About

The Pest Control Brief is an independent trade publication covering the structural pest control industry in the United States. We publish market data, price benchmarks and regulatory reference material, and we publish the underlying numbers with every story.

Why this exists

Pest control is a $7.4 billion payroll industry employing around 139,000 people across more than 16,500 locations, and almost nothing about it is documented in public. The numbers that circulate come from two places: proprietary surveys that cannot be checked, and lead-generation sites that publish price ranges with no method behind them.

Meanwhile the federal government publishes a great deal of usable data about this industry, and almost nobody reads it. That is the gap this publication fills. We work from the same public files anyone can download, we show the arithmetic, and we make the result citable.

Who we write for

Two audiences, served from one set of numbers.

• Operators. Owners, branch managers and technicians who need to know what a market looks like before entering it, what accounts are worth, what the licence actually requires and what the going rate for labour is.
• Property owners. Homeowners, landlords and facility managers who need to know what a fair price looks like, what a treatment involves, how long it really takes and how to check that a company is licensed.

These groups are usually served by separate publications with opposite incentives. We think the same evidence serves both, and that a homeowner who understands route economics negotiates better while an operator who understands what homeowners are told sells better.

How we are funded

The Pest Control Brief is published by CT Strategic Partners LLC. We do not sell leads, we do not sell placement in rankings, and no company can pay to appear or to be removed. Where that changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it changes anywhere else.

Editorial standards

Our sourcing rules, the datasets we use and the distinctions we refuse to blur are set out in full on our methodology page. In short: every number has a named source and a year, derived figures show their arithmetic, and anything we cannot source does not get published.

Articles carry the publication as the byline rather than an invented author name. Where an individual contributor writes for us, they will be named and their qualifications stated.

Contact

Corrections, data requests and story tips are welcome. See contact.