PestPin Research
Pest Control Licensing Report 2026
· Source publication timing varies by regulator
By Vijaygopal
In the directory snapshot processed October 3, 2026, PestPin tracks 23,291 pest control businesses matched to licenses marked active when processed across 35 U.S. licensing jurisdictions (states plus the District of Columbia) and 5,169 cities. Every company is matched to an official license record marked active when that source was processed. Confirm current status on the linked regulator record before hiring.
Download the machine-readable CSVFree to use, quote, and republish, including commercially, as long as you credit PestPin and link to this page. No permission needed. The figures are directory-snapshot counts, so please carry the processing date with them.
Press and data questions: hello@pestpin.com. We can pull the numbers for a single city or state on request.
A processing date is not a regulator publication date
PestPin currently has 14,406 state-board rows that are not publicly listable. That group can include inactive records, rows excluded from pest-control coverage, and records that could not be matched cleanly. It is not a historical lapse count. We reprocess official sources on a recurring schedule, but regulator publication timing and data access vary. The official source remains the place to confirm status before hiring.
Businesses by pest category
Categories reflect the license data and directory classification available when each record was processed. 23,291 businesses are listed under general pest control, while 728 are listed under wildlife removal. For unclaimed profiles, these categories do not confirm the services currently offered, service area, availability, or capacity. Confirm all four with the company.
| Pest specialty | Businesses |
|---|---|
| General Pest Control | 23,291 |
| Rodent Control | 16,522 |
| Bed Bug Control | 16,464 |
| Ant Control | 16,447 |
| Cockroach Control | 16,447 |
| Flea & Tick Control | 16,440 |
| Spider Control | 16,439 |
| Wasp & Hornet Control | 16,438 |
| Termite Control | 6,517 |
| Mosquito Control | 1,706 |
| Wildlife Removal | 728 |
License-matched businesses by state
Top licensing jurisdictions by distinct businesses whose license was marked active when PestPin processed the directory snapshot. A business holding several licenses counts once here, so these run smaller than the license-record counts on our license data page.
| State | Businesses matched |
|---|---|
| California | 3,607 |
| Florida | 3,597 |
| Texas | 3,428 |
| New York | 1,652 |
| Virginia | 991 |
| Ohio | 811 |
| North Carolina | 794 |
| South Carolina | 748 |
| Tennessee | 715 |
| Arizona | 651 |
| Wisconsin | 621 |
| Oklahoma | 588 |
The 25 largest cities we cover, ranked by licensed pest control businesses per 100,000 residents
Find your city in the table. Each figure counts distinct businesses whose state license record places them in that city, divided by the city's population. The ranking covers only the states where we read the regulator's current roster directly, so a thin count is never an artifact of a stored snapshot.
How cities are counted: most states publish each business's city. Texas, South Carolina, Utah, Florida and Colorado publish a county and no address on at least some records, so those records are counted under the county's principal city (a Tarrant County license counts toward Fort Worth). A small number of records in 3 other states are placed the same way. Every listing links the regulator's own record, so any row can be checked at the source.
Left out of this table: New York, NY. A city is dropped when its published population and its records sit on different bases, so a per-resident figure would be arithmetic on two numbers that do not match. New York is that case: the population is the five-borough total, while the records are filed under borough and neighborhood names that carry no population of their own, so the division would describe our city table rather than New York. We say what is missing instead of printing a figure we know is wrong.
| Rank | City | Population | Licensed businesses | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fort Worth, TX | 996,000 | 228 | 22.9 |
| 2 | Houston, TX | 2,390,000 | 428 | 17.9 |
| 3 | Dallas, TX | 1,326,000 | 211 | 15.9 |
| 4 | San Antonio, TX | 1,526,000 | 223 | 14.6 |
| 5 | El Paso, TX | 679,000 | 98 | 14.4 |
| 6 | Fresno, CA | 545,000 | 76 | 13.9 |
| 7 | Jacksonville, FL | 1,009,000 | 132 | 13.1 |
| 8 | Austin, TX | 979,000 | 113 | 11.5 |
| 9 | Sacramento, CA | 525,000 | 57 | 10.9 |
| 10 | Raleigh, NC | 482,000 | 49 | 10.2 |
| 11 | Memphis, TN | 618,000 | 51 | 8.3 |
| 12 | Colorado Springs, CO | 489,000 | 39 | 8 |
| 13 | Charlotte, NC | 911,000 | 66 | 7.2 |
| 14 | Nashville, TN | 687,000 | 46 | 6.7 |
| 15 | San Jose, CA | 969,000 | 60 | 6.2 |
| 16 | San Diego, CA | 1,389,000 | 82 | 5.9 |
| 17 | Louisville, KY | 622,000 | 34 | 5.5 |
| 18 | Columbus, OH | 913,000 | 47 | 5.1 |
| 19 | Atlanta, GA | 499,000 | 23 | 4.6 |
| 20 | Denver, CO | 716,000 | 26 | 3.6 |
| 21 | Los Angeles, CA | 3,878,000 | 121 | 3.1 |
| 22 | San Francisco, CA | 827,000 | 18 | 2.2 |
| 23 | Detroit, MI | 633,000 | 10 | 1.6 |
| 24 | Seattle, WA | 780,000 | 12 | 1.5 |
| 25 | Chicago, IL | 2,721,000 | 8 | 0.3 |
How to read a low number. Treat every figure as a floor rather than a total. A license is recorded at the address the business gave its regulator, so a company working across a metro can sit under a suburb, and a record filed under a neighborhood name counts toward that name instead of the city around it. Both push a city's figure down and neither pushes it up. States also structure licensing differently, and some register a company once at its headquarters. A low figure here means we matched few records to that city name. It is not a finding that the city has too few pest control companies, and we do not publish it as one.
