Quick answer: Across 7,560,863 US businesses in a dataset that records website presence as a real field, 1,034,933 have no website. That is 13.7%. The figure you see repeated across lead-generation blogs, that 40 to 70 percent of local businesses have no site, is not close. More useful than the average is the spread: barber shops are at 35.4% and HVAC companies at 2.6%. Pick the wrong trade and 24 out of every 25 businesses you call already have a website.
This matters because almost everyone selling websites starts by calling plumbers, and plumbers are one of the worst trades you can pick.
The numbers, by trade
| Trade | Businesses checked | No website | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barber shop | 72,162 | 25,513 | 35.4% |
| Beauty salon | 154,405 | 51,487 | 33.3% |
| Pet groomer | 29,725 | 9,453 | 31.8% |
| Tattoo parlour | 35,336 | 9,963 | 28.2% |
| Car repair | 283,648 | 76,240 | 26.9% |
| Towing | 22,098 | 5,859 | 26.5% |
| Dry cleaner | 34,229 | 8,208 | 24.0% |
| Childcare | 73,964 | 16,213 | 21.9% |
| Nail salon | 82,287 | 17,072 | 20.7% |
| Hair salon | 187,088 | 38,663 | 20.7% |
| Landscaper | 85,990 | 12,356 | 14.4% |
| Gym | 130,599 | 15,329 | 11.7% |
| Chiropractor | 76,363 | 8,849 | 11.6% |
| Restaurant | 947,976 | 105,247 | 11.1% |
| Dentist | 181,071 | 17,538 | 9.7% |
| Med spa | 28,072 | 1,898 | 6.8% |
| Real estate | 309,488 | 20,275 | 6.6% |
| Electrician | 32,181 | 1,977 | 6.1% |
| Plumber | 31,771 | 1,298 | 4.1% |
| Law firm | 145,237 | 4,085 | 2.8% |
| Roofer | 37,967 | 1,042 | 2.7% |
| HVAC | 45,659 | 1,186 | 2.6% |
Read that table before you pick a niche
The gap between the top and the bottom is roughly fourteen times. A thousand barber shops yields about 354 prospects. A thousand HVAC companies yields 26.
That is the difference between a list worth working and a list that wastes a week. And the trades at the bottom, plumbers, roofers, HVAC, law firms, are exactly the ones most people start with, because they sound like businesses with money.
They do have money. They also already have websites, because they have been sold one by somebody every month for ten years.
Why the 40 to 70 percent figure is wrong
It gets repeated because it is roughly what you see when you scrape a map listing page and count blanks. Two things inflate it.
The first is that a blank website field is not proof of no website. Map data is assembled from many sources and a missing field often means nobody filled it in, not that nothing exists. Treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence roughly doubles the number.
The second is more subtle and it is the one that caught us. If you pool several data sources, most of them do not record websites at all. Licensing boards, company registries and health-provider registries have no website column in the first place. Every row from those sources looks like a business with no website, because the field was never there to fill.
We hit this directly. Pooling every source we hold produces a no-website rate of 46.5%. That number is an artifact of missing columns, not a finding about the world, and publishing it would have been wrong. The 13.7% above comes only from the one source that records website presence as a genuine field.
If a tool or an article quotes you a number above about 35% for all local businesses, ask which sources it pooled.
How to use this when you are picking a list
Sort by rate, not by how lucrative the trade sounds. A barber charges less than a roofer and will pay less for a site. But you will have fourteen times as many conversations, and conversations are the thing in short supply when you start.
Watch the absolute numbers too, not just the rate. Restaurants are only 11.1%, but that is 105,247 businesses, the largest pool in the table. Car repair at 26.9% gives 76,240. A middling rate on a huge category can beat a great rate on a small one.
Combine a high rate with a phone-first trade. Barbers, salons, groomers and car repair shops answer the phone during the day because that is how their customers book. That matters more than it sounds if calling is your channel.
Do not take 2.6% as a reason to never call an HVAC company. It is a reason not to build your whole list from them. A targeted list of HVAC companies whose sites are genuinely broken is a different and perfectly good play.
What a realistic list looks like
Work the arithmetic before you start rather than after.
If you pull 500 barber shops, roughly 177 will have no website. If a tenth of those answer and hear you out, that is 18 conversations. At a 10% close rate across those, that is one or two clients from one list.
Run the same maths on 500 HVAC companies and you get 13 prospects, maybe one conversation, probably no client. Same effort, same cost, a completely different week.
The method, stated plainly
The figures come from 7,560,863 US business records in a dataset that carries website presence as a first-class field rather than inferring it. Categories with fewer than about 20,000 records are excluded, because small categories swing too much to quote.
Two honest limits. First, website presence being absent still means "no website recorded", not "verified to have no website", so treat every number as the ceiling of a range rather than a precise count. Second, of a sample of 250 recorded domains we checked, 85.2% actually resolved. So roughly one business in seven that is counted as having a website has one that no longer loads, which means the true addressable number is somewhat higher than 13.7%, not lower.