What the numbers
actually say.
Public figures on how many businesses start, how many last, and who is running them. Sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Potential Entrepreneurs
174 million Americans aged 15 and over have had an idea for a business. Three in every hundred act on one in a given year.
Acting today Would act Still waiting
Three of every hundred people with an idea act on it in a year.
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is for all.
Sources: Harris Poll for Zapier, 2,001 US adults · World Bank age structure · Census Business Formation Statistics · Census population estimates. The potential figure is a goal, not a measurement.
Failing over time
One group of businesses, followed the whole way. The BLS tracked every private establishment that opened in the year ended March 2015 and counted how many were still open each year after.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Closing is not the same as failing, and the ones that did fail rarely failed for want of effort. What was missing was everything below, and most of it was already funded and open to them before they ever started.
- Guidance
- Support
- Community
- Advice
- Events
- Resources
- Training
An establishment stops counting once it stops reporting employment, which also captures owners who sell, merge or retire. Read it as churn rather than failure.
Source: BLS Business Employment Dynamics, Table 7, total private, data through March 2025
Existing Entrepreneurs
The SBA Office of Advocacy assembles federal data into a profile each year. Switch between the country and the state.
Sources: SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025 Small Business Profiles · US Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2023
Questions this page answers
How many business ideas never get acted on?
About 168 million. Roughly 174 million Americans aged 15 and over have had an idea for a business, and around 5.6 million business applications are filed in a year.
How many business ideas are buried every day?
Around 5,000, or one every 17 seconds. That figure comes from the 3,072,666 US deaths registered in 2024, the share of adults who have had a business idea, and the share who never acted on one.
What percentage of new businesses survive?
Of the 677,876 US establishments that opened in the year ended March 2015, 79.6% were still operating after one year, 69.1% after two, 50.2% after five and 34.7% after ten. An establishment stops counting once it stops reporting employment, which also captures owners who sell, merge or retire.
How many US businesses have no employees?
78.4% of all US establishments in 2023, which is 30,427,808 businesses turning over nearly $1.8 trillion between them.
Where can I get help starting a business at no cost?
SCORE mentoring, Small Business Development Centers, Women's Business Centers and Veterans Business Outreach Centers are all SBA-funded and carry no charge, and are searchable by zip code. The Help tab above lists 29 of them with what each costs and who it is for.
How many small businesses are in North Carolina?
1.1 million, which is 99.6% of all businesses in the state. They employ 1.8 million people, or 44.2% of the state's workforce.
Where this comes from
Everything here is published by a US federal or state agency. Works of the federal government are in the public domain, and facts cannot be copyrighted, so anyone may use this material. We have written every description ourselves and linked every source.
Application figures update monthly, employment and survival figures quarterly or annually. Follow any source link for the current release rather than trusting this page to be fresh.