The State of US Small Business
and Compliance
2026 Edition
2026 Edition
Ten findings worth reading the rest of the report for. Every number on this page is sourced from public data assembled by Palavir in the first five months of 2026.
Start with the size of the thing being counted. The headline figures below come from the most recent full release of Census County Business Patterns (2022), augmented with federal exclusion counts from 2026-05-27 and Palavir's running NewFilings index.
The single most useful thing this page tells you: there are roughly 8.3 million addressable business buyers in the United States, with 136 million workers behind them. That number is the denominator under almost every market sizing exercise, every "TAM" slide, and every federal compliance question this report touches.
Three states own a third of every business establishment in the country. The geography is concentrated, and it has been concentrated for a long time. The table below is not surprising in its shape, it is more useful for the magnitude than the order.
| # | State | Establishments | Employment | % of US |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 1,022,104 | 16,030,863 | 12.3% |
| 2 | Texas | 656,638 | 11,506,502 | 7.9% |
| 3 | Florida | 632,756 | 9,628,133 | 7.6% |
| 4 | New York | 539,588 | 8,428,881 | 6.5% |
| 5 | Illinois | 322,152 | 5,533,585 | 3.9% |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 307,507 | 5,584,574 | 3.7% |
| 7 | Georgia | 258,008 | 4,248,926 | 3.1% |
| 8 | Ohio | 254,436 | 4,963,616 | 3.1% |
| 9 | North Carolina | 254,428 | 4,106,475 | 3.1% |
| 10 | New Jersey | 237,215 | 3,813,362 | 2.9% |
| # | County | State | Establishments | Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Los Angeles County | California | 303,972 | 9,848,406 |
| 2 | Cook County | Illinois | 134,765 | 5,185,812 |
| 3 | Harris County | Texas | 109,711 | 4,758,579 |
| 4 | Maricopa County | Arizona | 107,526 | 4,491,987 |
| 5 | Orange County | California | 106,169 | 3,164,063 |
| 6 | Miami-Dade County | Florida | 95,817 | 2,685,296 |
| 7 | New York County | New York | 94,914 | 1,627,788 |
| 8 | San Diego County | California | 92,725 | 3,282,782 |
| 9 | King County | Washington | 70,474 | 2,262,713 |
| 10 | Dallas County | Texas | 70,386 | 2,603,816 |
The least concentrated states give a useful contrast to the leader board above. These five states combined hold fewer total establishments than San Diego County, California.
| State | Establishments | % of US |
|---|---|---|
| Vermont | 20,854 | 0.25% |
| Alaska | 22,053 | 0.27% |
| Wyoming | 23,130 | 0.28% |
| District of Columbia | 23,854 | 0.29% |
| North Dakota | 25,068 | 0.30% |
The top three states are not all the same shape. Their industry mixes diverge in ways that explain a lot about regional sales and recruiting patterns.
| NAICS sector | Establishments | % of state |
|---|---|---|
| Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | 142,540 | 13.9% |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 127,019 | 12.4% |
| Retail Trade | 107,053 | 10.5% |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 94,672 | 9.3% |
| Construction | 85,171 | 8.3% |
| NAICS sector | Establishments | % of state |
|---|---|---|
| Retail Trade | 83,788 | 12.8% |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | 81,011 | 12.3% |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 77,083 | 11.7% |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 64,929 | 9.9% |
| Other Services (except Public Administration) | 57,987 | 8.8% |
| NAICS sector | Establishments | % of state |
|---|---|---|
| Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | 92,313 | 14.6% |
| Retail Trade | 75,743 | 12.0% |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 71,591 | 11.3% |
| Construction | 65,238 | 10.3% |
| Other Services (except Public Administration) | 54,117 | 8.6% |
When you look at average annual wages by state and NAICS sector, the spread is wider than most national summaries suggest. Filtering to combinations with at least 5,000 workers (so the result is not a small county artifact), the ten highest-paying state-sector combinations look like this.
