What legally mandated demand is worth

Most demand is a preference. A homeowner can skip the lawn service, wash the car at home, or let the gutters go another year. A small set of businesses sell something the customer is not allowed to go without, and three of them are in this database: portable toilets, parking lot striping, and septic pumping. The rule behind each one is different, and so is what the rule turns out to be worth.

Portable toilets: the rule counts heads

The federal construction sanitation standard, 29 CFR 1926.51, sets the number of toilets by the number of workers. A site with 20 employees or fewer needs one. A site with 20 or more needs one toilet seat and one urinal per 40 workers, and at 200 or more the ratio becomes one of each per 50. The only crews exempt are mobile ones with transportation readily available to nearby facilities.

Daniel Tom runs almost 2,000 units around San Francisco with 19 employees, and reported $4.3 million of total income for 2025. He puts a rentable toilet at about $800 and a vacuum truck at roughly $160,000. Divide his income by his fleet and each unit brings in a little over $2,100 a year. That is our division, and it folds event rentals and service work into the figure, but it shows the shape of the business: a cheap box that a regulation keeps on site until the job is finished.

Striping: the rule specifies the work

The ADA does not make anyone repaint a parking lot. It says what has to be there once they do. The Justice Department's compliance brief on restriping states that a business or government that restripes a lot must provide accessible spaces as the 2010 Standards require. The parking requirements start at one accessible space for a lot of 1 to 25, two for 26 to 50, and three for 51 to 75. At least one of every six accessible spaces must be van accessible, a car space must be at least 96 inches wide, and its access aisle at least 60.

So the law does not create the job. Fading paint does, on the 18 to 24 month cycle described on Luke and Heather Menear's entry. What the law changes is who gets hired. A property manager with a wrongly marked lot has a liability problem, and that is a reason to pay a contractor who knows the measurements. The Menears report about $739,000 a year in gross revenue after two decades in Rochester, on jobs that typically bill $500 to $1,000.

Septic: mostly biology, partly code

Septic is the weakest legal case of the three and the strongest physical one. The EPA's guidance is that a household system should be inspected at least every three years and that tanks are typically pumped every three to five. That is advice from a federal agency, and a full tank enforces it without any help. Local health rules vary and we have not surveyed them, so we will not claim a mandate we cannot cite.

Dan Spracklin bought a septic company with 22,000 customers on that clock. It did about $1 million a year at margins of 10 to 15 percent when he acquired it in 2013, and he reports roughly $3 million at more than 30 percent two years later.

What the mandate buys

A floor under the customer count. The Boring Index gives 35 percent of its weight to demand that ignores the economy, and scores legally mandated demand highest within that factor. Portable toilets and septic hold the top two scores in the database for that reason. As long as building permits are being pulled, someone is renting toilets to the site.

A buyer who is not shopping on price alone. A contractor needs the unit serviced on schedule because an inspector can count. A property manager needs the aisle to be 60 inches. In both cases the cheapest bid is worth nothing if it fails, which gives a reliable operator room that a discretionary service rarely has.

Renewal without selling. Spracklin's 22,000 households did not need to be persuaded again. They needed to be routed, which is why GPS on the trucks was one of his four changes.

What it does not buy

A high margin. Tom reports 20 to 25 percent, with labor at about 30 percent of revenue. The top of the margin ledger belongs to work nobody is required to buy: Alan Tursunbaev reports about 60 percent gross in mobile detailing. The rule says the toilets must be there. It says nothing about what the vendor gets to charge.

A cheap way in. Tom estimates about $250,000 for a credible start in portable toilets. Striping is the exception, at under $10,000 for most entrants according to the benchmarks on the Menear entry. The spread across all documented starts is on the startup costs page.

A premium at sale. Spracklin's own observation is that septic companies trade at 3 to 6 times EBITDA because the industry is fragmented, heavy on equipment, and tied to geography. The one striping listing in our file asked $300,000 for a 34-year-old company with $267,241 of gross revenue. Neither figure suggests buyers pay extra for the mandate. The exit ledger finds the premium goes to contracted revenue and to crews that run without the owner.

Even demand through the year. Kim Hatch reports as much as $200,000 in a peak month of septic work and about $30,000 in a slow winter one. The tanks fill all year, and the revenue still swings by a factor of six.

The mandate is on the customer

This is the part that gets lost. The contractor is obliged to have toilets. He is under no obligation to rent them from you, and a rule that guarantees the market exists also guarantees that every competitor can see it. What the documented owners did with the guarantee was ordinary: Tom reinvests in units and trucks and pays himself about $120,000, Spracklin fixed routing and prices, and the Menears sold door to door and by word of mouth for two decades. The law supplied the customers and left the rest of the work to them.

If mandated demand is what you are after, the waste and sanitation category is where most of it sits, and the picker sorts the models by how much capital each one takes. Every owner named here is in the database with sources.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Ten trades, ranked by what they sell for
• The margin cliff: why doubling revenue can cut your income
• The Boring Index: how the scores work