The Small Business Watchdog

How are small businesses doing in your state? The Office of Advocacy has just published the Small Business Profiles for the States and Territories, to help answer this question. These profiles are brief two-page documents that give policymakers, small business owners, economists, and many others a detailed picture of the economic role of small businesses within their state, or the nation as a whole. They are also a useful tool to track changes and trends in each state’s small business economy.

The profiles offer a glimpse of the small business status in each state, territory, and the nation. The five states with the largest populations—California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois—account for roughly 38 percent of the total number of small employers in the country. However, the highest shares of small firm employment are found in the less populous states, the top five being Montana, with 68.4 percent of its jobs provided by small businesses; Wyoming (64.8 percent); South Dakota and North Dakota (tied at 61.9 percent); and Vermont (59.7 percent). From a finance perspective, the average number of business loans under $100,000 for the five largest states was 238,967, with a mean total value of $4.3 million.

Each individual profile contains information pertaining to the growth and decline of that region’s small business economy, comparing the most recent data available with prior years’ data. The information included in the state and U.S. profiles include total number of businesses, both small and large, business owner demographics, workforce breakdown, unemployment rate, lending, revenues, employment and employer firms by industry, net new jobs created, and establishment turnover rates. Please note that only limited data are available for the four U.S. territories.

The Office of Advocacy releases this information with the most recent available data at the time of publication, utilizing data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; Administration Office of the U.S. Courts; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; and the Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy. Each profile is available in PDF format on the website, along with the raw data files.

—Shawn Fouladi, Research Assistant