Ace Hardware Has More US Locations Than Home Depot and Lowe's Combined

Ace Hardware has more stores in the United States than Home Depot, Lowe’s, or any other hardware chain.

As of September 2026 there are 4,947 Ace Hardware locations across the country, more than Home Depot and Lowe’s combined. Ace didn’t build most of them.

The Store Counts

Ace has nearly two and a half times as many locations as Home Depot, and its 4,947 stores beat Home Depot and Lowe’s added together with 1,154 to spare.

Ace Is a Co-Op, Not a Franchise

Ace Hardware Corporation is a retailer-owned cooperative, which is the part most people get wrong about it. Its retailers bought the company in 1973, after founder Richard Hesse died. Each store is independently owned. The owners are members of the co-op, not franchisees paying royalties. They share in the cooperative’s profits instead of paying a cut of every sale.

That distinction explains how Ace gets to 4,947 stores. They don’t need to build anything. An existing hardware store can join Ace, hang the sign, get access to the supply chain, and start operating under the brand. A grocery chain can bolt a hardware section onto an existing store. A family business that’s been around for decades can convert without giving up ownership.

It also means stores leave the network as easily as they join it.

What Five Months of Data Shows

Between April and September, Ace went from 4,847 locations to 4,947. That net gain of 100 is three separate movements:

• 129 new stores entered the dataset
• 41 stores left it
• 12 stores that had been closed or inactive in April came back

A chain that reports “we added 100 stores” is describing all three at once.

The Rebrands

Of the 41 stores that left, 8 were replaced by a new store in the same city. Same town, different store ID, usually a different owner or name:

Some of these are ownership transfers, where the store ID changes and the name barely moves. Others are regional operators absorbing independent locations. The Pea Ridge and Heber Springs stores both went to F.L. Davis, an Arkansas operator consolidating nearby towns.

The remaining 33 left with no same-city replacement. Some are genuine closures and some kept trading under their own name after leaving Ace. The location data can’t tell those two apart.

The Regional Chains

Two operators from this year show how that works:

Niemann Ace Hardware, a Quincy, Illinois company, has been acquiring and opening Ace stores across the Midwest, including three in the Minneapolis suburbs at Bloomington, Eden Prairie, and Edina. They now run about 40 Ace locations across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, and have said they want to double their Wisconsin count.

Rocky’s Ace Hardware opened its 51st store in Manchester, Connecticut in a former retail space, and took over a Kennebunk, Maine location from its previous owner.

This is how Ace grows: local operators, regional chains, and grocery companies each deciding independently to put Ace’s name on the door.

Where the Lead Is Widest

In the northern tier and the Mountain West, Ace accounts for most of the six chains’ combined footprint:

The share is Ace against all six chains, so the fourth column includes Tractor Supply, Harbor Freight and Floor & Decor alongside the three shown. It is a share of those six, not of hardware retail: independent stores outside the Ace network aren’t in the denominator, and in these states there are many. Even on the narrower measure, South Dakota has 50 Ace stores against one Home Depot.

930 Stores in Five Years

According to their fiscal 2025 earnings report, Ace added 180 new domestic stores and cancelled 74, ending the year at 5,250 total locations. Over the past five years they’ve opened more than 930 new stores.

Our dataset holds 4,947 of those. The difference is mostly stores that are Ace members but fall outside a US retail location dataset: international locations, and Ace-branded sections inside other retailers.

Their cancellation figure is worth comparing to ours. 74 over a fiscal year is about six a month; the 41 we recorded across five months is about eight a month, a third higher. The periods don’t line up exactly, and our count includes stores that dropped the affiliation and kept trading rather than closing.

Density Is the Whole Advantage

Ace isn’t competing with Home Depot on price, selection, or square footage. A typical Ace store is around 10,000 square feet. A Home Depot is 100,000 or more.

What Ace has is reach. In 2,271 cities Ace is the only one of these six chains present, with none of the other five in town. That is more solo-market cities than Lowe’s has stores. The co-op model lets a store exist wherever the economics support a small shop and a knowledgeable owner.

Those 4,947 stores sit in 4,133 cities, about 1.20 stores per city. Home Depot runs 2,028 stores across 1,608 cities, 1.26 per city, a nearly identical ratio on less than half the footprint. Ace isn’t stacking stores more densely inside the same towns; it is in more than two and a half times as many towns.

Ace’s stores still cluster where the people are. California leads with 389 stores, then Florida at 311, Texas at 289, Michigan at 231, and Illinois at 207. California alone has more Ace stores than Home Depot’s 234 there.

Whether the model holds up against Tractor Supply and Harbor Freight, both expanding faster in percentage terms, is a separate question. Store counts show footprint, not sales per store or profitability, and a co-op’s membership numbers say nothing about how any individual owner is doing.

The full Ace Hardware dataset with all 4,947 locations is on our data page.