For reporters: the summary, free to quote
Fort Worth has more licensed pest control businesses per resident than any other large American city on PestPin's list: 228 businesses hold a Texas pest control license record placed in Fort Worth, which works out to 22.9 for every 100,000 residents. Texas cities take 6 of the top 10 places. The counts come from state licensing boards rather than from reviews or advertising, and every one of the 23,291 businesses PestPin lists carries its license number and a link to the state's own public lookup, so a homeowner can check a company before letting it into the house.
Credit PestPin and link to this page. The underlying rows are in the CSV above, and we will pull the figure for any single city or state on request at hello@pestpin.com.
Why this report shows no year-over-year trend
State regulators publish who holds a license today. They do not publish who held one last year, and the rosters are overwritten rather than archived, so a twelve-month direction of travel cannot be recovered from the sources themselves. We started keeping our own dated record of what changes between one check and the next in August 2026. Until that record is long enough to describe a year, this report carries levels and not trends. The movement we have actually observed so far, with its start date on the page, is on the monthly snapshot.
2,487 cities have just one active-status business record
Of the 5,169 U.S. cities with active-status records in PestPin's latest snapshot, 2,487 have exactly one: a single source-linked business record listed there. This measures directory coverage, not an active service area or provider availability. Homeowners should confirm both directly.
Methodology
- Companies are sourced only from official state pesticide/structural pest control licensing boards, the public records that govern who may legally treat pests for hire. We never scrape review sites or buy lead lists.
- Official sources are reprocessed on a recurring schedule. Publication schedules and access methods vary by regulator, so a directory processing date does not mean every state published fresh data that day. Each profile links to its source where available for a current check.
- We place each record in a city using the location the source gives us and geographic data. A record location is not a claimed service area. Figures on this page come from the most recent PestPin directory snapshot.
- National headline counts deduplicate businesses and cities across all integrated source systems. State table and CSV rows deduplicate only within each license-state source, so they are not additive: a business or city with records in more than one state can appear in more than one row. The CSV includes a separate national summary row and explicit counting-scope fields.
Other editions
Monthly licensing snapshot
What changed on the rosters between one check and the next: first appearances, eligibility changes, and newly integrated states.
Licensed but unreachable
How many active pest control license records publish no phone, no website and no email, nationally and by state.
What state regulators have said
Four dated state actions on how pest control work is sold, 2025 to 2026, each linked to the agency's own release.
What Texas and Florida disciplined licensees for
A year of Texas enforcement actions and Florida's reports for early 2026: what licensees were cited for, the fines, and what to check at the door.
Questions this report answers
How many licensed pest control companies are in the United States?
PestPin's October 3, 2026 directory snapshot matches 23,291 distinct U.S. pest control businesses to licenses or registrations marked active when processed, across 35 jurisdictions (states plus the District of Columbia) whose license source we process. This counts businesses PestPin carries, not every licensee a state holds; check the regulator for the authoritative total.
Which state has the most licensed pest control companies?
In PestPin's October 3, 2026 snapshot, California leads with 3,607 matched businesses, followed by Florida (3,597), Texas (3,428), New York (1,652). These count distinct businesses PestPin matched, not regulator totals, and not license records: a business can hold several licenses.
Which US city has the most licensed pest control businesses per resident?
Of the 25 largest cities in the states where PestPin reads the regulator's current roster directly, Fort Worth, Texas ranks first: 228 distinct businesses hold a state license record placed in Fort Worth, or 22.9 per 100,000 residents. Texas cities take 6 of the top 10 places. Each figure is a floor rather than a total, because a record filed under a suburb or a neighborhood name counts toward that name instead of the city around it.
Where is pest control supply thinnest?
In PestPin's October 3, 2026 snapshot, 2,487 of 5,169 covered cities have only one matched license-record business. A low count means PestPin matched few records there, not that the area lacks licensed operators.
Is PestPin's license data current?
PestPin reprocesses official sources on a recurring schedule and shows the processing date on every count. The snapshot was processed October 3, 2026. Regulators publish on their own schedules, so confirm current standing at the official source linked on each listing.
Compare source-linked pest control records
Every listed company is matched to an official license record. Confirm current status, services, coverage, insurance, and availability directly before hiring.
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