Twenty. Google Business Profile Help says you can set up to 20 service areas, and it asks that the whole area stay inside about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based. Most trades businesses should use far fewer than 20, for reasons that have nothing to do with the cap.
The number is 20, and Google prints it
The rule sits on one page: Google Business Profile Help, Manage your service areas for service-area and hybrid businesses. That page carries no update date.
It says: “You can set up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postal codes, or other areas you serve.” Further down, in the same page’s list of tips: “You can have up to 20 service areas.”
So one slot is a town, a city, a county, or a ZIP code. You pick from what Google offers you as you type. You do not draw your own shape on the map.
The same page rules out the thing most contractors ask for first. “You can’t set your service area as a radius distance around your business.” There is no 30 mile circle. If you want a 30 mile reach, you spend slots on the named towns inside it. And if you are looking at an older profile that was set up as a radius, the page is blunt: “If you previously set up your service area this way, you can’t edit it.” You have to specify the area by city or postal code instead.
One more number worth writing down. “If approved, service area edits may take up to 48 hours to show on your Business Profile.” Change your towns on a Tuesday morning and do not panic on Tuesday night.
The driving time rule bites before the 20 does
That same help page sets an outer boundary. “The boundaries of your overall area shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based.”
Read it carefully. It covers the far edge of everything you claim, measured from your own yard. Two hours of driving in rural Montana covers a very different map than two hours out of Newark at 4pm.
For most plumbers, roofers, HVAC shops and electricians, this is the limit that actually binds. You run out of honest driving time long before you run out of slots. A one truck operation claiming 20 towns spread across two hours is claiming something the schedule cannot support.
Google writes “shouldn’t,” not “can’t.” A second page, Guidelines for representing your business on Google, repeats the two hours and then adds a line the first page leaves out: “For some businesses, larger service areas may be appropriate.” That page carries no update date either. So it is a boundary with a stated exception sitting next to it, not a wall. Treat it as the shape Google expects, and be ready to explain a list that sits outside it.
Adding a town does not move your truck
This is where the 20 slots get oversold. Filling every one of them does not put you on the map in every one of them.
Google publishes a page called Tips to improve your local ranking on Google. It says local results “are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity.” On the middle one it says: “Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.” That page carries no update date.
That is distance from your business. Not distance from the edge of a list you typed in. The service area page does say that setting your area “helps people find your Business Profile,” and that is worth having. What Google never says, on any of these pages, is that a town on your list lifts you in that town’s results.
The ranking page is blunt about the rest. “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”
Here is the honest part. If somebody has quoted you a monthly fee to expand your service area or to add your towns, that is a charge for an edit you make yourself, inside your own profile, at no cost. And if the pitch includes a map pack spot in each town you add, it is selling the one thing Google states plainly that nobody can sell.
One profile, not one per town
The temptation after reading the driving time rule is to open a second listing in the next county. Usually that breaks the rules. Occasionally it does not, and the difference is written down.
The service area page says service-area businesses “can only have one profile for the whole area that they serve.” The guidelines put it the same way: service-area businesses “should have one profile for the central office or location with a designated service area.” And directly: “Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.”
The exception is narrow, and Google prints it. “If you have different locations for your service business, with separate service areas and separate staff at each location, you’re allowed one profile for each location.” Read every part of that sentence. Different locations. Separate service areas. Separate staff at each one. A second profile run out of the same yard, by the same two vans, is not that.
Renting an address in the next town over does not get around it either. The guidelines say that if a business “rents a physical mailing address but doesn’t operate out of that location, also known as a virtual office, that location isn’t eligible for a Business Profile.”
That route is how listings get pulled, and getting one back is a slow job in itself. It is worth reading why Google suspends a profile before you try anything clever with a second address.
Your own address raises a separate question. The guidelines say “If you’re a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers,” and the example they give is a plumber running the business from a residential address. Whether yours should be hidden is a decision of its own.
What Google does not tell you
It is worth being straight about where the published evidence stops.
Google publishes the cap of 20 and the two hour boundary. It does not publish how, or whether, the towns on your list feed the ranking math.
None of the three pages quoted here carries an update date, and the help center does not always agree with itself. The ranking page names its third factor “popularity” in the summary line, then heads that same factor’s own section “Prominence.” Go and read the pages yourself before acting on anyone’s quote, this article included.
There is also no published figure for how far a listing reaches. The ranking page defines distance without naming a single mile anywhere on it. Anyone who tells you your listing works out to a specific mileage is guessing.
What to do this week
Three steps, and none of them cost anything.
- Open your Business Profile and read your service areas the way a customer would. Count them, then cut every town your crew would not drive to on a busy Thursday. Fewer honest towns beats 20 hopeful ones, and the ones you keep are the ones your website and your ads should name.
- Measure the far edge from your own yard, not from your nearest town. If the drive runs well past two hours and you have no separate location and separate crew out there, that town is hard to defend.
- Wait the full 48 hours before deciding whether an edit took.
After that, the work moves off the profile and onto your own pages. Google decides what to show a searcher partly on relevance, and a website that never names the towns you serve gives it very little to work with, so ask what one more page costs before you order twenty of them. Your business name is a different field with its own rules, and pushing towns into that one is a different mistake. Naming your towns on your own pages is ordinary page work, and it is the slow half of search checks.
If you want to see where you stand today before changing anything, there is a free scan that asks an assistant who does your kind of work in your town and writes down which companies get named. It is a report, not a fix, and a person reads it before it goes out.