The Census Bureau counted 12,189 businesses in the United States in 2023 that run parking lots and garages or park cars as valets, and 1,355 of them were in Los Angeles County. That’s 11.1%, about one in nine. The county has 2.9% of the country’s residents and 3.6% of its businesses of every kind, which makes parking about three times as common a line of business here as it is nationally.
Those counts come from County Business Patterns, the bureau’s yearly tally of business locations with a payroll. Parking is industry 812930, Parking Lots and Garages, which covers “providing parking space for motor vehicles, usually on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis and/or valet parking services.” The bureau counts each place with a payroll, so a company running ten staffed garages counts ten times, while a valet company is generally counted once, at its office, however many restaurant curbs it works. Garages run by a city or county aren’t counted at all. Most of the 1,355 are small, with 892 under five employees, and together they employed 10,947 people and had a $353 million payroll that year.
Manhattan is a distant second among counties with 886, and New York City’s five boroughs together have 1,289. Counted by metro area, greater New York edges greater Los Angeles, 1,625 to 1,593, but it has 6.8 million more residents, and no metro of a million people or more has as many parking businesses per resident as Los Angeles does.
Los Angeles County has more parking businesses than every state except New York and California, and almost as many as the rest of California put together, 1,355 to 1,371. Texas, with three times the county’s population, has 682.
Los Angeles County has more parking businesses than film and television post-production companies, 1,355 to 1,334, though 42% of the country’s post-production companies are here. It also has more of them than liquor stores, which number 1,328, or gyms and fitness clubs, at 1,283. Its talent agents and managers still outnumber them, 1,405 to 1,355.
The bureau’s ZIP code tables place 1,217 of the county’s parking businesses, and 374 of those, nearly a third, are in the 16 ZIP codes along Wilshire Boulevard between Downtown and the ocean. Those ZIPs cover about 1% of the county’s land. Downtown’s 90012 has the most, 51, and Beverly Hills’ 90210 and Hollywood’s 90028 have 49 apiece. ZIP 90010, a 0.4-square-mile stretch of Wilshire that’s mostly in Koreatown, has 47, one fewer than the state of Kentucky. Thirty-nine of those 47 have fewer than five employees.
In 1986, the earliest year in the bureau’s online county files, Los Angeles County already had 961 of the country’s 7,794 parking businesses, or 12.3%, and its share has stayed above a tenth every year since. It fell as low as 10.3% in 2004 and peaked at 12.7% in 1994 and again in 2010. The county’s count changed little when the bureau switched to new industry codes in 1998, going from 1,128 to 1,149. Manhattan has had fewer every year.
Method. Counts are establishments with a payroll in the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns, for 2023 unless a year is given, in industry 812930. Businesses run by their owners alone, with no employees, aren’t in it. State totals come from the bureau’s state file, and populations are its estimates for July 1, 2023. ZIP code counts come from ZIP Code Business Patterns, which lists a ZIP only where it has three or more parking businesses. A ZIP counts as along Wilshire if at least 1,000 feet of the boulevard, as OpenStreetMap draws it, runs inside it or on its edge. Before 1998 the bureau coded parking as SIC industry group 752, Automobile Parking, whose definition doesn’t mention valet service. The code is in tools/parkingbiz/.