Small business statistics for 2023

Small businesses have been through a lot. 

First, there was the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the shutdown of 3.4% of establishments and a 12.1% drop in employment just in the first month of restrictions. 

Then, there was the Great Resignation, which started when 45 million Americans quit their jobs.

Lastly, inflation reached a record height in this millennium of 7% and 6.5% in 2021 and 2022 respectively. 

With all this in mind, it’s fair to say that small businesses (and indeed all businesses) aren’t having a great time.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of small business owners (72%) are happy.

And there’s plenty to be happy about. Small businesses still form the backbone of the US economy, being responsible for 43.5% of the country’s GDP, 46.4% of private sector employment, and 97.3% of all exports. 

In this guide, we’ll look at the recent statistics on all things small-businesses-related, including:  

• Owner demographic breakdowns, 
• Earnings, 
• Challenges, 
• The state of mobile websites, 
• Cybersecurity, and much more.

10 Most important small business statistics

To whet your appetite for what’s to come, here are the 10 statistics we’ve singled out as the most interesting:

1. In 2023, Millennials accounted for only 12.9% of small business owners, up by approximately 85% from their 7% share in 2022.
2. The overwhelming majority of small business owners (72%) are happy.
3. 42% of businesses fail because the market has no need for them.
4. While only 20% of small businesses fail within 1 year, this percentage balloons to 50% by year 5 and steadily increases to 65% by year 10.
5. 66% of small businesses are profitable.
6. On average, small business owners with master’s degrees earn more ($73,941) than those with doctorate degrees ($70,031).
7. The median salary for self-employed individuals is $55,858, although these numbers can vary by more than 75% depending on the industry, state, and size of the business, with small business owners in Washington earning $120,339 (the most of any country).  
8. The net change of employment in small businesses during the first year of the pandemic was -2,992,757.
9. The majority of small businesses (55.9%) cost more than $250,000 to get started, with some (12.3%) costing more than $1 million.
10. 50% of aspiring entrepreneurs cite the lack of funding as the key barrier stopping them from starting a business.

What is a small business?

The U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy defines a small business as “an independent business having fewer than 500 employees.”

According to them, any business that has anywhere between 0 and 499 employees is a small business, and all of these businesses collectively contribute to most of the statistics relevant to the US.

The Europeans also use the term SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) to collectively refer to all businesses with fewer than 250 employees — which serves as the closest analog to the American definition of small businesses.

The definitions get a bit more nuanced than this. For example, the U.S. Small Business Administration uses different standards for classifying small businesses in different industries (a surface coal mining business with 1,250 employees is still counted as a small business).

However, the point we wanted to get across is that there are different definitions out there. So, for the purposes of this text, the term small business refers to all businesses with fewer than 500 employees.

Small businesses punch above their weight class

You would think that small businesses would have a small impact on the economy and a country’s GDP, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

When you hear statements like “small businesses are the backbone of the economy”, you should, indeed, take them quite literally.

Why, you might ask?

For starters, in the US, 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses. The latest 2023 statistics by the Office of Advocacy show that there are 33,185,550 small businesses in the US.

Conversely, there are only 20,868 large businesses.

Small businesses also create the most jobs. Between 1995 and 2021, small businesses were responsible for creating 17.3 million net new jobs or 62.7% of net jobs created in this period.

The 2022 Small Business Profile report by the Office of Advocacy shows that there are 6,081,544 small business owners and 61,693,908 small business workers.

Small businesses also constitute 97.3% of all US exporters.

Most small businesses have 0 employees

While small businesses do pull ahead of large businesses in some categories, they’re much more evenly matched — or even fall behind — in others.

For example, still sticking with the 2023 Office of Advocacy statistics, small businesses employ 61.7 million Americans, which accounts for 46.4% of private sector employment.

Moreover, small businesses are responsible for 39.4% of the private sector payroll and 43.5% of the country’s GDP.

Not to imply that these feats are insignificant, but they fall flat of the expectations you might have upon hearing that they make up 99.9% of all businesses.

This seemingly inexplicable discrepancy in the proportion of small and large businesses and their impact on employment and payroll makes more sense when we take into account that 81.7% of small businesses are nonemployer firms. 

In other words — 27,104,006 small businesses have no employees.

Therefore, only 18.3% of small businesses — or 6,081,554 businesses as stated in the March 2023 Office of Advocacy FAQ — constitute employer firms that have paid employees and can compete with large businesses in the realm of employment statistics.

This still leaves small businesses as 99.7% of all businesses with paid employees.

The number of employer firms has remained steady over the course of the last 20 years, whereas the number of nonemployer firms has increased by more than 10 million.

