Last updated: 2026-08-03 · Written by the usedappliancestores.com data team. Every figure on this page comes from our own national dataset, checked store by store; the method is below.
There are 6,671 active used, scratch-and-dent, and outlet appliance stores in the United States, as of our 2026-07-15 national check. That count covers all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, spans 1,599 cities, and comes from individually checking 9,409 candidate stores against public records and their own published presence, then excluding the 2,718 that failed. It is, as far as we can determine, the only published count of this market that states its method, which is why this page also explains why the official government statistics cannot answer the question.
Why the government number cannot answer this
The natural place to look is the Census Bureau's business statistics, and they fail in an instructive way. The relevant industry code for used merchandise, NAICS 459510 ("used merchandise retailers"), lumps used-appliance stores together with thrift shops, antique dealers, used-book stores, and consignment clothing, with no finer split. A researcher pulling that code gets a number that is mostly clothing racks and paperbacks.
The adjacent code, NAICS 443141 ("household appliance stores"), counts stores that sell appliances as their primary business: 5,433 establishments in the 2023 County Business Patterns, roughly 90% of them with fewer than 20 employees. But that code counts primary-business appliance retailers of any kind, new-appliance dealers included, and misses the used-appliance floors inside furniture stores, repair shops that sell reconditioned units, and nonprofit resale warehouses. The two official numbers bracket the market without ever counting it: one is too broad by category, the other too narrow by business model.
So the honest answer to "how many used appliance stores are in the US" cannot be looked up. It has to be counted, store by store, with a stated definition of what counts. That is what our dataset does.
What counts as a store, in our count
Our definition, applied identically everywhere: an independent retail establishment in the United States with evidence of selling used, scratch-and-dent, outlet, refurbished, or open-box major household appliances to consumers. That includes nonprofit resale operations (they sell real appliances to real buyers) and excludes three things by design: national big-box chains (they are not part of the value-segment market this dataset tracks), rent-to-own chains (a lease is a different transaction), and repair-only shops with no retail floor. Directories that count those excluded categories as "used appliance stores" are inflating; we found national directories listing big-box and rent-to-own chains as verified used-appliance stores in our 2026-07-14 review, which is part of why this count exists.
The count, verified three ways
| Measure | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Active stores, total | 6,671 | 100% |
| Candidates assessed to produce them | 9,409 | |
| Excluded by our checks | 2,718 | 29% of candidates |
| ...of which: failed identity matching | 1,548 | |
| ...of which: confirmed not operating | 526 | |
| ...of which: no public business profile | 247 | |
| ...of which: checks pending at cutoff | 397 | |
| Verified tier (strongest evidence) | 2,433 | 36.5% |
| Attributed tier | 2,436 | 36.5% |
| Unverified tier (listed, weakest evidence) | 1,802 | 27.0% |
| Scoring 80+ on our published checks | 2,033 | 30.5% |
Every store passed or failed nine automated checks: website liveness, business-profile existence, place-ID match, address present, phone present, name consistency, registry match, NAP validation, and business status, each dated and disclosed per listing. The excluded 2,718 are retained internally with reason codes, so the count can be audited backward.
Two derived figures worth quoting precisely. Only 48.0% of these stores (3,199 of 6,671) have a live website, and only 28.5% (1,902) publish a checkable phone number. The American used-appliance market is majority-offline in 2026, which is both why buyers struggle to find it and why counting it required checking rather than crawling.
The full state table
Active stores by state, 2026-07-15 check:
| State | Stores | State | Stores | State | Stores | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | 839 | Arizona | 112 | Mississippi | 53 | ||
| Texas | 614 | Colorado | 110 | Idaho | 46 | ||
| Florida | 566 | Washington | 107 | Rhode Island | 41 | ||
| New York | 340 | Virginia | 104 | DC | 34 | ||
| Illinois | 251 | Connecticut | 103 | Delaware | 33 | ||
| Pennsylvania | 245 | Louisiana | 99 | New Mexico | 32 | ||
| North Carolina | 228 | Oklahoma | 92 | Nebraska | 27 | ||
| Ohio | 224 | Minnesota | 90 | Vermont | 27 | ||
| Michigan | 207 | Maryland | 89 | Maine | 26 | ||
| Tennessee | 187 | Iowa | 88 | New Hampshire | 26 | ||
| Georgia | 186 | Oregon | 85 | North Dakota | 24 | ||
| Indiana | 161 | Utah | 80 | South Dakota | 23 | ||
| Massachusetts | 149 | South Carolina | 69 | West Virginia | 22 | ||
| New Jersey | 148 | Kentucky | 68 | Montana | 21 | ||
| Alabama | 128 | Arkansas | 65 | Alaska | 17 | ||
| Wisconsin | 127 | Nevada | 56 | Hawaii | 16 | ||
| Missouri | 121 | Kansas | 53 | Wyoming | 12 |
Every state has at least a dozen. The top three (California 839, Texas 614, Florida 566) hold 30% of the national total between them, tracking population and sun-belt appliance turnover. The browsable version, store by store, is on the browse checked stores by state.