| # | State | Sector | Avg annual wage | Employees | vs US |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York | Finance and Insurance | $262,027 | 539,719 | +112% |
| 2 | Washington | Information | $249,982 | 184,141 | +76% |
| 3 | California | Information | $221,502 | 794,947 | +56% |
| 4 | District of Columbia | Finance and Insurance | $193,373 | 21,199 | +56% |
| 5 | California | Management of Companies and Enterprises | $188,506 | 369,984 | +49% |
| 6 | Massachusetts | Finance and Insurance | $176,074 | 187,453 | +42% |
| 7 | Connecticut | Finance and Insurance | $174,853 | 112,512 | +41% |
| 8 | Massachusetts | Information | $159,024 | 130,330 | +12% |
| 9 | District of Columbia | Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | $157,547 | 113,870 | +50% |
| 10 | New Jersey | Management of Companies and Enterprises | $154,836 | 119,547 | +22% |
| # | State | Sector | Avg annual wage | Employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | West Virginia | Accommodation and Food Services | $19,856 | 63,567 |
| 2 | Kansas | Accommodation and Food Services | $19,892 | 117,287 |
| 3 | Nebraska | Accommodation and Food Services | $19,893 | 77,825 |
| 4 | Kentucky | Accommodation and Food Services | $19,964 | 172,542 |
| 5 | Ohio | Accommodation and Food Services | $20,115 | 473,891 |
| 6 | Iowa | Accommodation and Food Services | $20,144 | 119,547 |
| 7 | West Virginia | Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation | $20,245 | 6,534 |
| 8 | North Dakota | Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation | $20,276 | 5,662 |
| 9 | Oklahoma | Accommodation and Food Services | $20,338 | 163,318 |
| 10 | Arkansas | Accommodation and Food Services | $20,343 | 109,696 |
A more useful framing: take a single sector and look at the geographic spread for the same job. We use NAICS 62 (Health Care and Social Assistance) and NAICS 23 (Construction) below, two sectors with workers in every state.
The same NAICS code, in the same year, in the same country. The spread between the highest-paying and lowest-paying state for healthcare and social assistance is 44%. A healthcare worker in California earns roughly $22,114 more per year than one in New Mexico, before any cost-of-living adjustment.
Federal exclusion lists are the most boring and most underused data in vendor-risk management. The OIG LEIE list (Medicare and Medicaid program exclusions) and the GSA SAM list (federal procurement exclusions) together contain 207,215 active records as of 2026-05-27. The relevant question for buyers, lenders, and partners is not the raw count, it is the rate per 10,000 businesses in each state.
Exclusions per 10,000 business establishments. Calculated as (LEIE + SAM count) divided by total Census CBP establishments, multiplied by 10,000.
| # | State | Per 10K estab | LEIE | SAM | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mississippi | 788 | 2,048 | 2,712 | 4,760 |
| 2 | Vermont | 645 | 578 | 768 | 1,346 |
| 3 | West Virginia | 585 | 845 | 1,233 | 2,078 |
| 4 | Rhode Island | 445 | 520 | 792 | 1,312 |
| 5 | Oklahoma | 438 | 1,663 | 2,525 | 4,188 |
| 6 | Louisiana | 430 | 1,941 | 2,706 | 4,647 |
| 7 | Kentucky | 427 | 1,741 | 2,247 | 3,988 |
| 8 | Arkansas | 423 | 1,274 | 1,667 | 2,941 |
| 9 | Alabama | 421 | 1,870 | 2,545 | 4,415 |
| 10 | Arizona | 381 | 2,669 | 3,421 | 6,090 |
A few patterns are worth calling out explicitly because they tend to be missed when this data is looked at one state at a time.
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky all appear in the top 10 by intensity. So do Oklahoma and West Virginia. Seven of the ten highest-intensity states are in the South or Appalachian region. This is not a random distribution.
| State | Per 10K estab | LEIE | SAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| District of Columbia | 127 | 93 | 211 |
| Wisconsin | 132 | 777 | 1,122 |
| Nebraska | 133 | 314 | 435 |
| Hawaii | 143 | 177 | 293 |
| Montana | 146 | 256 | 357 |
A vendor screen built only at the federal level, "is this entity on LEIE or SAM today", answers a narrower question than most buyers think. It tells you whether the entity itself has been excluded. It does not tell you whether the entity sits in a state where exclusion rates run 5x the national median, which is a useful proxy for the local enforcement environment. The intensity table above is the missing layer.
The SBA's Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) program gives federal contract preference to certified small businesses located in qualifying areas. An earlier edition of this page counted every county with median household income below 80% of the national median as HUBZone-eligible. That is not the rule, so we have withdrawn those counts.
Under 13 CFR 126.103, a HUBZone is an area within a qualified census tract, a qualified non-metropolitan county, Indian reservation lands, a redesignated area, a qualified base closure area, a qualified disaster area, or a Governor-designated covered area. A county can qualify as a county only if it is not in a metropolitan statistical area, and then on one of three tests: its median household income is less than 80% of its State median household income; its unemployment rate is at least 140% of the lower of the US or State average; or, in Alaska, Hawaii and the territories, it contains a Difficult Development Area.