Further breakdown of small businesses by the number of employees — for which the latest statistics come from the 2022 Small Business Profile by the Office of Advocacy — shows that 16.4% of small businesses have between 1 and 19 employees. This leaves the percentage of small businesses with headcounts between 20 and 499 at 1.9%. 

Demographic statistics on small business owners

Courtesy of the 2022 Small Business Profile report, we also know what the demographics of small business ownership and workers are.

Demographic	Small business ownership	Small business workers
Women	43.2%	47.3%
Veterans	6.4%	5%
Hispanics	13.8%	17.6%
Racial minorities	19.4%	24.8%

More information regarding the generation gap between small business owners can be gleaned from Guidant Financial’s 2023 Small Business Trends report, which shows that Millennials still play second fiddle to Boomers and Gen X.

Age range	Percentage of business owners
Gen X	47.2%
Boomers	39.6%
Millennials	12.9%
Post War	0.3%

That being said, it’s worth noting the percentage of Millennial business owners as shown in Guidant Financial’s 2022 Small Business Trends report was 7%. In other words, the number of Millennial business owners has increased by almost 85% between 2022 and 2023.

Gen Z business owners were completely excluded from the 2023 report, but in the 2022 report, they were shown to have been the owners of 0.5% of businesses.

Nonemployer business demographics

The latest data on nonemployer businesses comes from the Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics (NES-D) report, released by the United States Census Bureau back in 2019. 

Since 2019, we’ve experienced rapid inflation and gone through a global pandemic, both of which have likely altered current-day reflection of these statistics. 

Nevertheless, until new data emerges, it’s worth reflecting on the state of the pre-pandemic nonemployer statistics. You can see them in the table below.

Demographic	Percentage of nonemployer businesses owned	Receipt size
Women	41.4%	$313.6 billion
Hispanic	15.5%	$156.5 billion
Veteran	5.1%	$59.7 billion
Asian	8.6%	$114.2 billion
Black / African American	12.7%	$83.6 billion
American Indian / Alaska Native	1.2%	$10.5 billion
Native Hawaiian / other Pacific Islanders	0.3%	$3 billion

What drives people to start small businesses

Guidant Financial’s 2023 Small Business Trends report provides insight into the motivations behind the emergence of small businesses — in other words, why business owners choose to become business owners.

The leading motivation is the desire to be one’s own boss, but it’s far from the only motivation, as shown in the table below.

Motivation to start a small business	Percentage of respondents
Readiness to be your own boss	28%
Dissatisfaction with corporate America	23%
Desire to pursue your passion	13%
Redundancy (laid off / job outsourced)	10%
Unwillingness to retire	10%
Opportunity presented itself	9%
Inspiration for a new business idea	4%
A life event, such as a divorce or death	2%

Why don’t all people start small businesses?

On the other hand, if we want to see what’s stopping people from starting a business, we can turn to Incfile’s 2023 Small Biz Survey. 

In this survey, 50% of the 2,000 respondents — who were all members of the general population who weren’t business owners — said that the lack of funding was the biggest obstacle stopping them from starting a business. 

Other commonly cited reasons included not knowing where to begin (25%) and the endeavor being deemed too risky (16%).

How much does it cost to start a small business?

While we understand the why behind people starting their small businesses, the how remains just as big a factor to consider.

First and foremost, the cost of starting a small business is significant.

According to Guidant Financial’s 2023 survey, the cost to start a business ranges from $50 to more than $1 million.

Cost to start a small business	Percentage of businesses
More than $1 million	12.3%
Between $500,000 and $1 million	16.3%
Between $250,000 and $500,000	27.3%
Between $175,000 and $250,000	14.2%
Between $50,000 and $175,000	26.2%

To gather the capital needed to do this, prospective small business owners overwhelmingly (52%) turn to 401(k) Business Financing, also known as Rollovers for Business Startups (ROBS) — withdrawing money from their retirement accounts.

Aside from this, the only 2 financing options that enjoy a double-digit share of the financing source pie are cash (19%) and Small Business Administration (SBA) loans (13%).

Biz2Credit’s analysis of 100,000 women-owned firms for 2022 also found that the average loan size for women-owned businesses in 2020 was $36,981 — which was 33% lower than the average loan size for men-owned businesses at $55,061.

How many new small businesses are being started?

More small businesses are being started now than ever before, at least if the data on business applications by state is to be believed.

In April 2020 — just 1 month after the first coronavirus restrictions were put in place — the number of business applications across all US states dipped to 233,008. 

For reference, the number of applications at the start of the year (January 2020) was 279,273. In July of the same year, the number of applications skyrocketed to 552,214.

