See how your cost structure, margins, and growth compare to the rest of the industry.
You know what you made last year. You don’t know if that’s good.
The operator across town running the same routes might be keeping twice what you keep, and nothing in your P&L would tell you.
We pulled the real books from 125 pest control operators and built the ranges: cost of service, labor, marketing, gross margin, EBITDA. Segmented by revenue tier and region, so you are comparing against operators your size instead of a national average that describes nobody.
Most industry reports run on surveys, which means they run on what operators say. This one runs on what they actually spent.
Top performers run 24.2% EBITDA. Everybody else runs 12.7%.
On a million-dollar book, that is $115,000 a year. Same revenue. Same routes. The difference never shows up in your revenue line, which is why most operators never find it.
| Median % of revenue | Top performers | Everyone else |
|---|---|---|
| EBITDA margin | 24.2% | 12.7% |
| Revenue growth | 27.2% | 12.2% |
| Gross margin | 64.0% | 60.3% |
| Operating expenses | 38.2% | 45.4% |
| Direct labor | 19.5% | 24.2% |
| Indirect labor | 10.6% | 14.4% |
| Sales & marketing | 10.1% | 12.3% |
| Materials & chemicals | 10.2% | 8.3% |
Look at that last row again. The most profitable operators spend more on chemicals, not less. They run leaner everywhere else. Most operators cut the one line they shouldn’t.
Why benchmarking matters
You already track revenue, expenses, and profit. The problem is that your numbers only make sense against themselves. Nothing in them tells you whether a 14% margin is good or whether your labor cost quietly climbed three points over two years.
Without a reference point, you cannot tell:
That is what a benchmark gives you. Not more numbers. Context for the ones you already have.
WHAT THIS BENCHMARK INCLUDES
Cost Structure
The benchmark provides visibility into how key expense categories behave across the industry, including cost of service, people cost, marketing, and operating expenses. These are presented as distributions, allowing operators to see not just averages, but ranges.
Profitability
Gross margin and EBITDA margin are presented across percentiles, showing how profitability varies across operators. This helps clarify what is typical, what is above average, and where there may be structural pressure on margins.
Growth Patterns
Revenue growth is analyzed across the dataset, highlighting how growth differs by operator size and across the broader cohort. This provides a clearer understanding of what growth looks like in practice, rather than in theory.
Comparative Performance
The benchmark includes comparisons between higher-performing operators and the rest of the cohort. These comparisons focus on financial structure, not operational tactics, to show how performance differences are reflected in the numbers.
Segmentation by Size and Region
Financial patterns are segmented by revenue tier and geographic region, enabling more relevant comparisons by company size and operating environment.
Every number in here maps to a line you already have on your P&L. Nothing exotic, nothing you need an analyst to interpret.
This is built from real bookkeeping and accounting data across 125 pest control operators, mapped to a consistent chart of accounts so the comparisons actually hold up. 116 of them had full-year data for the growth and profitability analysis.
Most industry reports are surveys. Someone asks an owner what their labor cost is and writes down the answer. This one reads the books.
Everything is segmented by revenue tier and region, so you are compared against operators your size in your part of the country.
Clean financials show you where you stand. Benchmarks tell you whether that is any good.
Pull your own P&L, put it next to the tables, and ask one question on every line: where do I stand relative to this number?
Then use it to:
You are not trying to copy the benchmark. You are trying to find the gaps worth fixing.
This is financial structure and historical performance. It will not tell you about technician utilization, route efficiency, or pricing strategy. It will not forecast anything.
If you are looking for operational tactics, this is not it. If you want to know whether your cost structure is normal for a shop your size, it is.
