U.S. home improvement retail spans national home centers, hardware stores, paint specialists, building-material dealers, garden suppliers, and outdoor power equipment retailers. In 2024, the listed retail categories reported billions of dollars in sales, while large chains combined store networks with growing online operations. Remodeling demand provides additional market context, although homeowner spending is not the same measure as retail-register sales.
Contents
- Market size by retail category
- Payroll and employment
- The establishment footprint
- Sales and operating performance
- Digital and omnichannel retail
- Remodeling and repair spending
Market size by retail category
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 Annual Integrated Economic Survey reported sales in thousands of U.S. dollars for employer firms. The categories below use the survey’s 2017 NAICS structure, so they should be read as source-defined industry groups rather than a single official “home improvement retail” total.
| Retail category | 2024 sales |
|---|---|
| Home centers | $252,882,361 thousand |
| Other building material dealers | $142,636,918 thousand |
| Nursery, garden center, and farm supply stores | $49,571,631 thousand |
| Hardware stores | $39,774,770 thousand |
| Paint and wallpaper stores | $17,158,439 thousand |
| Outdoor power equipment stores | $11,613,150 thousand |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Retail Trade Summary Statistics.
Home centers were the largest listed category, with $252,882,361 thousand in 2024 sales. Other building material dealers reported $142,636,918 thousand. The remaining categories were smaller by reported sales: nursery, garden center, and farm supply stores recorded $49,571,631 thousand; hardware stores, $39,774,770 thousand; paint and wallpaper stores, $17,158,439 thousand; and outdoor power equipment stores, $11,613,150 thousand.
The Census Bureau’s broader building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers industry reported $516,483,315 thousand in sales in 2023. That figure is a wider industry measure and comes from a different survey year, so it should not be combined mechanically with the individual 2024 category values. See 2023 Retail Trade Summary Statistics.
Payroll and employment
The 2024 Census figures also show the labor scale behind these categories. Home centers employed 721,611 people and reported $21,837,211 thousand in annual payroll. Other building material dealers employed 287,185 people, with annual payroll of $17,820,183 thousand.
Hardware stores employed 149,776 people and reported $5,376,179 thousand in payroll. Nursery, garden center, and farm supply stores employed 155,257 people, with $5,478,445 thousand in annual payroll. Paint and wallpaper stores employed 43,314 people and reported $2,261,267 thousand in payroll, while outdoor power equipment stores employed 28,443 people and reported $1,364,310 thousand.
These measures describe employer firms in the Census categories and use annual payroll reported in thousands of dollars. They are not wage-rate estimates, and they do not show how employment or payroll changed from the prior year. The figures are useful for comparing the relative labor footprint of the categories in the same 2024 source.
Source for all figures in this section: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Retail Trade Summary Statistics.
The establishment footprint
The 2022 Economic Census provides a separate view of physical retail presence. In the broader building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers subsector, it counted 28,285 firms and 49,169 establishments. A firm is a business organization, while an establishment is generally an individual business location, so the two counts answer different questions.
Within building material and supplies dealers, the Economic Census counted 21,320 firms and 35,342 establishments. The home-center segment accounted for 776 firms and 5,035 establishments. Paint and wallpaper retailers totaled 1,464 firms and 7,364 establishments. Hardware retailers totaled 10,087 firms and 16,434 establishments, while other building material dealers totaled 23,208 firms and 30,372 establishments.
| 2022 category | Firms | Establishments |
|---|---|---|
| Building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers subsector | 28,285 | 49,169 |
| Building material and supplies dealers | 21,320 | 35,342 |
| Home centers | 776 | 5,035 |
| Paint and wallpaper retailers | 1,464 | 7,364 |
| Hardware retailers | 10,087 | 16,434 |
| Other building material dealers | 23,208 | 30,372 |
Source: 2022 Economic Census retail summary.
The establishment counts use 2022 NAICS, whereas the 2024 Annual Integrated Economic Survey categories use 2017 NAICS. Category names can therefore look similar without being perfectly interchangeable across the two sources. The 2022 counts are best used to understand the scale and distribution of the physical business footprint, not as a current 2024 store census.
