The metric franchise buyers never check: daytime population

A franchise buyer walks into two identical neighborhoods: 100,000 residents each, $130,000 median income, 40-year-old median age. Both pass. Both are licensed. Both have foot traffic. So far they are twins.

One has 948,000 people working within its boundaries during business hours. The other has none — they're residential, entirely.

If you're selling coffee, lunch, or office supplies, the neighborhood without daytime workers is a dead site. The neighborhood with nearly a million weekday jobs is a casino. Most franchise disclosure documents never mention this number. You have to find it.

Why residential population lies about trade areas

The fundamental assumption behind standard demographic reports — that a neighborhood's population is stable and predictable — breaks down the moment your customers include workers. A office tower, a hospital, an industrial park, a university campus, a convention center: these aren't homes. They're job sites. They generate foot traffic that has nothing to do with the 101,709 residents in the 1-km radius around Times Square.

Times Square itself has 948,299 jobs located within its trade area (US Census Bureau LEHD LODES, 2022). That's 9.3 jobs per resident. When you're placing a restaurant, a coffee chain, or a pharmacy, that 948,000 is the market. The residents are secondary.

This matters by business type:

• Quick-service restaurants, coffee, lunch plays: Daytime population is the primary market. Your 8am-2pm sales are driven by workers, not residents. A residential-only area will feel like a dead zone at 11:45am on a Tuesday.


• Retail (clothing, jewelers, gifts): Mixed. You're competing for evening and weekend traffic, but weekday foot traffic from workers is real spending. Tourist-heavy areas amplify this.


• Fitness, salons, healthcare: Daytime matters differently. A gym near an office park has "before work" and "lunch break" traffic. A dental practice near a hospital has referral traffic plus patient visits.


• Convenience stores, pharmacies: Daytime is the meal. Overnight convenience stores rely on workers (hospital staff, night-shift drivers) and residents. The mix changes everything about margins.



Without daytime population, you're left betting on residential patterns that may not match your business model at all.




How to get this number: LODES




The US Census Bureau publishes the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) dataset under its LODES (Origin-Destination Employment Statistics) product. It matches anonymized tax records to home and workplace Census blocks, then publishes aggregate counts by geography and sector.




The data is public, free, and updated annually. It's also the only official source for workplace-level employment counts in the United States.




LODES has limits: it's US-only (we have no Canadian equivalent yet that meets our licensing bar), it's block-level granular but releases at a lag (2022 being the most recent full-year publication as of July 2026), and it covers wage-and-salary jobs only—self-employed and contractors are missing. But within those constraints, it's authoritative.




For a trade area, you sum the jobs across all blocks inside your boundary. Vantlens reports flag LODES as "Daytime population (US only)" because it deserves its own line.




The honest caveat




This number tells you about potential foot traffic. It doesn't tell you which workers eat lunch in your neighborhood (many leave for food), when they eat (some work 10-6, some 9-5, some overnight), or how much they spend. A downtown with 948,000 jobs might have 300,000 leaving at lunchtime, another 100,000 buying coffee at 3pm, and 150,000 eating early breakfast. You still need foot-traffic proxies—the composition and churn of competing places—to know if your site captures any of that flow.




But without the daytime number, you're already blind. The residents-only report doesn't even whisper that the opportunity exists.




What you read from this number




If daytime >> residential: You're in a work district. Evening and weekend traffic will be low; weekday foot traffic will be high and concentrated in short windows. Retail leases will succeed or fail based on lunch and break-time spending.




If daytime ≈ residential: You're in a mixed-use neighborhood. Both day and evening traffic matter. Both workers and residents are your customer base.




If daytime ≈ 0 (or missing): You're in a pure residential area. All traffic is residents, families, and after-work retail. Weekday lunch is a non-event.




Times Square sits at the extreme: 948,000 jobs, 101,709 residents. That ratio—9.3:1—is hyperlocal. Most neighborhoods are 1:1 or lower. But even the difference between 2:1 and 0:1 changes whether a lunch-focused brand makes rent.




This is why it appears in a Vantlens report as its own section. It's not a nice-to-have demographic color. It's a gate: does foot traffic exist here during your business hours?




---




Sources:


• US Census Bureau, LEHD LODES, workplace-area estimates (2022)


• Trade area: 1-km radius, Times Square, New York (40.758°N, -73.985°W)