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The data behind the case for commercial, in one place

A RocketLevel reference, backed by decades of experience in the trade. These are the numbers that anchor every play in this Hub, pulled from the industry's two main annual benchmarks, the C&R State of the Industry Report (from Cleaning & Restoration magazine, or C&R, powered by KnowHow), which is free, and the 2025 Restoration Industry Association (RIA) Cost of Doing Business Report, based on fiscal year 2024 (FY2024) data, which is free to download. The RIA figures below come from the 2025 report itself, and each bullet names the page it sits on. We summarize the figures that matter for a commercial decision and point you to the full reports at the source.

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How to use this: every stat here ties to a play in the Hub. The getting-paid numbers anchor the Getting Paid shelf, the residential-mix numbers anchor Concentration Risk, and the margin numbers anchor the Operating Scorecard.

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Getting paid: the #1 problem

• Getting paid is the industry's number one problem, and it widened its lead in 2025. The 2026 C&R State of the Industry Report says it took the top spot from hiring in 2024 and has held it since, with third-party administrator (TPA) timelines, carrier negotiation and supplement approval named as the drivers. The report's year-over-year chart (page 14) puts the split for FY2025 at 40.8% of respondents naming getting paid as their biggest challenge against 20.9% for hiring, up from 32.2% against 26.5% in FY2024.
• Payment is slowest on program work. The 2026 C&R State of the Industry Report is direct about why: managed repair programs pay on their own timelines, which are often slow and not negotiable, and companies that leaned harder on TPAs in 2024 may have traded one cash-flow problem for another. The report also states that by the end of 2024, nearly three-quarters of restorers said payment took 30 days or more, and the share waiting 60 days or more grew. The same report's FY2025 chart by payment source (page 15) gives the finer split: roughly 38% of respondents collect private-pay jobs in full inside 15 days, while about 37% wait 46 to 60 days on TPA and program work. The chart carries no data labels, so quote both as approximate.
• The industry average time to get paid is 60 days, and it does not simply lengthen as companies get larger. Read directly at page 33 of the 2025 RIA Cost of Doing Business Report, by revenue band:

The 46-to-91-day spread quoted elsewhere in this library is correct, but the progression is not a straight line. The worst wait in the industry sits in the middle of the growth curve, where companies take on larger insurance and program work before collections has caught up. One caution when you quote it: the report states the 60-day average in body text and never plots it, and the unweighted mean of the seven bands is about 63 days.

The residential-commercial mix

• 67.31% of companies did 75% or more residential work in 2025, the highest share in the survey's four-year history, up from 59.78% in 2024 (2026 C&R State of the Industry Report, page 8). Plenty of shops say they want commercial, yet the residential share keeps climbing.
• The mix flips with size, and the flip is sharp. Read directly at page 14 of the 2025 RIA Cost of Doing Business Report, based on FY2024 data: under $1M runs 86% residential and 14% commercial. $1.1M to $5M runs 73% residential, 21% commercial, 6% other. $10.1M to $15M runs 65% residential, 35% commercial. Above $50M the mix inverts to 35% residential, 57% commercial, 8% other. Read the shape of that cut before you use it. It segments companies by size within a single survey year rather than following the same companies over time, so it tells you larger companies reported a different mix, not that a company's mix changes as it grows.
• 53% of companies took less than 30% of revenue from commercial work in FY2024, read directly at page 13 of the 2025 RIA Cost of Doing Business Report, based on FY2024 data. That is down from roughly three-quarters in the prior edition, which is the one encouraging number in this section for anyone building a commercial book. The same page puts average revenue at $5.13M per location. Read the page closely if you quote it: it also says nearly two-thirds of respondents draw close to 70% of revenue from residential work, which does not sit easily beside the 53% figure. The report gives both, from two survey questions, and does not reconcile them.

Margins and overhead

• Overhead averages 38.53% of gross revenue, up from roughly 36% the year before. Read directly at page 37 of the 2025 RIA Cost of Doing Business Report. Overhead labor, meaning estimators, accounting, coordinators, admin and sales, averaged 16.88% of revenue (page 38). The band spread on pages 38 and 39 is wide and it is not a smooth curve. $1M to $2.99M is the worst in the industry, $10M to $19.9M climbs back up, overhead breaks down between $20M and $99.9M, and the $100M+ band climbs back to about 39%:

If you are between $1M and $6M and your overhead feels heavy, the benchmark agrees with you.