National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States (2017)

The Kauffman Indicators of Early-Stage Entrepreneurship is a set of measures that represents new business creation in the United States, integrating several high-quality, timely sources of information on early-stage entrepreneurship.

This report presents four indicators tracking early-stage entrepreneurship for the years 1996-2021: rate of new entrepreneurs reflects the number of new entrepreneurs in a given month, opportunity share of new entrepreneurs is the percentage of new entrepreneurs who created their businesses out of opportunity instead of necessity, startup early job creation is the total number of jobs created by startups per capita, and startup early survival rate is the one-year average survival rate for new firms.

Report Highlights:

The rate of new entrepreneurs was 0.33% in 2017, which reflects that 330 out of every 100,000 adults became new entrepreneurs in an average month.
The opportunity share of new entrepreneurs was 84.4% in 2017. This figure is down slightly from 2016, when it was 86.3%, but it is more than 10 percentage points higher than it was in 2009 (73.8%), at the depths of the Great Recession.
Startup early job creation was 5.27 jobs per 1,000 people in 2017, reflecting an increase from 5.23 jobs per 1,000 people in 2016, but a longer-term decline from 6.23 in 2007.
The startup early survival rate was 79.78% in 2017, representing a small increase from 79.58% in 2016 and 77.88% in 2007.