Business Information Statistics

Business information statistics at a glance

Business information statistics show a sector that is large, active, and still reshaping itself through openings, closures, jobs, lending, exporting, and ownership patterns. The numbers below give you a compact read on where the business information landscape stands and how broad its footprint is.

Contents

• Fast facts
• Business counts and employment
• Openings, closures, and net growth
• Jobs and lending
• Information-sector business profile
• Exporting activity
• Ownership and representation
• What the numbers suggest

Fast facts

• 33.3 million small businesses operated in the United States in 2023 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• 99.9% of U.S. businesses were small in 2024 (Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Small businesses employed 61.6 million people and 45.9% of U.S. employees in 2023 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Between March 2021 and March 2022, 1.4 million U.S. establishments opened and 917,825 closed (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Net establishment growth was 447,519 in that period, with 2.4 million expansions and 1.7 million contractions (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Small businesses contributed a net increase of 4.9 million jobs, or 70.0% of the total net job increase (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Reporting banks issued $102.7 billion in loans to U.S. businesses with revenues of $1 million or less in 2021 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• 271,241 identified exporters were small firms in 2021, and those firms exported $541.6 billion in goods (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).

Business counts and employment

The scale of business information in the U.S. starts with sheer count. The country had 33.3 million small businesses in 2023 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy), and the 2024 FAQ profile says 99.9% of U.S. businesses were small (Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, SBA Office of Advocacy). Those two figures are easy to read together: almost every business in the country falls into the small-business category.

That scale matters because small businesses are also a major employment base. In 2023 they employed 61.6 million people and accounted for 45.9% of U.S. employees (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). In other words, the business ecosystem is not just a long tail of firms; it is a massive labor market structure.

For readers trying to understand business information statistics as a decision tool, these headline numbers matter for three reasons:

• They show the market is broad rather than concentrated in a few large firms.
• They show workforce effects are substantial enough to shape local and national conditions.
• They create context for every other statistic in the dataset, from financing to exporting.

The small-business base is also uneven across ownership and sector. Later sections show the information sector alone includes hundreds of thousands of firms, which helps explain why business information statistics are often used to study not just firms, but ecosystems of owners, employees, lenders, and exporters.

Openings, closures, and net growth

The business stock is not static. Between March 2021 and March 2022, 1.4 million U.S. establishments opened and 917,825 closed (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). The same period also saw 2.4 million establishments expand and 1.7 million contract (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). These four flows are the clearest sign that the business landscape is continuously rebalancing.

A compact comparison helps put the movement in perspective.

Measure	Count	Source
Opened establishments	1.4 million	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
Closed establishments	917,825	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
Expanded establishments	2.4 million	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
Contracted establishments	1.7 million	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
Net establishment growth	447,519	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy

The net result was growth of 447,519 establishments (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). That figure is especially important because it shows that openings and expansions outweighed closures and contractions in the period measured.

Small businesses also played a large role in turnover. They accounted for 1.2 million openings and 833,979 closings in that same period (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). That means the small-business segment is not merely present in the economy; it is a large part of the system that creates and removes business entities.

For business information analysis, these numbers point to an important idea: firm counts alone do not explain the market. The flow of openings, closures, expansions, and contractions is where the operating reality shows up. A sector can look stable in a headline count and still be highly active underneath.

Jobs and lending

Job movement is another core layer of business information statistics. The 2023 Small Business Profile reports that opening and expanding establishments added 17.9 million jobs, while closing and contracting establishments lost 11.0 million jobs (SBA Office of Advocacy). The difference produced net job growth of 7.0 million jobs (SBA Office of Advocacy).

Small businesses themselves contributed a net increase of 4.9 million jobs, which represented 70.0% of the total net job increase (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). That is a strong indicator that small firms were the main engine of net employment growth in the period covered.

A few points stand out:

• Job creation and job loss are both very large in absolute terms.
• The net result is positive, but the gross flows are much larger than the net change.
• Small businesses account for most of the net gain, not just a marginal share.

Financing data adds another layer. Reporting banks issued $102.7 billion in loans to U.S. businesses with revenues of $1 million or less in 2021 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). In the same profile, total reported new lending through loans of $100,000 or less was $125.7 billion, and total reported new lending through loans of $1 million or less was $354.5 billion (SBA Office of Advocacy).

Those lending figures are useful because they show how business information statistics connect business size with capital access. Smaller revenue businesses still attract substantial reported lending volume, and the combined totals suggest a financing environment that matters to both micro and small enterprises.