Sales and operating performance
Company filings add retailer-specific operating measures that are not available in the same form in the Census category tables. The Home Depot reported $159.5 billion in net sales for fiscal 2024, an increase of 4.5% from fiscal 2023. Its total comparable sales declined 1.8% in fiscal 2024. The company operated 2,347 stores at February 2, 2025 and reported $599.92 in sales per retail square foot for fiscal 2024.
Lowe’s reported $83.7 billion in net sales for fiscal 2024. Its comparable sales declined 2.7% in fiscal 2024. These comparable-sales measures follow each company’s own filing definitions and fiscal calendars; they are not directly equivalent to the Census industry sales measures.
| Retailer and period | Net sales | Comparable-sales result |
|---|---|---|
| The Home Depot, fiscal 2024 | $159.5 billion | Down 1.8% |
| Lowe’s, fiscal 2024 | $83.7 billion | Down 2.7% |
Sources: The Home Depot fiscal 2024 Form 10-K and Lowe’s 2024 Annual Report.
The combination of higher reported net sales at The Home Depot and a decline in total comparable sales illustrates why total sales and same-store performance should be kept separate. Net sales can reflect the company’s full operating base, while comparable sales are intended to track performance for a defined comparable store or sales base.
Digital and omnichannel retail
Online sales represented 15.1% of The Home Depot’s net sales in fiscal 2024 and increased 6.6% from fiscal 2023. The company operated 19 direct fulfillment centers in fiscal 2024 and transitioned 100% of its appliance deliveries to its market delivery network during that fiscal year.
The Home Depot also reported foundational Pro capabilities in 17 markets in fiscal 2024. These figures describe company-reported infrastructure and service development, not the size of the entire home improvement e-commerce market.
Lowe’s reported that online sales positively affected comparable sales by approximately 50 basis points in fiscal 2024. A basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point, so the company’s disclosure describes an approximate contribution to its comparable-sales result rather than a standalone online-sales percentage.
Taken together, the disclosures show several distinct parts of omnichannel retail: the online share of sales, the year-over-year change in online sales, fulfillment capacity, delivery-network changes, and the reported contribution of digital sales to comparable performance. They should not be collapsed into a single digital-market-size estimate.
Source for The Home Depot figures: fiscal 2024 Form 10-K. Source for Lowe’s figure: 2024 Annual Report.
Remodeling and repair spending
Homeowner remodeling and repair spending provides demand context, but Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies figures describe spending on owner-occupied homes rather than retail-register sales. The U.S. homeowner remodeling and repair market expanded 26.6%, from $407 billion in 2021 to $515 billion in 2022. It then contracted 1.0% to $510 billion in 2023.
Harvard JCHS estimated homeowner remodeling activity at $503 billion in 2024 and projected $509 billion for 2025. The 2025 value is a forecast, not a completed-year measurement. The updated 2024 estimate was $30.1 billion, or 6.4%, higher than the prior estimate. The updated 2025 projection was $30.5 billion, or 6.4%, higher than the prior projection.
Historically, home improvements account for about 80% of total homeowner improvement and repair spending in the Harvard JCHS benchmark series through 2023. That benchmark helps indicate the importance of improvements within the broader spending measure, but it does not convert the benchmark into retail sales.
The improvement-spending LIRA model’s correlation with the benchmark spending series was 0.83 after the 2023 American Housing Survey update. Correlation describes how closely the model and benchmark moved together in the stated evaluation context; it is not a forecast accuracy percentage.
Source: Harvard JCHS, “Benchmark Update Lifts Remodeling Market Size Projections”.
For readers comparing these statistics, the key scope distinctions are straightforward: Census data describes retail industry categories and establishments; company filings describe individual retailers and their fiscal years; Harvard JCHS describes homeowner remodeling and repair spending, including a clearly identified 2025 forecast. Measurement year, geography, industry definition, and whether a figure is an estimate or forecast all matter when interpreting home improvement retail statistics.