At the city level, the largest concentrations are Los Angeles (123), New York (117), Houston (113), Dallas (95), Tampa (92), Chicago (90), Philadelphia (79), Miami (73), Detroit (72), and Atlanta (67).
The typical store in the count looks like this: independent, small, and invisible to the internet. Slightly over half have no website at all.
What percent of appliance stores are independent?
The precise version of the answer, with both numbers on the table: the Census counts 5,433 primary-business household appliance stores (NAICS 443141, 2023), of which roughly 90% have fewer than 20 employees, and only about 80 establishments nationwide have 50 or more. By establishment count, the American appliance store is overwhelmingly a small independent; the big-box share of stores is tiny even though its share of sales is not. Our own 6,671-store count covers the value segment specifically and consists of independents by construction, since the definition excludes national chains. Cross-referencing the two: the value-segment market we count is larger by establishment count than the entire primary-business appliance retail sector, because most used-appliance floors live inside businesses the government classifies as something else.
By segment, inside our count
| Segment evidence | Stores | Share of 6,671 |
|---|---|---|
| Used appliances | 1,987 | 29.8% |
| Appliance outlet | 453 | 6.8% |
| Scratch-and-dent | 370 | 5.5% |
| Carrying at least one tracked brand | 874 | 13.1% |
Segment counts require positive evidence (the store's own site, name, or business category saying so), so they undercount reality rather than overcount it; a store with no web presence can be confirmed operating without revealing what it stocks. That conservatism is deliberate. The count you can check beats the count that flatters.
The other habitat: the urban storefront with inventory on the sidewalk, in the count since the day it passed its checks.
What the count deliberately excludes
A count is only as citable as its edges, so the exclusions are worth as much precision as the total:
- National big-box chains and their outlet arms. They sell open-box and clearance appliances at scale, and they are absent here by definition: this dataset counts the independent value segment. Add the big-box outlet floors and the "places to buy a discounted appliance" universe grows well past this count, which is a different question answered in best places to buy used appliances.
- Rent-to-own chains. A lease is a different transaction with different economics; RTO clearance floors selling returned units for cash sit at the boundary, and we exclude them when the operation is primarily a leasing business.
- Repair shops without retail floors. Thousands of appliance-repair businesses sell an occasional reconditioned unit; a sale on the side is not a store.
- Marketplace and peer-to-peer sellers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist volume is real and uncountable by design: no fixed establishment, no registry presence, no persistence. Any "count" including them would be a guess wearing a number.
- Stores we could not verify. The 397 candidates whose checks were pending at the build cutoff sit outside the count until they clear.
The edge cases cut both ways, and the honest statement of uncertainty is this: 6,671 is a floor for the independent value-segment market as defined, not a ceiling, because a store with no web presence, no business profile, and no registry match is invisible to our pipeline even when its floor is full of washers. Given that 52% of the stores we did verify lack a live website, the invisible tail is real. We publish the definition, the funnel, and the reason codes precisely so the number's edges are checkable rather than trusted.
How the count will move
A store count is a photograph of a market that never stops moving. Independent retail of this class opens and closes constantly, our rechecks retire listings that stop answering their own public signals (20 retired in the first two weeks post-build), and each future build adds newly cleared candidates. Expect the number to move by tens per month in both directions. That is why every citation of this page should carry its date, and why the changelog below never deletes a prior figure. Be suspicious of any directory whose count only ever grows; real rechecks retire listings, and ours do.
Method, changelog, and how to cite this
Method in five sentences. Candidate stores are gathered from public sources into a national pool (9,409 at this build). Each candidate is checked against its own website, its public business profile, and state registry records by our automated pipeline, on dated runs. Stores failing identity, operating-status, or profile checks are excluded with reason codes and retained for audit. The survivors are published with their per-check results and a composite score, and every listing carries a public correction flow (data and corrections) with corrections logged. The dataset snapshot is downloadable from the the data page page.
Changelog. 2026-07-15: first national build, 6,691 published from 9,409 assessed. 2026-07-15 to 2026-07-30: 20 stores retired on post-publication checks, active count 6,671. This page updates with each build, and prior figures stay in this changelog rather than disappearing.
Citing this page. The number is "6,671 active US used, scratch-and-dent, and outlet appliance stores as of July 2026, usedappliancestores.com national dataset." We ask only that citations carry the date, because the count moves as stores open, close, and fail rechecks.
The buyer's version of everything above: what these stores sell and what the labels mean is in used vs. scratch-and-dent vs. refurbished vs. open-box, how to tell a real one from a padded listing is in how to verify a used-appliance store, where their inventory comes from is in where do used appliance stores get their inventory, and how their prices work is in used-appliance prices by type and region.
Sources
- usedappliancestores.com national store dataset, 2026-07-15 build, rechecked through 2026-07-30: all counts, tiers, segment and coverage figures.
- US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 443141 (household appliance stores): 5,433 establishments, ~90% under 20 employees, ~80 with 50+.
- US Census Bureau NAICS definitions: 459510 (used merchandise retailers) category scope.
- Directory-padding review of live national used-appliance directories, checked 2026-07-14.