The dataset behind this report has county incomes but no metropolitan delineation, so it cannot say which counties qualify. A count built from income alone would include metropolitan counties, where the county test does not apply.
Palavir publishes a composite county opportunity index that combines four equally-tractable signals: median household income, population growth, establishment density per capita, and state-level federal exclusion intensity. The weights are 30% / 25% / 25% / 20%. Each component is z-scored across all counties and then linearly combined. The full table below filters to counties with population at least 50,000, small enough to be reachable, large enough to matter.
| # | County | State | Score | Population | Median HHI | Pop growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gallatin County | MT | 1.54 | 122,194 | $87,454 | 17% |
| 2 | Madison County | ID | 1.44 | 53,578 | $58,259 | 38% |
| 3 | Eagle County | CO | 1.17 | 55,374 | $103,174 | 2% |
| 4 | Comal County | TX | 1.16 | 174,552 | $99,015 | 29% |
| 5 | Lincoln County | SD | 1.15 | 68,286 | $96,552 | 24% |
| 6 | Flathead County | MT | 1.11 | 108,445 | $71,327 | 11% |
| 7 | Kaufman County | TX | 1.07 | 160,718 | $88,606 | 35% |
| 8 | Washington County | UT | 1.07 | 189,827 | $76,411 | 18% |
| 9 | Walton County | FL | 1.04 | 79,846 | $79,281 | 21% |
| 10 | Deschutes County | OR | 1.03 | 203,026 | $87,640 | 12% |
| 11 | Iron County | UT | 1.03 | 60,201 | $65,527 | 21% |
| 12 | Kootenai County | ID | 0.98 | 177,736 | $77,034 | 16% |
| 13 | Forsyth County | GA | 0.98 | 260,062 | $138,000 | 18% |
| 14 | Rockwall County | TX | 0.94 | 116,931 | $124,917 | 25% |
| 15 | New York County | NY | 0.93 | 1,627,788 | $104,553 | -0% |
The pattern is consistent. The top 15 are dominated by mid-size counties in growing states with relatively low state-level exclusion intensity and median household income above the national average. Gallatin County, Montana (Bozeman) is the leader on the population-floor filter, posting 17% population growth and $87,454 median household income. The Mountain West and exurban Texas dominate the leader board.
The composite score does not consider the specific industry you operate in. A construction company re-ranks the same counties by demand for housing starts and pipeline of permitted projects. A healthcare clinic re-ranks by population age, density, and existing supply of competitors. A tech services firm re-ranks by educated workforce share. Palavir publishes industry-specific re-rankings as dedicated tools, links at the end of this report.
The same county will score very differently depending on the lens applied:
Census County Business Patterns measures the stock of US business establishments at a point in time. It does not measure the flow of new registrations. Palavir's NewFilings index reads Secretary-of-State public registries for 12 states (Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington) and accumulates one row per new entity registered. As of 2026-05-27 the index holds 15,292,338 rows across those 12 states.
The pandemic-era jump in business formation has not reversed. The 5,751,706 filings indexed in New York alone are larger than the cumulative total of every state below the top five. Two things are happening at once: a real expansion in sole-proprietor and LLC formation since 2020, and an indexing tailwind from states like New York that publish bulk SOS data going back many years.
This report is regenerated annually each May, after the prior year's CBP release. Component data products (state pages, county pages, ranking tables on palavir.co) refresh on their own faster cadences, exclusion lists monthly, NewFilings nightly, CBP and ACS annually.
Palavir LLC is a Pennsylvania-based data and consulting firm founded in 2023. We build public-data products and tools that help small businesses, lenders, attorneys, and federal contractors make better decisions with information that is already public but difficult to assemble.
We are a small operation. We do not sell advertising. We do not gate downloads behind email forms. We publish the underlying data products as paid datasets on marketplaces (Snowflake, Datarade) and the dashboards and tools they power as free reads on palavir.co. Our paying customers are buyers of structured data and consumers of our consulting work; everyone else is reading for free.
Every tool below is free to use without registration:
This report will be re-issued in May 2027 with refreshed CBP 2023 data, updated exclusion lists, and any new NewFilings state coverage we add between now and then. If you would like a copy emailed to you when it ships, contact josh@palavir.co and we will add you to the announcement list. That is the only thing on the list; we do not run a newsletter.
Joshua Elberg, Founder · josh@palavir.co · palavir.co