35.5% of US small-business email addresses are on free providers like Gmail and Yahoo

Findings

1. 35.5% of 559,231 US small-business email addresses in 33 professions are on a free provider. The other 64.5% are on the business's own domain.
2. Hair salons are highest at 67.7% (26,518 of 39,163 addresses), followed by auto repair shops at 55.2% and plumbers at 50.1%.
3. Financial advisors are lowest at 4.3% (of 21,133), followed by marketing agencies at 8.3% and mortgage brokers at 10.2%.
4. By industry group, automotive (51.7%) and hospitality and personal services (49.4%) use free mail the most. Finance, insurance and real estate is at 16.4%.
5. A website does not predict a domain inbox. Between 94.1% and 99.8% of listings in every profession show a website, including 94.1% of hair salons.
6. Claimed Google Maps profiles vary even more than email does, from 4.8% of financial advisor listings to 90.6% of chiropractor listings.

Free mail by profession

Hair Salon67.7%

Auto Repair Shop55.2%

Plumber50.1%

Chiropractor49.9%

Landscaper48.4%

Car Dealership47.5%

Veterinarian46.9%

Cleaning Company43.6%

Roofer42.8%

Medical Spa41.8%

HVAC Contractor41.1%

Restaurant40.9%

Pest Control Company39.9%

Gym38.6%

Optometrist38.5%

Dentist36.5%

Electrician34.2%

Pharmacist33.5%

General Contractor31.3%

Wedding Planner28.5%

Realtor25.0%

Physical Therapist23.7%

Hotel23.3%

Doctor22.6%

Trucking Company22.3%

Nurse21.8%

Accountant17.4%

Property Manager14.5%

Solar Installer13.9%

Insurance Agent10.5%

Mortgage Broker10.2%

Marketing Agency8.3%

Financial Advisor4.3%

Source: Carroway Research analysis of 559,231 US business listings with a public email address, computed 3 September 2026.

Hair salons stand out. Two in three salon addresses are on Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or another free service. Auto repair shops (55.2%), plumbers (50.1%), chiropractors (49.9%) and landscapers (48.4%) follow. These are owner-run businesses where the public address is often the owner's own inbox.

At the other end are professions that handle money or regulated advice. Financial advisors (4.3%), mortgage brokers (10.2%), insurance agents (10.5%) and accountants (17.4%) mostly publish an address on their own domain. Marketing agencies (8.3%) sit in this group too.

The median profession is at 34.2%, close to the overall 35.5%.

Free mail by industry group

Automotive51.7%

Hospitality and personal services49.4%

Trades and home services40.3%

Health37.4%

Finance, insurance and real estate16.4%

Business services and logistics13.6%

Source: Carroway Research. Groups pool the professions listed in free-mail-by-profession.csv.

Grouping the professions shows the same split. Automotive, hospitality and personal services, and the trades use free mail at 40% or more. Health sits at 37.4%, pulled up by chiropractors (49.9%), veterinarians (46.9%) and medical spas (41.8%), and pulled down by doctors (22.6%) and physical therapists (23.7%). The two business-services professions in the study, marketing agencies and trucking companies, are at 13.6% combined.

A website does not mean a domain inbox

Nearly every listing in this data shows a website: 94.1% for hair salons, the lowest profession, and 99.8% for marketing agencies and veterinarians, the highest. Across professions, a higher website share goes with a lower free-mail share (Pearson r = -0.59 across the 33 professions), but the website range is narrow. The practical reading is simpler. Most salons, auto shops and plumbers that run a website still answer email from a Gmail or Yahoo address.

For anyone building an email list, this is the number that matters. A list that drops free-mail addresses loses 35.5% of this sample overall, 67.7% of hair salons and 55.2% of auto repair shops, and almost nothing from financial advisors.

Claimed Google profiles follow a different pattern

Chiropractor90.6%

Dentist88.2%

Optometrist86.1%

Medical Spa85.2%

Restaurant79.9%

Car Dealership79.2%

Insurance Agent79.2%

Roofer78.1%

HVAC Contractor77.1%

Landscaper76.9%

General Contractor76.8%

Physical Therapist76.2%

Pest Control Company75.6%

Solar Installer74.3%

Pharmacist70.8%

Veterinarian69.6%

Electrician69.1%

Auto Repair Shop68.1%

Hotel66.7%

Plumber66.6%

Nurse63.7%

Doctor63.5%

Accountant53.4%

Realtor53.0%

Cleaning Company50.4%

Trucking Company50.3%

Hair Salon46.1%

Property Manager42.1%

Wedding Planner41.8%

Mortgage Broker28.9%

Gym23.5%

Marketing Agency20.0%

Financial Advisor4.8%

Source: Carroway Research analysis of the same 559,231 listings. Claimed status as recorded in the source data.

Health practices claim their Google Maps profiles most often: chiropractors 90.6%, dentists 88.2%, optometrists 86.1% and medical spas 85.2%. Financial advisors (4.8%), marketing agencies (20.0%), gyms (23.5%) and mortgage brokers (28.9%) claim theirs least. Financial advisors are last on both measures: few use free mail and few claim a Google profile, which fits a profession that is found through referrals and firm websites more than through maps.

Method

Source. US business listings from the D7 Lead Finder data set. Each listing carries a Google Maps category, city, state, website, phone and a public email address. Counts were computed on 3 September 2026.

Unit. One unique email address. Addresses were lower-cased and deduplicated, so a business that appears in several listings with the same address counts once. Malformed addresses and no-reply, test and example addresses were removed.

Professions. 33 professions, each defined by a fixed set of Google Maps categories. The full mapping, with counts per category, is in profession-categories.csv. Lawyers and several other professions are not included because their counts come from a different source.

Free provider. An address counts as free mail when its domain is one of 38 consumer or internet-provider mail domains, listed in free-mail-domains.csv (for example gmail.com, yahoo.com, outlook.com, comcast.net). Every other domain counts as the business's own domain, including domains hosted on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

Website and claimed profile. Website means the listing includes a website URL. Claimed means the Google Maps listing was marked as claimed by its owner in the source data.

Groups. The six industry groups are our own pooling of the 33 professions. Each profession's group is in free-mail-by-profession.csv.

Limits. The data only covers businesses that publish an email address, and most of those addresses were collected from business websites. That is why website coverage is 94% or higher everywhere, and it means businesses with no public email are not counted. A business with a custom domain that forwards to Gmail counts as own domain. Categories come from Google Maps and are sometimes wrong. The correlation figures compare professions, not individual businesses.

Data

The four CSV files below hold every number in this note. They are free to reuse with credit to Carroway Research.

• Free-mail share by profession CSV, 33 rows, 2.9 KBOne row per profession: email addresses counted, free-mail and own-domain counts and shares, share listing a website, share with a claimed Google Maps profile, mean Google rating, and states covered.
• Free-mail share by industry group CSV, 6 rows, 0.3 KBThe 33 professions pooled into 6 groups: professions, addresses, free-mail addresses and share.
• Domains counted as free mail CSV, 38 rows, 0.5 KBThe 38 consumer and internet-provider mail domains that define a free-mail address in this study.
• Google Maps categories behind each profession CSV, 910 rows, 36.2 KBEvery Google Maps category counted in each profession, with address counts and share of the profession.