How Many Quilt Shops Are There in the US? 2026 Count by State

1. What counts as a "quilt shop" in our number

The 6,666 figure is broader than "independent quilt shop." It includes three kinds of business, because quilters shop at all three and the line between them is blurry in practice:

• Independent quilt shops. The classic local quilt store: quilting cotton by the bolt, precuts, patterns, notions, classes, often a longarm in the back. The majority of the list.
• Fabric stores that stock quilting cotton. General fabric stores, decorator-fabric houses that keep a quilting aisle, and the garment-district textile stores in big cities. Some of these barely qualify; we keep them when quilters actually shop there.
• Sewing-machine and vacuum dealers with fabric. The "Sew & Vac" stores that sell Bernina, Janome, or Husqvarna machines and carry fabric, thread, and classes alongside them. Many of the best-reviewed "quilt shops" in the country are technically these.

National chains are mostly excluded. We do not list Hobby Lobby, Walmart craft aisles, or Michaels as quilt shops. JOANN closed all of its roughly 790 stores by the end of May 2025; the JOANN listings that came in with earlier imports have all been removed.

Online-only sellers are not added on purpose. A handful remain in the directory, and in the count, because readers search for them by name; they are labeled online-only on their listing and do not represent a place you can drive to. Longarm services, retreats, and repair shops are counted separately and are not in the 6,666. Shops that Google Maps marks "Permanently closed" are not counted either.

2. Why industry figures vary so much

You will see quilt-shop counts anywhere from "about 2,000" to "over 5,000" quoted in articles and trade decks. They are not all wrong; they are counting different things. Industry surveys such as the ones historically run by Quilts, Inc. and Premier Needle Arts focus on dedicated independent quilt shops and rely on shops answering a questionnaire. That produces a smaller, cleaner number than a directory that also includes fabric stores and sewing dealers.

Timing matters too. The pandemic closed a wave of shops in 2020 and 2021 and also created a wave of new home-based and online sellers, some of which later opened storefronts. JOANN's 2025 bankruptcy and store closures, widely reported at the time, removed a large chunk of the big-box fabric footprint from many towns, which changed what "fabric store near me" even returns. Any count taken before those events looks different from one taken after.

So when you compare numbers, ask three questions: does it include general fabric stores, does it include sewing-machine dealers, and when was it taken. Our answer is yes, yes, and November 2026.

3. Quilt shops by state: the full table

Every state plus the District of Columbia, sorted by shop count, as listed on QuiltMap in November 2026. The state rows add up to 6,665; 1 listing has no state assigned yet. Click a state to browse its shops by city.

The raw ranking mostly tracks population, which is why the per-capita table below is the more interesting one. Two things stand out even here: Missouri (190) and Minnesota (182) punch well above their size, and Ohio (240) and Michigan (233) have the most shops of any Midwest state.

4. Shops per capita: the top 15 states

Shops per 100,000 residents, using U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates (July 1, 2025). This is the table that matches what quilters already know: rural, cold, and Mountain West states have a lot of quilt shops for their size.

Montana leads at 6.03 shops per 100,000 people — roughly 4 times California's 1.62 and 6 times New Jersey's 0.96. The top of the list is dominated by Plains and Mountain states, most with around a million residents or fewer, where a single shop in a county seat serves an enormous area.

The bottom of the per-capita list (leaving out the District of Columbia) is New Jersey (0.96), Maryland (1.21), New York (1.32), Massachusetts (1.33), Florida (1.38). Those states have plenty of quilters; they just have fewer, larger shops and a lot of fabric buying that happens across state lines and online.

5. Cities with the most quilt shops

By raw count, the top three cities are Los Angeles, CA (47), Brooklyn, NY (41), and Houston, TX (40). Treat big-city numbers with care. They are inflated by garment-district and wholesale fabric stores that sell apparel yardage, not quilting cotton. A quilter visiting Manhattan will find a handful of stores worth the trip, not 32.

The rest of the top twenty: New York, NY (32), Chicago, IL (27), Portland, OR (27), Philadelphia, PA (26), Dallas, TX (22), Phoenix, AZ (20), Miami, FL (19), San Antonio, TX (19), San Diego, CA (19), Honolulu, HI (18), Oklahoma City, OK (18), San Francisco, CA (18), Las Vegas, NV (17), Minneapolis, MN (17), Seattle, WA (17), Tucson, AZ (17), Indianapolis, IN (16).

City counts also undercount the suburbs. "Dallas" is 22 listings, but the Dallas–Fort Worth metro has far more once you add Plano, Frisco, Arlington, and Fort Worth. Use the city links on each state page to see the whole metro, or drop a destination into the trip planner and let it pull every shop within driving range.

6. Where guilds, longarmers, retreats, and repair shops cluster

Shops are only part of the picture. The other four directories tell you where the quilting community actually lives, and they do not line up neatly with the shop table.

Texas leads every category except repair, and its guild count (152) is more than double Florida's (71) in second place. That is partly the size of the state and partly a genuinely strong guild culture — many Texas towns of 20,000 people have their own guild.

Retreats are the outlier. Wisconsin (47) and Minnesota (49) have more than half as many retreat centers as Texas despite a fraction of the population, and Michigan and Ohio follow. The Upper Midwest is the retreat capital of the country: lake houses and converted farmhouses rented to guild groups for long weekends. If you are planning one, start with how to plan a quilt retreat. Longarmers cluster in the West — Washington, Utah, Arizona, and Oregon all outrank Florida — which matches where the big longarm-machine dealers are.

7. How we count

The number comes from a directory, not a survey, so it is only as good as the directory's sourcing and cleanup. Here is what feeds it:

• Google Maps scrapes. Category searches ("quilt shop", "fabric store", "sewing machine store") run city by city across the country, then re-run periodically to catch openings and closures. This is the bulk of the data and the source of the Google ratings and review counts you see on listings.
• Shop websites. Where a shop has a site, we pull hours, description, brands carried, and whether it runs classes or a longarm service.
• Guild-sourced lists. Hundreds of guild websites keep "local shops" pages. We harvested those to catch shops Google's categories miss — the ones in a church basement or a farmhouse outbuilding.
• Owner and reader submissions. Shops claim and correct their own listings, and readers submit shops we missed. Every submission is reviewed by a person before it goes live.
• Admin review. Scraper results include noise: malls, big-box stores, upholstery shops, embroidery-only businesses. We review and hide those on an ongoing basis. Some noise is still in the data; if you find a listing that is not a real fabric or quilt business, use the "suggest an edit" link on the page.
• Duplicate and closure handling. The same shop often appears under two slightly different names or addresses. A duplicate-finder flags clusters at build time and we merge them. Shops that Google Maps marks "Permanently closed" are hidden from the count, not deleted, so we can track them.

Of the 6,666 shops, 5,213 have a Google rating in our data and 1,667 have 50 or more reviews. Those are the listings we lean on for the best shops by state rankings. The rest are real businesses with thin or missing Google profiles — common for small-town shops that have been open for decades and never asked anyone for a review.

For quarterly data and downloadable tables, see the QuiltMap Industry Reports.

FAQ

Related guides

• The Largest Quilt Shops in America (by State) — the destination shops worth a road trip, and what "largest" actually means.
• Best Quilt Shops by State: How We Rank Them — the top-rated shops in each state, with the method spelled out.
• Finding Quilt Shops While Traveling — how to turn a state count into an actual route.
• What Makes a Quilt Shop Worth Visiting — because count is not quality.