Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

The Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services sector (NAICS 54) aggregates 93 distinct sub-industries into one benchmarking unit. At the sector level, the average net profit margin is not reported - a figure that is significantly below average. Averages at this tier can mislead because they blend high-margin specialty lines with commodity operators: margin dispersion across the sub-industries is wide. When you benchmark a business against a sector, always drop one level deeper to the NAICS 6-digit industry that matches your actual operations.

Scale metrics reinforce the story, and they come from two separate sources on two separate clocks. Census Bureau CBP 2023 records 51,508,027 employees across 4,945,910 establishments in this sector, while IRS SOI reports $2.5T of annual receipts from C corporation returns across the 10 sub-industries that have an SOI figure: a different population, a different year and a different denominator, so the two figures should never be divided into one another. The largest employer sub-industry is Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services with 10,401,442 workers. Understanding which sub-industries drive headcount helps identify where labor cost trends, wage pressure, and hiring competition will concentrate, all of which feed directly into the profit margin shown above.

For operators, investors, and analysts, the right move is to use this sector page as a map rather than a conclusion. Click into any sub-industry below to see its actual NAICS-6 profit margin, entity-type breakdown (sole prop vs. S-corp vs. C-corp), state-level employment concentration, and SBA lending activity. Sector-level numbers are the aggregate; the real benchmarking precision lives one layer down in the IRS SOI and Census CBP micro-data that PlainBizBench surfaces on each industry page.