Six chains account for 13,165 hardware and home improvement stores in the United States, spread across 6,198 cities. In 3,501 of those cities, more than half, exactly one of the six has a store.
Ace Hardware is that one chain in 2,271 of them. Tractor Supply is in 652. Home Depot, the name most people would guess, is the only option in 266, and Lowe’s in 170.
Seeing that distribution takes all six chains side by side.
The Six Chains
Every US location, with the change since April:
| Brand | Stores | Since April | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ace Hardware | 4,947 | +100 | +2.06% |
| Tractor Supply | 2,481 | +47 | +1.93% |
| Home Depot | 2,028 | +7 | +0.35% |
| Lowe’s | 1,765 | +4 | +0.23% |
| Harbor Freight | 1,652 | +26 | +1.60% |
| Floor & Decor | 292 | +8 | +2.82% |
Ranked by store count, the two best-known names come third and fourth. Ace has more locations than Home Depot and Lowe’s combined, and Tractor Supply passed both of them while opening 47 stores in five months.
Home Depot and Lowe’s added 11 stores between them over those five months. The other four added 181.
Most Cities Get One Option
Across the 6,198 cities where at least one of the six operates:
| Chains present | Cities |
|---|---|
| 1 | 3,501 |
| 2 | 1,263 |
| 3 | 690 |
| 4 | 451 |
| 5 | 232 |
| 6 | 61 |
The curve falls off fast. Well over half of these cities have a single chain, three quarters have two or fewer, and only 61 cities in the country have all six. Nationally there are 2.12 stores per city, which is thin for a category that feels saturated from inside a big metro.
It goes further than one chain. Of those 3,501 single-chain cities, 3,413 have exactly one store. For 97% of those 3,501, the alternative to the one store in town is the next town.
Who Is the Only One in Town
When a city has exactly one of the six, this is which:
| Only chain in town | Cities |
|---|---|
| Ace Hardware | 2,271 |
| Tractor Supply | 652 |
| Home Depot | 266 |
| Lowe’s | 170 |
| Harbor Freight | 117 |
| Floor & Decor | 25 |
Those add to the full 3,501. Ace accounts for 65% of them, which follows from its model: a co-op member can open in a town of a few thousand because the store is 10,000 square feet and already locally owned. Tractor Supply’s 652 come from the same logic applied to farm and ranch customers.
Home Depot and Lowe’s are alone in 436 cities between them. A 100,000-square-foot box needs population, so where one of them is the only option, it is usually the anchor of a small regional trade area.
62% of Cities Have No Big Box
Of the 6,198 cities, 3,866 have neither a Home Depot nor a Lowe’s. That is 62% of the cities in this dataset served entirely by Ace, Tractor Supply, Harbor Freight, or Floor & Decor.
Single-chain cities cluster in the big states, not the empty ones:
| State | Single-chain cities | All its cities | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 217 | 432 | 50% |
| Texas | 205 | 415 | 49% |
| New York | 183 | 296 | 62% |
| Pennsylvania | 176 | 282 | 62% |
| Florida | 157 | 312 | 50% |
| Illinois | 156 | 239 | 65% |
Illinois runs highest at 156 of 239, and New York and Pennsylvania are close behind at 62% each. These are not thinly populated states, and that is the tell: the states topping this list are the ones carved into the most separate municipalities, so a single metro can produce dozens of technically single-chain cities.
Part of that reflects how city boundaries work. In a densely incorporated state, a store can be the only chain inside one small municipality while a competitor sits two miles away in the next one.
Floor & Decor’s 25 solo cities show the effect cleanly. It runs metro-scale warehouse stores, so the list of towns where it stands alone reads oddly: Dorchester, Massachusetts is a Boston neighborhood; Doral and Miami Gardens sit inside metro Miami; Fountain Valley is in Orange County. All are municipalities inside larger metros. Read these as cities rather than trade areas, and treat the state ranking as a measure of municipal fragmentation as much as of retail coverage.
The Growth Left Big Box
Home Depot and Lowe’s are still growing, just not in stores.
Home Depot bought SRS Distribution in 2024, and in September 2025 SRS completed a $5.5 billion acquisition of GMS, a drywall and steel framing distributor. The combined business runs about 1,200 locations and nearly 8,000 trucks. Lowe’s closed on Foundation Building Materials for $8.8 billion over the same stretch.
$14.3 billion on contractor supply between them, against 11 net new retail stores in five months. Home Depot has announced 12 stores for all of 2026, which is 0.6% of its footprint, and its retail growth has effectively stopped.
Meanwhile the chains adding stores are the small-format ones. Harbor Freight added 26 and has 20 more coming. Ace added 100 net, from 129 openings against 41 departures and 12 reactivations, which is how a voluntary co-op grows and shrinks at the same time.
Where All Six Compete
61 cities have all six chains.
The six largest of those 61, by total store count:
| City | Stores across all six |
|---|---|
| Tucson, AZ | 49 |
| Phoenix, AZ | 37 |
| Las Vegas, NV | 33 |
| Jacksonville, FL | 31 |
| Orlando, FL | 28 |
| Indianapolis, IN | 26 |
All 61 hold 797 stores between them, which is 6.1% of the 13,165 total in 1% of the 6,198 cities. Tucson at 49 is the outlier, and the Sun Belt dominates the top of the list. These are metros with sprawl, population growth, and enough incorporated area for six chains to coexist without any of them cannibalizing itself.
What the Counts Don’t Show
Store locations show where each chain decided to compete. They say nothing about revenue, traffic, or which stores make money, and a city-level match can put two competitors in “different” cities when they are a few miles apart. What the footprint does answer is which of the six is present in any given town.
The complete dataset for all six chains, 13,165 locations, is on our data page.