Ever since August 2021, the monthly number of applications has stabilized around the 420,000 mark.

Of course, this was just the healing of wounds inflicted by the restrictions, which forced 43% of small businesses to temporarily close, according to a research article on the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses published by PNAS. 

The damage was even worse in the Mid-Atlantic region, in which 54% of businesses were closed, leading to a 47% decrease in employment.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses in America

Between April 2020 and April 2022, the United States Census Bureau carried out the Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS), which sought to gather data on the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses.

At the start of this period, the data showed that 51.4% of businesses suffered a large negative impact. By September of that year (5 months later), the number of businesses reporting large negative effects had dropped to around 30%, from which point it continued to slowly dip down, reaching 21.6% by April 2022.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all small businesses made it through unscathed. Many businesses that reported large negative effects one month were no longer around the following month and therefore not part of the data.

Office of Advocacy’s Business Dynamics During the COVID-19 Pandemic research shows that, in the first 3 months of the COVID-19 emergency in the US, the number of establishments decreased by 3.4%. At the same time, employment dipped by 12.1%.

While the number of establishments recovered that same year, it took 2 years for businesses to return to their pre-pandemic levels across all states and sectors.

Employment was much slower to recover. The reason for this phenomenon is not a decrease in the number of hiring, but an increase in the number of Americans who quit their jobs. In 2021, over 45 million workers quit, setting a record and issuing the Great Resignation.

Not that the decrease in employment was entirely voluntary. The establishments that didn’t close instead shrunk. While closing establishments reduced the number of jobs by 3.9 million during the first year of COVID, 14.1 million jobs were lost to downsizing. 

For context, this is more than the 11.7 million jobs lost to downsizing during the Great Recession.

In short, the net change of employment between March 2020 and March 2021 in small businesses was -2,992,757. 

How different industries handled the pandemic

While the trend of businesses across all industries reporting a large negative impact reduced with time, not all industries were affected equally.

Accommodations and food services were hit the hardest, with 83.5% of businesses reporting a large negative impact at the start of SBPS and 44.7% at its end — which was more than double the national average of 21.6%.

The least affected were utilities, the industry where only 6.7% of businesses reported suffering from a large negative impact in April 2020. Interestingly enough, this number increased to 8.7% at the end of April 2022.

Health care and social assistance are examples of industries that got hit hard but managed to weather the storm better than most. 

At the start of the SBPS, 69.5% of small businesses in this industry reported a large negative impact — well above the national average of 51.4%. By the end of the survey, however, only 18.8% of businesses in this industry still reported this, ranking them below the 21.6% national average.

Earning statistics for small businesses

We should preface this segment by saying that the statistics shown here are more useful for curiosity-satiating purposes than practical application.

For example, the median yearly salary for a small business owner is $50,934, according to Zippia, at least. This isn’t far off from the $55,858 median salary for self-employed individuals as reported by the US Census in their 2019 Statistics of US Business Survey (the latest of its kind, having been released in 2022).

In either case, these median salaries include small businesses of all sizes, across all industries, and in all countries. 

For example, business owners in Washington make $120,339 yearly — more than in any other state. While not strictly focused on small businesses, another Zippia research showed that, in the US, annual salaries can vary by more than 75% between different occupational groups. 

Biz2Credit also reported a significant discrepancy in earnings between women-owned and men-owned businesses, which drew in an average of $88,895 and $136,147 respectively in 2021.

As you can imagine, the variability of individual units within such a sample set is large and diverse and therefore not necessarily indicative of what you should expect to earn as a small business owner in any particular industry.

Educational backgrounds and earnings

Large sample size data like this is great for comparing more abstract statistics, like the ones from the Business Owner Demographics and Statistics in the US report by Zippia. This report includes insights into such things as which educational degrees business owners have and how this affects their wage.

Educational degree level	Percentage of business owners with this education
Bachelor’s degree	52%
Associate degree	21%
High school diploma	10%
Master’s degree	9%
Other degrees	8%

We can only assume that the table above does not include doctorate degrees because there weren’t enough PhD business owners to warrant being a separate group and that they were lumped together with other degrees. 

This is, of course, an assumption, but it’s an educated assumption given the same study includes doctoral degrees when showing a breakdown of how much business owners with different educational backgrounds earn. 

Spoiler alert — PhD business owners actually make less than those with Master’s Degrees.

Education degree level	Median annual income
Bachelor’s degree	$59,594
Associate degree	$46,387
High school diploma	$44,495
Master’s degree	$73,941
Doctorate degree	$70,031

Job demand statistics

Restaurants have been hit particularly hard by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying restrictions.

