More Than Half of Home Improvement Websites Have No DMARC Email Record
In Diib's latest email checks, 53% of home improvement websites had no DMARC record at all, compared with 40% of websites across other industries.
If you're a contractor, remodeler or tradesperson, there's a better-than-even chance your domain has no DMARC record, so inboxes get no instructions for handling fake emails sent in your name. Customers who expect quotes and invoices by email are the ones most likely to trust a convincing fake.
If you run a home improvement business, the emails you send to customers — quotes, invoices, appointment confirmations — may be easier to fake than you think.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is a short DNS record that tells inboxes like Gmail and Outlook what to do with email that claims to come from your domain but can’t prove it. Without one, inboxes have less to go on when deciding whether your email is real or an impersonation attempt.
What the data shows
Diib looked at the most recent email-authentication check for each website it scanned between July 1 and September 28, 2026. Across 276 home improvement websites:
- 53% had no DMARC record at all, versus 40% of the roughly 35,000 websites in other industries.
- 86% had at least one DMARC issue, versus 78% elsewhere.
- Among the rest, the most common issue was a DMARC record that monitors email but doesn’t tell inboxes to quarantine or reject fakes.
Plumbing websites, a sub-group of home improvement, looked similar: 51% of 173 sites had no DMARC record.
What this does and doesn’t tell you
This is a snapshot of aggregated Diib website data, not a survey of every contractor online. It shows how often the record is missing. It doesn’t show that any particular business has been spoofed or that its emails are landing in spam. The gap is also probably not about carelessness. Many trade businesses set up email once, through a web designer or domain registrar, and never revisit the DNS settings.
Still, email is how many home improvement businesses send estimates and collect payments. That makes a missing DMARC record a small setup gap with outsized consequences if someone decides to send fake invoices in your name.