP year and has not announced a 2024 release date. The CBP extract uses its 2017 NAICS codes; the BLS group codes and their descriptive scope are shown separately. These are broadly aligned industry groups, not a claim that every program classification and coverage rule is identical. Plumbing and HVAC are combined here; no dedicated garage-door or restoration count is estimated.

The extract is pinned for reproducibility. It is not a live data feed. Recheck agency releases/revisions and definitions before using it in a new analysis; rebuild the source extract with its retrieval script and preserve the new URLs, dates and hashes. Methodology: Census CBP, BLS QCEW overview and QCEW CSV fields and disclosure flags. Source files: Census 2023 county download and the county-specific QCEW URLs in the CSV.