According to the National Restaurant Association, the number of eating and drinking place employment has been on the rise for the past 24 consecutive months. The number of net job increases per month has been much larger in 2021 than it is now, with 152,800 job increases reported just in June 2021. 

Nevertheless, at the time these figures were released (January 2023), eating and drinking places were still lagging behind their pre-pandemic levels by 450,000 jobs (3.6%), making this the slowest recovering industry in the US.

Alternatively, the Association of Builders and Contractors (ABC) has reported that there is a demand for 546,000 workers beyond the rate of normal hiring to meet the demand for 2023.

Even before the pandemic started, project management statistics showed that there would be a demand for 25 million project professionals by 2030 when taking into account the growth of the industry and the number of employees expected to retire by this point.

Overall, the job supply (and the demand for workers) seems to be on the up.

This is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ June 2023 The Employment Situation report, which shows that the unemployment rate for that month was at 3.6%. For reference, it was close to 6% in June 2021.

This report states that, over the course of 6 months, nonfarm employment has been increasing by an average of 278,000 per month.

The report highlighted a significant monthly job increase in the following industries.

Industry	Average monthly job increases in 2023
Government	63,000
Health care	42,000
Social assistance	22,000
Construction	15,000
Professional and business services	40,000

How likely are small businesses to fail?

Failure statistics of any kind tend to paint a bleak picture of whatever it is they’re describing, so we want to preface them by sharing some optimistic statistics that will serve as additional context.

Namely, Guidant Financial’s 2023 report shows that 66% of small businesses are profitable. This at a time when high inflation rates are making it more difficult for small businesses to survive than in pre-pandemic times.

In 2020, according to the above-mentioned research by Zippia, 63% of small businesses were profitable, down from the 78% reported in 2019.

All of this is to say that, while small businesses have taken a hit, they are slowly recovering, and 2 out of 3 small businesses can expect to be profitable.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s see the doom and gloom of business failure statistics.

When do small businesses fail?

According to data on the survival of private sector establishments by opening year, we can see that approximately 20% of new businesses fail within a year.

By year 5, the failure rate of businesses is 50%. In other words, if you opened a business today, the statistical probability of it staying open after 5 years is close to a coin toss.

At 10 years old, the mortality rate of small businesses hovers around 65%.

It should be noted that this data operates only using the number of businesses opened and closed, without taking into account why businesses closed. Therefore, cases where a small business owner decides to retire and closes their business after years of success are still counted as failures.

Why do small businesses fail?

As for why small businesses fail, we can turn to information reported by VisualCapitalist in their Study of Failing U.S. Businesses.

According to them, 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems.

However, usually when a business fails, this can’t be attributed to a single cause. This is why the other top reasons for small business failures, when added together, far exceed 100% — one and the same business can fail due to several reasons.

Aside from cash flow problems, 42% of businesses find that the market has no need for them.

The lack of the right team is cited in 23% of cases, while 19% of businesses simply get outcompeted. Finally, 14% of businesses fail simply because they ignore their customers.

Small business challenges in 2023

Rampant inflation and the Great Resignation are at the forefront of small business discourse. So, it should come as no surprise to see them topping the list of biggest challenges threatening the livelihood of small businesses according to the 2023 report by Guidant Financial.

Top challenges according to small business owners	Percentage
Recruiting and retention	22%
Inflation and price increases	22%
Lack of capital / cash flow	14%
Supply chain issues	11%
Business promotion	8%
Administrative work	7%
Time management	6%
Providing or managing benefits	6%

The Great Resignation seems to have been on the mind of those who formulated the questions for this survey since one of the questions relates to the difficulty in hiring during the previous year.

How difficult was hiring this past year?	Percentage of business owners
Very easy	3%
Somewhat easy	4%
The same as compared to other years	22%
Somewhat difficult	24%
Very difficult	23%

At the same time, the desire to increase staff is shown to be the highest priority plan for most business owners (26%).

As for reasons behind the difficulty in hiring, the respondents cited the following:

Cause of difficulty in hiring	Percentage
Low number of applicants or lack of interest in your organization	22%
Competition from other employers	20%
Candidates don’t have the needed work experience	18%
Candidates don’t have the right technical skill	11%
Candidates don’t have the right workplace soft skills	11%

Nor are all positions equally difficult to fill. As the talent gap currently stands, the 5 most difficult positions to fill in small businesses are:

1. Sales — 24%
2. Construction and maintenance — 18%
3. Food service — 14%
4. Healthcare and childcare — 10%
5. Management — 10%

Small business owner happiness statistics

Despite the many challenges small businesses face in these turbulent times, the overwhelming majority of small business owners report being happy.

