State 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 represents four indicators that track early-stage entrepreneurship for the years 1996-2017: 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. State level trends are reported for all four indicators.

Report Highlights:

The rate of new entrepreneurs ranged from a low of 0.16% in Delaware to a high of 0.47% in Wyoming, with a median of 0.30%.
The opportunity share of new entrepreneurs ranged from a low 68.7% in Rhode Island to a high of 94.0% in Nebraska, with a median of 84.7%.
Startup early job creation ranged from 2.95 jobs per 1,000 people in West Virginia to 10.34 in Washington, D.C., with a median of 4.71.
Startup early survival rate ranged from 73.48% in Georgia to 88.13% in Maine, with a median of 79.1%.
The overall KESE Index – a composite of the four indicators – ranged from -2.93 in Rhode Island to 9.86 in California, with a median of 0.01.