Information-sector business profile

The dataset also includes a specific breakdown for the information sector. In 2023 profile data, information-sector small businesses without employees totaled 334,717, those with 1-19 employees totaled 72,997, and those with 20-499 employees totaled 10,121 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). Together, information-sector small businesses totaled 417,835 (SBA Office of Advocacy).

That profile is useful because it shows how the sector is distributed by employment size. Most firms in the category are nonemployer businesses, with fewer firms as employment size rises. The distribution looks like this:

Information-sector small business group	Count	Source
Without employees	334,717	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
With 1-19 employees	72,997	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
With 20-499 employees	10,121	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy
Total small businesses	417,835	2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy

This pattern matters for business information analysis because it shows the sector is numerically dominated by very small firms, even though the larger small-business band still contributes meaningfully to total count.

At the same time, the information sector has current labor-market signals of its own. Information-sector employment was 2.853 million all employees in October 2025, and production and nonsupervisory employment was 2.267 million in October 2025 (BLS Information: NAICS 51). The sector unemployment rate was 5.0% in November 2025, job openings were 120 thousand in October 2025, hires were 80 thousand in November 2025, and separations were 87 thousand in December 2025 (BLS Information: NAICS 51).

Taken together, these measures show the information sector as both a business community and a labor market. It is not enough to count firms. The employment, openings, hires, and separations data reveal whether the sector is expanding, tightening, or simply churning.

Exporting activity

Exporting gives business information statistics a global dimension. In 2021, a total of 278,362 identified firms exported goods, and those firms exported $1.6 trillion in goods (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). Within that total, 271,241 identified exporters were small firms (SBA Office of Advocacy).

That means 97.4% of identified exporters were small firms (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). Small-firm exports reached $541.6 billion and represented 34.9% of exports by identified firms (SBA Office of Advocacy).

The export figures show two things at once:

• Small firms are the overwhelming majority of identified exporters.
• Large exporters still dominate the dollar total, since small-firm exports are a smaller share of the total export value than their share of exporter count.

That contrast is useful when interpreting business information statistics. A count-based view can make the small-firm presence look almost universal, while a value-based view shows where the largest dollar flows sit. Both are true at the same time.

Ownership and representation

Ownership data add demographic depth to the picture. Women made up 47.2% of workers and owned 43.4% of businesses (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). Veterans made up 4.6% of workers and owned 6.1% of businesses. Hispanics made up 17.2% of workers and owned 14.5% of businesses. Racial minorities made up 26.6% of workers and owned 20.4% of businesses (SBA Office of Advocacy).

The totals behind those shares are also instructive. Female-owned businesses totaled 12,338,407 and male-owned businesses totaled 18,078,265 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). Veteran-owned businesses totaled 1,713,151 and non-veteran-owned businesses totaled 29,970,916 (SBA Office of Advocacy). Hispanic-owned businesses totaled 4,537,836 and non-Hispanic-owned businesses totaled 27,295,352 (SBA Office of Advocacy).

The racial and ethnic ownership counts are equally detailed:

• American Indian and Alaska Native-owned businesses: 341,064 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Asian-owned businesses: 2,915,200 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Black or African American-owned businesses: 3,589,567 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander-owned businesses: 89,331 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• White-owned businesses: 25,429,100 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• Hispanic or racial minority-owned businesses: 10,630,319 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).
• White and not Hispanic-owned businesses: 21,114,007 (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy).

These ownership figures are not just demographic labels. They help show who is participating in business ownership and how that participation compares with workforce shares. That comparison can be especially useful when studying access, representation, and business formation patterns across different groups.

What the numbers suggest

The strongest pattern across the dataset is scale paired with movement. The U.S. has tens of millions of small businesses, and those businesses employ tens of millions of workers (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). At the same time, millions of establishments open, close, expand, and contract in a single measurement window. The business environment is therefore large, dynamic, and highly sensitive to shifts in financing, labor, and market demand.

A second pattern is that small firms matter not only in count terms but in flow terms. They account for most net job growth, dominate identified exporter counts, and remain central to employment and ownership statistics (2023 Small Business Profile, SBA Office of Advocacy). That makes small-business data one of the most useful lenses for understanding the wider business system.

A third pattern is that the information sector is a good example of how business information statistics should be read. It has a very large pool of small firms, a layered employment structure, and active labor-market indicators from BLS Information: NAICS 51. Looking at just one measure would miss the broader shape of the sector.

If you are using business information statistics for analysis, planning, or reporting, the most practical approach is to combine three views:

• firm counts, to understand scale;
• flow measures, to understand churn and growth;
• ownership and labor measures, to understand who participates and how the sector behaves.

That combination gives a clearer picture than any one statistic on its own, and it is the fastest way to turn raw business data into useful context.