Namely, as part of the 2023 Guidant Financial survey, small business owners were asked to rate their happiness on a 5-point scale ranging from very unhappy to very happy. These are the results.

Happiness level	Percentage
Very happy	37%
Somewhat happy	35%
Neutral	13%
Somewhat unhappy	11%
Very unhappy	4%

This is despite the fact that the same survey showed a middling confidence level of these same small business owners of their businesses succeeding in the current economy.

Confidence level in their small business	Percentage of business owners
Very confident	6%
Somewhat confident	30%
Neutral	17%
Somewhat unconfident	36%
Very unconfident	12%

Interestingly enough, this confidence level distribution mirrors the distribution of confidence levels of small business owners in the current political climate.

Confidence level in the current political climate	Percentage of business owners
Very confident	6%
Somewhat confident	28%
Neutral	21%
Somewhat unconfident	31%
Very unconfident	14%

Of course, we have no means of saying whether the majority of respondents expressed the same confidence level to both of these questions, but the similarity is nonetheless intriguing.

Regardless of this, when asked whether or not they expected their business to survive, 76% of respondents replied positively, with 18% being unsure, and only 6% expecting to shut down.

Small business mobile statistics

According to Google research on consumer trends, at any given moment, 84% of Americans are shopping for something. In almost 25% of cases, shoppers refer to their smartphones when they want to buy something.

The same data also indicates that 9 out of 10 shoppers don’t start out with preconceived notions of which brand they want to buy from.

This would suggest that small businesses should be more than capable of competing for customers with big brands online.

That being said, there are some roadblocks you should be aware of.

For starters, smartphone users are more likely to buy from companies whose mobile sites or apps provide easy-to-find information. 

They want their shopping and billing information to autofill if they’re buying for a retailer they’ve used previously in 61% of cases. And, they’re quick to bail if the mobile experience isn’t smooth or the page takes too long to load. 

Negative experiences on mobile such as these reduce the chances of online shoppers purchasing for you in the future by 62%.

Statistics on small business websites

Research by Zippia on how many businesses have websites shows 99% of consumers find local businesses through the Internet. Moreover, 81% of shoppers first look up information about the business online before they make a purchase, in most cases by reading online reviews (55%) or looking up the website of the business in question (47%).

Additionally, 44% of B2B buyers will immediately give up on using a small business if their website has no contact information.

How tragic is it then that 27% of small businesses don’t have a website?

The impact of this statistic on small businesses is dampened somewhat by the fact that 20% of small businesses without websites use social media instead.

For a complete breakdown of why small businesses don’t have websites, you can refer to this table.

Reasons behind not having a website	Percentage of small businesses
They believe it’s not relevant to their industry	27%
They cite the cost as being too large	26%
They use social media instead	21%
They lack the technical knowledge to operate and maintain a website	15%

In light of the second most common reason behind not having a website, it bears pointing out just what the cost of designing a website for a small business is.

Cost brackets for designing and launching a small business website	Percentage of websites that cost this much
Between $5,000 and $6,000	13.5%
$4,000	10.8%
$3,000	16.2%
Between $2,000 and $2,500	24.3%
Between $1,000 and $1,500	35.1%

Small business cyber security statistics

According to the 2023 Zippia research on small businesses, only 14% of small businesses are taking measures to protect themselves from cyber attacks. Of these 14%, only 55% are successful.

Meanwhile, 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses. This means that the majority of small businesses are woefully unprepared to combat cyber attacks.

The most common means of cyber attacks against small businesses (57%) is phishing.

The reason phishing is so prevalent is, no doubt, due to its effectiveness, as Accenture’s cybercrime statistics show that humans are the weakest link in defense against cyber attacks.

This sentiment is echoed in the 2020 cybersecurity statistic from the World Economic Forum, according to which 95% of cybersecurity issues occur due to human error.

At the same time, Cisco’s 2020 Cybersecurity Considerations study shows that 42% of respondents suffer from cybersecurity fatigue, having all but given up on defending against cyber threats.

Conclusion: In the face of adversity, small businesses remain resilient

While the economic situation at the moment seems unfavorable for small businesses, they still persevere — and that with a smile on the faces of business owners running them, if happiness stats are to be believed.

Despite the Great Resignation, most small businesses are looking to expand and attract new talent. The gumption with which small business owners are facing the market is reminiscent of underdog stories like Rocky.

In short, small businesses aren’t going anywhere. While they may not be back to their pre-pandemic glory days in many regards, statistics show an upward trend in comparison to the days of the pandemic.

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